From Mimi's notes on our trip to Hong Kong more than 20 years ago, her first experience in Asia:

Hong Kong has the most beautiful harbor I've ever seen—far more beautiful than San Francisco's, which God knows is a beautiful thing. But Hong Kong is more mountainous, with craggy islands and a marvelous assortment of boats—junks, of course, and sampans, also Russian trawlers and gaudy Chinese cruise ships and fishing vessels from mainland China and, when we were there, a U.S. destroyer. The harbor ferries are a joy, zipping back and forth every few minutes, each time a different ride because the light is different, the surrounding boats are different, the horizons have changed again.

Hong Kong is building, everywhere, all the time. Jackhammers were going on the main street of Kowloon, Nathan Road, and on the main streets of Hong Kong Island. Modern multi-storied buildings are going up—with scaffolding of lashed bamboo.

The contrasts get to you. Smells of diesel and garbage (the garbage cans are woven baskets, and, although the people are constantly cleaning, the baskets don't do much to keep odors in), fragrance of ginger. Huge, modern apartment complexes and, from all the windows, bamboo poles from which hang laundry and plants. Incredible poverty, like the squatters' shacks built of driftwood, tin, and cardboard by refugees from the mainland, just down the hill from the magnificent mansions of Victoria Peak and the exquisite estates on Causeway Bay. Hong Kong can be the best and the worst place to be.

Junks and sampans moored together at Aberdeen and Cheung Chau Island (a tiny fishing village of an island with no motor traffic of any kind, but an incredible number of cats—cats and kittens everywhere!) formed floating villages. People spend their entire lives on boats, never knowing what it feels like to live on land. The land is crowded. The Chinese are used to living five, eight, or more in one tiny room. They work incredible hours—12 a day, with, at best, one or two days off a month. Most of them don't question this; they are used to hard work. Enormous quantities of the goods sold in Hong Kong are from the mainland, which may be one of the reasons why Hong Kong, unlike Taiwan, seems unworried about the giant next door. China needs the outlet. Many manufactured goods are from Japan, of course—cameras, calculators, audio equipment, many of the cars. But a surprising number come from China, including cameras (Seagull brand), and many textiles, jewelry items, baskets, whatever. Hong Kong's water supply comes from the mainland. Much of the food comes from there.

That border between Hong Kong and China, so impervious to us, is totally open to the local people. Farmers who live in the New Territories (where the farms are so symmetrical and beautifully tended that they look like quilts spread out in the sunshine) farm in China, and farmers who live in China farm in the New Territories; they go back and forth every day. And the border is opening to us, too. One week after we left, a new program opened up allowing Americans to spend a five-day weekend in Canton. Canton is only 90 miles from Kowloon by rail. You can take a western train to the border, get out, walk across a wooden bridge, and pick up a Chinese train for the rest of the trip. We want to go back and do that.

We did go to Lok Ma Chau, where you stand high on a hill and look out across the river and the beautiful green hills of China. (And where old ladies in traditional dress stand waiting, baby under one arm, puppy under the other, saying, "Pictchah! One dollah! Pictchah! One dollah!" The joys of tourism....) From Macau, that Portuguese backwater abutting China, there is just a gate separating you from the mainland, like in Berlin, but of course we couldn't go through it, nor could we photograph it.

(Says Mimi now: Times have changed, no?)

We walked everywhere. I wore out a pair of shoes. When we didn't walk, we rode the local buses and trams, unlike most of the Americans at the hotel who only rode in taxis. The public transportation system is incredibly efficient—a bus or a ferry every two or three minutes!—and would put ours to shame. The system is also incredibly cheap. First class on the harbor ferry is H.K. 30 cents; that's about six cents U.S. Anyhow, we'd ride and get off and walk. We found open-air markets—whole streets filled with stalls selling produce and eggs and rice and ?—and all-night markets that were gone by dawn and there again the next evening.

We saw old men out walking their birds, and we found several bird markets, including one with a tame cockatoo who put out his head to be scratched and petted. Birdcages there are bamboo, and the birds' food dishes are not junky plastic, but painted china. We looked in the windows of herb and snake shops. We tracked down a cutlery shop in a local district and selected a vegetable cutter that cuts carrots into the shape of a bird from two drawers full of such, including a huge one that cuts God-knows-what into the shape of a dragon! We had a chop made for Dick's father with his name in English and Chinese. We found a shop that hand-crafts mah-jong tiles and matched missing tiles to a friend's set. We ate dim sum for breakfast and lunch and gorged at about $1.25 per meal, ate exquisite Chinese banquets for about $18 for the two of us, and had one glorious meal at the restaurant considered the best in Asia—for about U.S. $85. Service not to be believed—a different waiter for every item, many produced at our table at a cart equipped for just that project. A rose for me, a Cuban cigar for Dick. At the end of the meal, bonbons in a huge goblet filled with dry ice. Extraordinary.

We went to the movies once and saw an English film with Chinese subtitles. We discovered that whereas we number theater rows from A to Z starting at the stage in Asia they are numbered A to Z starting at the rear of the theater—so there's some useless information for you. We also saw Chinese television. In Hong Kong there are five channels, two English and three Chinese. The Chinese channels run all day and all night, the English channels only in the evening. We saw, for instance, “Star Trek” in Cantonese.

We had fun shopping. The alleys are the most fun, where people are cooking outdoors and, as you wander through the crowds and the fragrances, you don't know what you're going to find next. My mother would love it—you're supposed to bargain, and I'm not nearly as good at that as she is, and Dick can't do it at all. But we ran out of money midway through the second week and were reduced to credit cards, which cut down on our shopping in local stores somewhat and restricted us to hotels and shopping centers.

There are many things we didn't get to do that we wanted to—like ride the Kowloon-Canton Railway as far as we could and get to Lantau Island where there's an interesting monastery and a beach—so we were incredulous at the Americans who thought that three or four days in Hong Kong were enough. But they got themselves measured for clothes, flew off to Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok, and then came back to pick up their clothes. They never ate Chinese food at all. We did join a group for an evening in a Chinese nightclub, a Pekingese feast and two charming shows, one semi-traditional Chinese dancing, the other tumblers from the mainland.

We spent Christmas Day at Ocean Park, a marine-life park that has the most exquisite location and two "campuses" connected by a bubble-car tramway that hauls you up great crags and swings you out over the blue China Sea. We met some lovely people visiting from Taiwan while we stood on line to get into the atoll aquarium, and while families were photographing their children we took pictures of the kids, too. Chinese children are so beautiful!

Hong Kong is a beautiful and fascinating place, and I am hung up on Asia more than ever. I have wanted to go to China since reading through all of Pearl Buck when I was a teenager. I still want to go to China!