Hometown Glory
The City Series. One. Stories from urban jungles, growing metropolises and ancient capitals around the world
After every visit to Hong Kong, I would check the photos I took on my phone as I wait for my flight. The pictures are invariably of the following, in sequence of quantity, no matter the length of stay: food, family, and friends in chic backgrounds. Once in a long while, there might be a beautiful landscape photo from a hike, or a photo of the streets. those would be lodged between a char siu (barbecue pork) photoshoot and an artfully positioned cup of coffee in a hipster cafe. I’d upload these snaps onto social media.
It struck me as I scrolled through the photos: they don’t really portray most of the city. I make the same mistake government tourism pamphlets make. My photo feeds of Hong Kong fit the social media cliché — the world is beautiful, the food is good, and my life is perfect. I didn’t capture the Hong Kong whose streets I ran through and wrote about; whose politics and people I shed tears over.
My hometown is a place of uneven cement pavements and eclectic neon advertisement signs draped over building walls. The mountains are ever present, caressing the city’s glass, concrete and metal giants like a pair of half-clasped hands. My hometown is a city which glistens and glows in the rain. Lights are magnified when it pours, and windows fog up as the humidity outside hits the blasting air-conditioning inside. The constant sound is the sound of the sea. Waves surge white and then retreat turquoise, or beat furiously against orange rocks. That, and the sound of traffic.
My hometown is disorienting, overwhelming, colourful in sight and in sound. But to me, the chaos is comforting.
Sai Ying Pun smells fragrant, the wafts of fermenting fish flesh pungent in the summer. We walk through the markets in Yau Ma Tei, Tsim Sha Tsui, Sham Shui Po, where the little bellies of hawker stalls burst with everything imaginable — undergarments, adapters, fresh fruit, household items, antique lamps, old books. The wet markets in North Point open early in the morning and close late at night, fresh meat hang on hooks, fish swimming in styrofoam boxes filled with seawater. The clang of a large metal ladle into a deep pot of beef brisket broth, sloshing into a bowl with translucent rice noodles, greens and beef tripe and intestines in Tin Hau; the barbecue pork and rice place which sells by the plate for less than 4 pounds. Then there is Central, which smells like money and is stuffed full of luxury cars, stuck in traffic jams.
My hometown is a city of suits, old street sweepers and cardboard pickers. Lonely people cramped in tiny boxes, stacked on top of each other. Beds of heaving, breathing, sweating bodies when the days are hot and the flat rooftops are flooded by storms. People walk, run, bustle and stumble through the streets like blood through arteries. Even through the rain.
Amidst all the bustle, she sits there. There on her cart, on the busiest street in the busiest part in the glitzy bit of town. She sits with her straw hat, the light rain sliding down the thin purple blouse covering her bent back.
Rain meant less cardboard to collect, she said.
People wet their cardboard so it’s heavier, and the heavier the cardboard, the more money you get. You see, the cardboard prices are according to weight, but wet cardboard would make it harder to recycle, she said. Me, I don’t do that.
She used to collect cardboard on that street with her gambler of a husband until he died. And before that, they worked in the nearby wet market, cleaning and plucking chickens. The live chicken business went down in the early 2000s. The government outlawed the selling of live birds in markets after the bird flu epidemic hit the city. She lost her job.
Between chickens and cardboard, she raised three children, paid for her husband’s habit, bought an old fourth-floor walk-up and saved up funds for her funeral. During summertime, I would bring her a cold, sweet drink. Sometimes we would walk to the eatery under the Canal Flyover, and order green bean congee and steamed rice rolls with minced beef. She doesn’t finish the rice rolls, wrapping the leftovers in paper. For dinner, she said. My appetite is tiny these days.
She laughs easily and often, works every day, and says it’s nicer to be out on the streets than to stay at home. She could greet the shop employees coming to work. I hug her and hold her hand. She has watched her part of town grow rich, old buildings with neighbourhood stores torn down for shopping malls and expensive serviced apartments. Society pushes her out, but she says it was just her time being up. Even when someone cheated her out of all her savings this winter; even when she is deemed ineligible for government support because she “owned real estate” — the equivalent of gold in Hong Kong.
I wish I took a picture of her. I wish I had a picture of her warm hand, her fragile skin, thin like crumpled tissue paper. I wish I had a photo of the way she looked at me, telling me her husband had just passed away, and she returned to her cardboard cart alone.
In my hometown, there are so many like her. I am thinking of her specifically, but she is many of us. She is the blood running through the veins of Hong Kong, the heartbeat and the cornerstone of my hometown.
I wish, I took a picture of her.
