It's been about six weeks month since I got here and it took about a couple of weeks to get used to the job (remember, this is the first full-time job I've held in ten years). While it's taken some time to gather my thoughts together for this letter, it's also taken some time for me to get used to working with Wordstar and for an IBM-compatible to get installed at the house.

I'm living the somewhat schizophrenic existence of the expatriate who lives and works in an English-speaking environment with only the non-English-speaking lower-level employees and household help reminding him that he is in a foreign country.

I haven't learned a single word of Cantonese (not even bad words, believe it or not) but have managed to get by in one of three ways: (a) asking bilingual to translate, (b) using sign language, or (c) grinning and bearing it, e.g., letting the bus go clear to the end of the line instead of telling the driver to stop three blocks before.

This doesn't mean that I'm just a little better than a deaf-mute. There are a few places where you can speak English, e.g., McDonald's and as long as you carry a map along, you can get by, provided you're willing to get lost a few times (when that happens, I take a cab and show the cabdriver where on the map I want to go).

Part of the problem is that the roads aren't laid out in a grid pattern and this makes it quite difficult for a person whose sense of direction is as lousy as mine.

But I've seen much of the place--because my co-workers do drive around a lot and I often go along, if only for the ride. I haven't done everything that tourists generally do (I have not, for instance, taken the tram up to Victoria Peak, gone boating in the Aberdeen area, or caroused in Wanchai). But I've taken the ferry across the channel (and gone through the tunnel linking Hong Kong and Kowloon), I've window-shopped in Causeway Bay and walked down Nathan Road; I've dined at the Foreign Correspondents' Club and at the Kowloon Club; and I've watched part of the dragon boat races. I've gone down the Repulse Bay Road to Stanley, have been to Junk Bay, and even to Shek-O beach.

The problem is that by and large, I've been seeing the Hong Kong viewed by people who drive around in air-conditioned cars. One doesn't quite get the beat of the city this way . . . certainly not the way one feels Manila as he fights his way through Rizal Avenue, Baclaran, or Cubao. I hope to be able to do more walking around in various parts of the colony over the next few months.

I live and work in Kwun Tong, a district in Kowloon that tourists rarely visit because there's nothing here worth seeing. Part of Kwun Tong is an industrial area but the industrial zone is some distance from where I work and live.

I live in a three-story house that was originally designed to contain six apartments. We have over 1,000 square feet of floor space per floor (there are five of us who live here) and if this amount of living space seems generous by Manila standards, it is scandalously luxurious by the standards of Hong Kong where public housing (government high-rise apartments) generally allocates around 300 square feet per family of five adult members (two children are considered equivalent to one adult).

The house is about five minutes' drive from the office (about 30 minutes' walk). While I've walked to office, I've never walked home because the homeward trek would be all uphill. We figure that the house is more than 500 feet above sea level.

From our yard, we can look to the right and get an unobstructed view of Hong Kong island across Victoria channel; if we look straight ahead, we see a couple of hills; if we look to the left, we see Junk Bay and more to the left and farther in the distance, Clear Water Bay. The view is unobstructed beause we are up on a hill. Our nearest neighbor also has a three-story house but the level of our first floor is even higher than his roof.

The view is somewhat better from my room (which is on the third floor) or from our flat tiled roof which we could very easily convert into a roof garden. Having a washer and dryer means that we don't have to use the roof as a place to hang out our laundry.

My room is pretty large, over 300 square feet, is fully air-conditioned, and has got wall-to-wall carpeting. I don't have to do any cleaning; I don't even have to make my bed because a maid does these things (although most of the time, the bed doesn't get made till past lunchtime). And though the maid will wash our clothes if we tell her to, each of us washes his own clothes (I suspect that we trust ourselves with the washing machine more than we trust her). But she presses our clothes . . . or at least, the clothes we want her to press.

In short, it's pretty much like hotel living.

I haven't had too much difficulty moving to a daytime schedule. I generally am up before 7 and am in the office between 8:30 and 9. All this means is that I no longer can stay up till 3 or 4 in the morning. I generally am in bed by midnight.

And, of course, my eating habits have had to change. My breakfasts aren't the hearty 10 a.m. meals that enabled me to last till as late as 7 or 8 p.m. with nothing in between. Breakfasts now are "dry" breakfasts -- granola bars, sometimes with crackers and toast or cold cuts and crackers . . . but lunch and dinner are relatively heavy (or about as heavy as a three- to four-dish Chinese meal can be).

How good are these Chinese meals? Well, better than the kind of stuff I used to get at places like Aberdeen Court or China Pearl and about as good as what I would get at Marco Polo. The fish dishes are pretty good since the fish is always fresh, thanks to the custom of buying fish that are still alive and swimming.

