It's been three months since I got to Hong Kong. I think Hong Kong is a city that is easy to fall in love with, but is also one that is easy to fall out of love with ... just like an old flame gone out after a short summer, like steam, it evaporates. It's a place that you have to learn to love in order to survive there. And in this process of learning, you'll find a lot about this culture and yourself -- about why or why not you come to love this place, what you love or don't love this place that reflects your personality, about your own parameters and principles that have never come to be tested, patience, and, most of all, where your home and your heart is.
Hong Kong is like that, vibrant, full of surprises, modern and fashionable. It is a place full of contradictions. As if to show how different and individualistic it is, it built for itself the famous Bank of China tower, the world's heaviest bridge, the Tsing Ma Bridge, spent only 7 years to materialize an international airport out of nothing (even the island itself was man made), one of the world's best designed transporation network, the world's busiest cargo port .... Yet, aside from its individualism, it hides itself
behind a mask of designer goods and brands and styles from abroad, rarely from within.
High-strung could be a very appropriate word to describe Hong Kong. No other place could you find a combination of so much modernity and culture, with the odorless, but potent, killer sense of survival. It is everywhere; from the subway to the movies, to the streets, the offices, at the border, the media, to its education and politics, it is ladened with this acute scent of urgency.
This is how they survive, I suppose. This culture survives in the gaps between two other worlds, lashed by the critics of insecurity. It survived abandonment, loss and invasion through the past century. It learned so much as being a survivor that the only way to escape from the deep rut of being a surivor is to dig itself out of it. It frantically dug and dug ... and as if this hole will always be haunting, this culture as a whole is still digging, only to dig itself into an psychological hole. It has lost its personality along the way.
One might come to love Hong Kong for the fact that it has that facade of being so strong, yet it really is just as tender as anyone else inside. Because of this weakness, Hong Kong becomes alive. It becomes a real person with blood and tears and a scar that will always sting.
Just try walking down by the waterfront at 8pm; you'll see Hong Kong in all its glory and glitters, laser show and lights every night. Then go to the bar street on Lan Gui Fong, and you'll see how many people with pains that need to be consoled, that need a place to take off the mask they wear during the day that's suffocating them.
You'll see that this city is real.
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