Summer Snow in Hong Kong
It never snows in HK, until it did…
I was on the fifth floor when a flurry of snow cascaded across the football field. I forgot where I was going, stopped mid-step and just stood still.
It hasn’t snowed in Hong Kong in over 40 years, and even climate change isn’t going to make it happen in mid-May. No, the snow I saw never falls and cannot melt, because it’s cotton, and cotton only knows how to float.
The cottonwood trees blew a cloud of white across the green field, some flying so high they became one with the heavens. Hold on… is it clouds that grow on trees, or cotton that adorns the sky?
In school, I walked extra slow to watch a group of girls scoop up fluffy piles of cotton with little smiles, so bright under the dark eye bags we all sport from late-night studying. Later in line, they picked fluff from each other’s hair, only to have it mischievously fly into the teacher’s hair.
In maths, my teacher caught sight of the snow through the window, ran out of the classroom with her phone and abandoned all thoughts of monomials, binomials and trinomials. When she came back, grinning abashedly, the snow had wiped our minds of algebraic expressions too.
I picked some up to play with, and in my hands, I held not a piece of cotton, but a fluff of almost-thread, almost-sweater. Could you spin this into yarn?
Boom. New hobby unlocked. I sacrificed a CD of The Simpsons, a knitting needle, a curtain hook, and a roll of duct tape to make a drop spindle, then got to work. The thread broke while spinning, and the cotton made me sneeze and stuck to my hands, but I finally got a spool of handmade thread!
It doesn’t look like much, does it? But I saw the whole journey, how the cotton flew off the trees, around my fingers and through a spindle. It feels like I’ve travelled back thousands of years, discovering something as simple as thread for the first time. Watching others enjoy the cotton was reassuring and satisfying, to know that you’re not the only one who still finds joy in these simple things.
As students, we rarely get time to do things like this, which are fun in an impractical and 97% unuseful for our future careers way. More than the actual spinning of thread, what makes it enjoyable is I’m doing something no one is expecting, has no deadline, and won’t be judged. And that, is quite liberating.
