On penises and parishes, cultural differences, unlikely similarities, and the enduring ability of the human phallus to generate scandal on both sides of the Pacific.

Ruth and I have spent the better part of a decade navigating each other’s worlds with the quiet, ongoing bewilderment of two people who love each other very much and understand each other’s hometowns not at all.

She doesn’t understand why people in Adams, Massachusetts give directions using landmarks that no longer exist. I don’t understand why the wet market near our apartment sells live frogs in a bag and why nobody finds this remarkable. She doesn’t understand the concept of a potluck supper. I don’t understand why our building’s management office sends notices about not drying underwear on the communal railings, and why the notices never work. She finds it baffling that an entire town can mobilize against a change to their street numbers. I find it baffling that our housing estate of 40,000 people can’t mobilize against the man on the fourteenth floor who practices erhu at midnight.

These are the ordinary frictions of a cross-cultural marriage. You accept them. You learn. You develop a private taxonomy of confusion, filed under headings like “Food Storage Norms (Irreconcilable)” and “Appropriate Volume for Family Phone Calls (Under Review).”

But every so often, you discover something your two homes have in common. Something that bridges the gap, that makes you think, maybe we’re not so different after all.

Sometimes it’s mundane. Both places have excellent dumplings, though Adams would never call them that, they call them pierogi, because the Polish grandmothers who made them did not take kindly to having their cuisine reclassified. Both places have a complicated relationship with humidity. Both have mountains you can see from the main street, though in Adams the mountain is Greylock and in Hong Kong it’s a wall of apartment buildings that, if you squint, has the same geological permanence. Both places have an unreasonable number of churches per square mile, though in Hong Kong the temples are doing the heavy lifting. Both have a breakfast culture that borders on the sacred. Both have old men who sit on benches and pass judgment on the world as it walks by.

And both, as it turns out, have had a penis scandal.

I should be more specific. Both have had a penis scandal that consumed the local consciousness, divided public opinion, generated extensive media coverage, and became, in its own way, a defining cultural moment. Different penises. Different scandals. Same energy.

Let me start with Adams.

The Phallus on Park Street

Park Street is the main street of Adams, Massachusetts. It’s where you get your coffee, pick up your mail, run into someone’s mother, and hear about whatever happened last Saturday whether you want to or not. It is also where, in a gift shop window just off the street, someone displayed a giant crocheted penis.

Giant. Crocheted. Penis. In a window. On a street where people walk to church.

And when I say giant, I don’t mean a novelty keychain. I don’t mean a gag gift you’d find at a bachelorette party in a bag under the counter. I mean a substantial, lovingly constructed, yarn-based phallus, with significant girth, I might add, displayed in a shop window with the confidence of a Macy’s Christmas arrangement, visible to anyone walking past on their way to the post office, the pharmacy, or, God help them, Notre Dame Church.

Adams, as I’ve mentioned in previous dispatches, is a town with a church on every corner and a bar between every church. It is a town where people’s grandmothers still live on the same street where their grandmothers’ grandmothers lived. It is a town where you cannot buy a loaf of bread without running into someone who will tell you exactly what they think about whatever you did last Saturday. It is, in other words, precisely the kind of town where a giant crocheted penis of significant girth in a shop window would not pass without comment.

It did not pass without comment.

The whispering started at the Daily Grind, because in Adams, everything starts at the Daily Grind. The Daily Grind is a breakfast place on Park Street where the coffee is strong, the portions are large, and the local intelligence network operates with an efficiency that would make the CIA weep with envy. If something has happened in Adams, anything, from a fender bender on Route 8 to a questionable romantic decision at the Polish club, the Daily Grind will have the full report by 7:45 AM, sourced, annotated, and available with a side of home fries.

The giant crocheted penis was, by Daily Grind standards, a five-alarm event.

People spoke about it in the hushed, scandalized tones normally reserved for affairs, tax audits, and that time someone put a Biden sign on their lawn. Have you seen it? Have you walked past? My mother nearly had a heart attack. The church-going population, which in Adams is effectively the population, was appalled, or at least performed appalled with the commitment of people who had been rehearsing for exactly this kind of moral crisis their entire lives. There was talk of a lawsuit. There was talk of zoning. There was talk of decency, and standards, and what kind of message this sends, and won’t someone think of the children, even though the children had already seen it, taken a photo, and posted it to Instagram before the adults had finished clutching their pearls.

And then something shifted. The way things always shift in a small town when outrage meets curiosity and curiosity wins.

People started coming to see it. Not just from Adams. From Cheshire. From Williamstown. From places that had no business being in Adams on a Tuesday afternoon. They came to see the penis. They came to take pictures with the penis. The giant crocheted penis in the gift shop window became, against all odds and the explicit wishes of at least three parish councils, a tourist attraction. People drove significant distances to stand on a sidewalk in the Berkshires and pose next to a yarn scrotum. If Adams had had the entrepreneurial foresight to sell commemorative T-shirts, the town budget would have been solved for a decade.

Ruth was not in Adams for the penis. I told her about it later, over dinner, in our apartment in Mei Foo, 8,000 miles from Park Street.

She listened. She processed. She put down her chopsticks.

“A crocheted penis,” she said.

“A giant crocheted penis. With significant girth.”

“In a window.”

“In a window. On Park Street. Where people walk to church.”

She picked her chopsticks back up. “Hong Kong had a penis scandal too,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“A man got his penis stuck in a park bench.”

I put down my fork.

The Bench of Lam Tin Park

In August 2008, while the Beijing Olympics were thrilling billions worldwide, a 41-year-old man in Kowloon was having his own athletic event.

