Base City

Honolulu’s top Yelp-rated Chinatown restaurant, 1453 photos.

“Excuse me, where’s the restroom?” Paranoia that a street mutant masturbated on the rubber
handlebars of the Biki bike I rented to get here demands immediate hand washing.

I’m dismissively pointed to the dining area’s rear by the house dragon lady. Bitch.

Pass through every Hollywood depiction of a Chinese kitchen: sizzling, superfluous arguing,
pots clanging, maybe even a live chicken.

Ill-postured skeletons profusely sweating over woks, I glide past—tall, arrogant yet nonplussed,
hyperborean.

The bathroom looks like someone blew their head off in it. Half-inch thick pink soap residue on
the sink. Yellow diarrhea streaks everywhere… how?

“What am I doing here?” Grime does not equate to authenticity.

Leave, don’t pay.

The unnerving only worsens outside. This city is coated in the ectoplasm of homeless. Too much
rain, mold. Here, everything lives and nothing dies.

Honolulu, San Francisco, Manila, Vancouver, Beijing, they’re all the same; do you know how
much shit Kaiser Wilhelm II took for talking about ‘the yellow peril?’

In Big Trouble in Little China, Egg Shen says “Only a dream can kill a dream.”

Does the same not apply to nightmares?

-Anthony Bavaria