A Sunburnt Day on Lamma Island

People who’ve never lived on an island may think that island life everywhere is all the same. But this is not true at all. Being a person with island karma and having lived major portions of my life on various islands—Manhatten Island, Staten Island, Peaks Island, Maine, and now Ma Wan Island, just across Victoria Harbor from Hong Kong—I can state with confidence that every island lifestyle is unique, created as it is by the blend of energies and attitudes of the people who live on that particular island and make up the rules.

            And so, having heard so much about the laid-back artsy feel of Lamma Island, and in order to fight off the temptation to make an obvious comparison to my home on Peaks Island, Maine, I decided on Easter weekend to head across the waters and check it out. I took the noon ferry from Ma Wan Island to Hong Kong Island, which everyone thinks of when they think of Hong Kong, arrived at 12:25, in time to jog down Central Pier and make it onto the 12:30 ferry to Lamma Island. Twenty minutes later I stepped out onto a pier crowded with bicycles (no cars are allowed on Lamma Island) and lined with bright red flags with green and yellow trim. Being an illiterate in China, I could not read the characters on the flags, but assumed that they expressed happy thoughts as they fluttered crisply in the wind. In the harbor, alongside local wooden fishing boats laden with nets, there were two long wooden dragon boats with ceremonial drums and a seat for a drummer. I wished I could see those boats glide across the water with the drummers beating out their rhythms to the dragon god, who is believed by the Chinese to live in the sea.

            I’d only just made it off the dock when I was caught up in a crowd of Chinese women frenetically buying bright paper sun hats from a vendor beside the footpath. I have observed here in Hong Kong that a day is not a day unless something is bartered for and purchased. I too fell under the spell and walked away with an orange floppy hat with a wide brim and decorated with cloth flowers atop my head. However, later, as I hiked the four kilometer long Family Trail across the island I would be grateful for that purchase.

            I walk a few footsteps more into the village of Yung She Wan and immediately I think that I must be dreaming. I stumble upon the Lamma Amber Shop, which is literally bursting at its seams with authentic Baltic amber necklaces, rings, earrings, brooches, exactly in the style one sees in the Baltics. A lean blonde man in his forties lounges in the doorway, apparently he is the owner. Perhaps it was because of the quality of the amber or the fact it was so obviously amber from the Baltic Sea that prompts me to address the man spontaneously in Lithuanian. He stares at me puzzled.

            “Excuse me, but I thought you were maybe Lithuanian because you are selling Baltic amber.”

         “I am German,” the man replies in heavily accented English with that particular guttural “r” that Germans never seem to be able to shake, “and the amber is from the Kaliningrad region.”

            Aha, so I was right. It was amber from the Baltics.

           I step inside the shop to take a closer look and immediately the man and his Chinese wife prevail upon me to buy something.

            “I’m sorry, I can’t,” I say. “You see, I have about a suitcase full of amber at home. I have amber I’ve inherited from my grandmother and amber from Lithuania, where we have amber markets everywhere.”

          The man looks at me with surprise and says with sincerity: “Then why aren’t you wearing your amber?”

            “I suppose I am tired of it,” I answer.

            “Oh no, this cannot be. Surely you are aware of the medicinal benefits of wearing amber,” he says and hands me a pile of brochures.

            I glance at the brochure and I read: “The signature offshoot of amber is succinate, the salt contained in succinic acid that makes up approximately eight percent of amber by weight. Amber has been widely used as a natural antibiotic in Europe for ages. During the plagues of the Middle Ages it is said that ‘not a single amberman from Gdansk, Klaipėda, Konigsberg, or Liepaja died of the disease. ’”

            I had heard stories of people in coastal Lithuania grinding and melting amber and then burning it to cure ear infections or to inhale it.

            I read on: “Amber allows the body to heal itself by absorbing and transmuting negative energy into positive energy. It emits a sunny and bright soothing energy that helps to calm the nerves and enliven one’s disposition…”

            Well, it was no wonder that this amberman was shocked that I would hoard amber and not wear it.

            He hands me a card. I read the names on the card: Mr. Udo Wilhelm and Mrs. Amber Wilhelm. It is a tradition for Hong Kong Chinese to choose an English name beside their Chinese name, in order to negotiate the English-speaking world. This woman had chosen amber. I looked up at her and saw sunlight pouring through two huge finely polished amber balls, which she wore as earrings.