The man, identified in reports as Le Xing, found himself alone late at night in Lam Tin Park, a modest public park in Kwun Tong with the usual amenities: paths, trees, exercise equipment. Among the equipment were steel sit-up benches, the perforated kind, sturdy metal platforms with rows of small circular holes designed, one assumes, for ventilation and drainage and absolutely nothing else.

Le Xing, for reasons that remain between him and his therapist, inserted his penis into one of these holes. What happens next is a matter of physics that requires no elaboration: what goes in flaccid does not always come out erect.

He called the police. With his mobile phone. While attached, face-down, to a park bench. I want you to imagine making that call. I want you to imagine the dispatcher’s face. I want you to imagine the conversation in the squad car on the way to the scene.

When police and medics arrived, they found Xing moaning in pain, stuck to the bench in a position that can only be described as profoundly regrettable. His cover story was, and I say this with genuine admiration for the attempt, that he had been doing push-ups and his pants fell down. Late at night. Alone. On a sit-up bench. With his penis perfectly aligned with a one-inch hole. Doing push-ups.

The rescue attempt was, by all accounts, protracted and medically creative. Doctors on the scene first tried to drain blood from the swollen area to reduce the erection. This did not work. They tried other methods. These also did not work. After about an hour of increasingly desperate intervention, the rescue team did the only thing left to do: they cut the entire top section of the bench off its base and loaded Le Xing into the ambulance with the bench still attached to him. He was transported through the streets of Kowloon, in an ambulance, with a steel park bench welded by blood pressure to his groin.

At the hospital, it took doctors another four hours to separate man from furniture. They later said that if he’d been stuck even one hour longer, they would have had to amputate.

He was also charged with destruction of government property. The bench had cost HK$14,000, about US$1,900. The man nearly lost his penis, and the government sent him a bill for the bench.

But here’s where it becomes a true Hong Kong story. News crews arrived at the park and filmed the rescue. The footage was broadcast. In a city of 7.4 million people with a tabloid culture that makes the New York Post look like the Financial Times, the park bench incident became a sensation. The story ran on television, in the newspapers, on every internet forum in the territory.

If you’re old enough to remember Baby Jessica, the toddler who fell into a well in Midland, Texas, in 1987, you know the feeling. The whole country stopped. CNN ran the same footage on loop. You watched the clock and waited for word, helpless, knowing someone was stuck somewhere they shouldn’t be and there was nothing to do but hope the rescuers got there in time. Hong Kong had that same energy that night. The same vigil. The same collective breath-holding. Except instead of a toddler in a well, it was a 41-year-old man’s penis in a park bench. And instead of Wolf Blitzer providing solemn updates, it was a TVB reporter trying to keep a straight face while a fire crew cut through municipal steel. The nation wept for Baby Jessica. Hong Kong made ringtones out of Xing’s cries of pain.

Whether the ring tone story is true or apocryphal, the fact that it’s plausible tells you everything about Hong Kong’s relationship with public humiliation and comedy.

Le Xing told police he was “celebrating the Olympics.” I suppose we all celebrate in our own way. Some people watch the opening ceremony. Some people wave flags. Some people, apparently, commit an act of love with municipal infrastructure and end up on the evening news with a park bench attached to their genitals. It takes all kinds.

Ruth told me this story with the absolute calm of a woman who had lived through it in real time, who had seen the news coverage, who had possibly heard the ringtone, and who considered it simply one of those things that happens in Hong Kong, like a typhoon signal 8 or a six-hour queue for a restaurant that serves nothing but toast.

“They showed it on TV?” I asked.

“Live,” she said.

“The rescue.”

“The whole thing. The blood draining. The bench cutting. Everything.”

“And people made it a ringtone.”

“His moaning. Yes.”

I sat with this for a long time. In Adams, a crocheted penis in a gift shop window nearly brought the parish councils to their knees. In Hong Kong, a man’s actual penis, trapped in a park bench, was broadcast live on television, turned into a ringtone, and filed under Tuesday.

Two Penises, One Conclusion

The crocheted penis of Adams and the park bench of Lam Tin Park are, in their own ways, perfect expressions of the places that produced them.

In Adams, the scandal was about display. About propriety. About what you’re allowed to put in a window on a street where people walk to church. The penis itself was harmless, yarn and stuffing, a craft project elevated to controversy by the simple fact of its visibility. The outrage was real, but so was the curiosity, and in the end the curiosity won because in a small town where nothing ever happens, a giant crocheted penis is, whether you approve of it or not, something happening.

In Hong Kong, the scandal was about spectacle. About the collision of private desperation and public infrastructure. About a man who made a catastrophically bad decision in a park at night and woke up a tabloid legend. The city didn’t clutch its pearls. The city watched the rescue live, made ringtones, and moved on, because Hong Kong processes scandal the way it processes everything else: quickly, loudly, and without apology.

Ruth and I come from places that could not be more different. She grew up in a city of 7.4 million. I grew up in a town of 7,995. She navigates my hometown with the quiet squinting skepticism of a woman who cannot believe that iced hot toddies and Chinese auctions are real. I navigate hers with the wide-eyed bewilderment of a man who once got lost in a wet market and emerged holding a bag of something he still can’t identify.

But we share this. Somewhere in the great Venn diagram of Adams, Massachusetts, and Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China, there is a narrow, overlapping sliver, and in that sliver is a penis causing problems and a community unsure whether to be outraged or entertained.

I think that’s called common ground.

Ruth disagrees. She says it’s called a cautionary tale. I asked her what the caution is.

“Don’t put your penis anywhere it doesn’t belong,” she said. “That includes shop windows.”

Fair point. But in Adams, as in Hong Kong, that advice has never once stopped anyone.