A day in the New Territories
I'll continue from my last post with a short anecdote which doesn't really address this issue at all, probably.
At one point the carrier (USS Ranger CV 61) pulled into Hong Kong for four or five days. I have several moments I remember indelibly from this period, but this story is from the third day when I took a day long bus tour around Kowloon and the "New Territories" with two of the DP techs from our section (who were brothers). My friend Mark Edmunds is not in this story as he opted to stay in the Philippines with the squadron the previous month. The attractions of Olongapo being to attractive to give up. At one point we came to an overlook where the bus stopped and you could look out over the border: the Sham Chung River, into the People's Republic of China. The road leading from the look-out point to the bus in the parking lot was lined with venders with numerous small souvenir items. It seemed a curious tourist attraction, but the place did have a certain degree of cold war charm. There was a road and rail line leading into China that we could see below us. So I bought a pencil. I was looking at the pencil and noticed it said "made in the PRC" on it, helpfully it said this in english. Scandalized I cried out "why this pencil was made in...in Communist China it's a communist pencil!" The old man who sold it to me said something and began to laugh, then everyone around him began to laugh. In a moment I was surrounded by a fair sized crowd of chinese people, all laughing at me. I turned very red and stood there. Finally a women stepped in to explain: "he said that not just the pencil, but he too was made in the Peoples Republic of China." It turned out that all those venders came across the border every day to sell stuff to tourists.
I went back down to the bus with my pencil, where my companions already were. "Everyone in China is a comedian", I said, "and I'm their straight man". Somewhere, I still have a slide I took of our tour guide on that bus trip, she was very cute.
10:40:29 AM  ;;
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