TABLE
OF CONTENTS
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Getting Your Feet Wet
By Becka
September,
21st seems a very odd time to find people sunbathing and
surfing, or
at least it would if I were back home. We
descended the steps from the Hong Kong Trail down through surfboard
rentals,
restaurants and shops selling everything you’d need for a day at the
beach,
from bathing suits to sunscreen. The we walked onto Big
Wave Bay
Beach.
I was struck by the white sand and the
cleanest water I’ve seen in my life, protected on three sides by the
mountain
range we’d been in. The sand was full of
sunbathers, and the water, to my surprise, was full of surfers.
The group
of young men out on the waves along with those on the beach were all
Chinese,
in striking contrast to the sea of blondes
that could be seen on the beaches by
Stanley Market. These boys catch the
waves and ride them up, their laughter carries to where I stand, still
amazed
that it’s late September. The people on
the sand paid little to no attention to those in the water, and those
in the
water, in turn, seemed not to notice the sunbathers.
I, too, sensed the laid-back way of it all;
no one gave us a second glance, pants rolled up and cameras in hand,
standing
knee-deep in the water.
I couldn’t
help but watch the
surfers transfixed; it never occurred to me that surfing would be a
popular
sport in Hong Kong, even though it’s an island. To me, surfing had always belonged in places
like Hawaii, California,
Florida and even
Japan; showing
how little I knew of the place where I stood. In
Participating in the Global, Alan
Smart writes that “increasingly, even the region cannot be studied as
an
independent entity, but must be studied as subject to the influences of
an
emerging and changing global system” (62). This
seems to ring true for even the rural areas of Hong
Kong,
that is, if surfing is something transnational, a product of
globalization and
the exchange of culture and idea. When
looked at that way, the quaintness of the youth in the water on
surf-boards,
the beauty of the white sand beach is somewhat lost, and replaced with
the idea
that, were it even a month earlier, I could have been standing on the
Jersey
Shore, knee-deep in water and watching a group of American boys out on
the
water.
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