My handling of chopsticks is no better than it used to be -- certainly not expert-class -- but I get by.

We have two part-time Chinese cooks -- one cooks lunch, the other dinner. So far, there's nothing that has been served that I didn't like, but if this happened, I wouldn't be bothered at all. We have a rather liberal policy on groceries . . . basically, we can buy what we want and charge it to the house. I must have bought something like two dozen huge chocolate bars over the past month . . . but it seems I'm not the only one who eats them!

The cooks are off on Sunday and so, it's only one day a week that we have to fend for ourselves. Either one of the other people in the house cooks (certainly not I) or we go out. When we don't go out, I generally wash the dishes -- about the only chore I do around this house.

Under these conditions, I will never learn to cook. The most I've ever done is fry an egg or cook some noodles (you know, the kind which merely requires you to add boiling water).

The office is located in the Kwun Tong Pastoral Center. I have only a very vague idea about what other activities go on in that building. I know there must be classes of various kinds going on because I see a number of teenagers in school uniforms playing on the basketball courts (and they don't always play basketball; more often than not, they play half-court soccer) and I am told that there are evening adult-education classes too. And the building is used as a meeting place by various groups . . . including some Filipina housemaids (I was introduced to the Filipino nun and priest who meet with this group regularly).

Traditional journalists will probably gasp at the idea that an agency that sends out a weekly package of news stories and publishes a weekly eight-page newsmagazine has only one typewriter which hardly ever gets used. We have nine IBM-compatible microcomputers all hooked up to each other, with four printers (two daisy-wheel, two dot-matrix) and four hard-disks. So far, it is only Manila that we can hook up to directly. Direct hook-ups with other parts of Asia will depend, I expect, on the amount of stories we get from these places and the quality of staff members we would have there.

Each story gets edited at least three times and each editor can call any story into his machine.

The stories, as you might expect, can be rather atrocious. Think of the kind of English written by Indonesians and Thais and you can imagine the kind of stories we get. Worse, since very many of our correspondents are not professional journalists, the stories we get often lack important details.

Many stories that we receive are not objective. Some of our correspondents seem to feel that their job is to glorify certain members of the church hierarchy. And we have correspondents who are themselves involved as actors in the events they are reporting, e.g., a Thai bishop who supervises the Church effort to help the Indo-Chinese refugees in Thailand. We can't expect such people to be truly objective, can we?

Of course, there are places where writing the truth is dangerous (or at least, is seen to be dangerous). In places like Korea, a foreign missionary certainly feels a little more secure than a Korean newsman when he writes about the anti-government riots going on over there. And in Indonesia, where the Church receives government subsidies, many churchmen do not like to speak out against government abuses. If I don't sound particularly excited about the job, that's because much of what I'm doing is stuff I could have done about five years after I finished college. What I look forward to is helping to set up a better system of doing things so we can do the things we're doing in about half the time it takes us now.

And yet, strangely enough, the visitors who have come to the house represent a much wider spectrum of people than I have expected, e.g., the United States consul-general, an Australian assemblyman, the son of former Korean Prime Minister John Chang, a Thai professor of philosophy, Swiss representatives of a philanthropic organization, and an Austrian high school teacher of history and geography.

As you might expect, there's a wide range of opinions (and misinformation) represented . . . the old China-watcher who has never been back in China since 1949 and looks at today's China as a simple extrapolation from 1949 . . . the Indian archbishop, just back from Beijing, extremely optimistic about the Chinese government's desire for peace . . . the matron from the American Midwest who sincerely asks about the extent to which the Maryknoll Order has been infiltrated by the communists . . . the 70-year-old British civil servant who never raises his voice but conveys emotions ranging from malicious glee to high indignation simply by the inflection of his voice . . . the Indonesian who has spent the last 20 years in China who looks at a pizza pie and pontificates that it is Danish pastry.

Still, I like the people at the office. And while the pay in money terms is not particularly great, a major fraction of it pure profit. I get free room and board and about the only things I have had to spend for is cigarettes, plus occasional bus and taxi fares. Maybe I'll be spending a little more once I start making the rounds of the bookstores (I've done that only once--more to buy maps than books).

I haven't looked up some of the people whom I know are here, partly because I still haven't quite learned to get around the place and I'm sure that many of these people have gotten sick and tired of having old friends drop in on them, broadly hinting that they play tourist guide. No, I'll look these people up when I can tell them that I've seen most of the tourist spots. Better yet, I probably will invite them up to the house.