           I said goodbye and exited their shop, resolved to start wearing my amber and appreciating the legacy of amber that had been handed down to me. It took coming out to Lamma Island to appreciate what I had in plentitude.

            I lost myself in the flow of pedestrian traffic in the village. The narrow streets were lined with funky organic cafes and make-shift bars and fish and chip joints. Tucked between the casual eateries there were craftsy one-of-a-kind item shops, some of them selling bags and clothing made by local Lamma artists, others selling crafts items imported from mainland China or Thailand or Vietnam. Friendly, stray, mongrel dogs tangled underfoot. Local children, both white and Chinese, wove around pedestrians propelled on scooters and skateboards, shouting and playing, their hippy mothers in floral print cotton dresses, lounging on plastic chairs on the sidewalk, keeping one eye on their kids, while sipping a long cool drink. A few shops were run by aging hippies with British accents, clearly the people who chose to never leave paradise behind after the colonizers left. On one corner an elderly man with long scraggly gray hair, his shirt off, revealing gray chest hair and stringy muscles, sits possessively beside a wooden bookcase of paperbacks set out on the street. He clutches one in his hand. Apparently he is scavenging for cash, selling off his prized possessions. His equally elderly wife with waist length frizzy gray hair comes out to join him, addressing him in a posh accent. He sullenly looks at her with watery eyes and gazes at the crowds, hoping someone will stop and page through his paperbacks, but no one so much as glances at his books. They are the relics of England’s great colonial era, sitting there on the side of the dusty road, clutching their ancient technology, books, in a world that has gone digital, even out on Lamma Island.

            A few steps further the word PEACE and a peace symbol are scrawled in rainbow colors in an alley tucked between buildings on the busy street. At the end of the street, there is a Tin Hau Temple. Every island has one. The Tin Hau Temple is a temple dedicated to fishermen who risk their lives pulling out the fruit of the sea to feed the village. They are in daily contact with the power of the dragon deep beneath the unpredictable waters. These island temples are typically made of colorfully glazed ceramic pieces fitted together. I am always impressed with their precision and detail considering the primitive kilns people used in centuries past.

            I leave the village and head out across the mountain through the jungles on the four-kilometer long Family Trail that leads to the second ferry dock located in the village of Sok Kwu Wan, once a sleepy fishing village, but now the site of busy fish restaurants that cater to corporate guests who come in by private boat from Hong Kong and don’t mind spending thousands on a single meal.

            I am wearing my purple Converse knock-offs that I bought cheap in the market in Beijing, but they are a size too small, though marked as my size, and soon my feet begin to ache. In one reckless move, I remove my socks and shoes and complete the four kilometer hike barefoot, energized by the giddy freedom of walking barefoot in public, something I’ve not done since my childhood in the hippy seventies.

            I walk the concrete trail, surrounded on both sides with the chatter of the green jungle, sometimes passing through ramshackle villages that look like illustrations from a Dr. Seuss Book, and muse on the hundreds walking behind me and in front of me, mostly Hong Kong Chinese on a day trip like me, pushing strollers uphill, leading small children by the hand, or leading the elders by the elbow. We walk almost the entire trail in unison in a thick pack of humanity that defies the wild surrounding us on all sides if only we were to just take a side step off the trail. We walk along areas that provide glorious views from mountaintops, including one spectacular view of the Lamma Island electrical plant, the one with the three large smokestacks that serve to identify the island, and we walk along beaches of silver sand packed with noisy bathers and sunbathers, and, oddly enough, a full choir practicing church hymns, barefoot in the sand, holding up their prayerbooks to follow the words. And I think as we walk, the density and our pace is like that of beach traffic in July coming back from the Long Island beaches, only we are all on foot, and this is a good thing, this acceptance of the natural order of things on Lamma Island.

            Eventually, we all reach Sok Kwu Wan. From atop a high mountain we see the village and we hear the sounds of Chinese opera wafting up from far below. The sun is a flat orange disk in the hazy humid sky and is making its descent behind the green mountains. It is low tide and throngs of people dig for something in the mud flats below. I am relaxed in that way one can only be relaxed on an island, far away from the daily realities of frenetic Hong Kong with its kilometers of shopping malls and sky scrapers stretching towards the sun. I board the ferry eventually, and chug back towards reality. Only, perhaps, it is reality that I am leaving behind?