25th anniversary Pietro is a fellow Italian who has been living in Hong Kong for over a decade and constantly seems as if he is seconds away from reaching an emotional boiling point. A simple greeting like Hows life going, Pietro? triggers an explosion of words and curses start to strike the air like thunder and lightining. For him, Hong Kong is the worst place to live on Earth: it is unethical, aggressive, intolerant and lacks breathable air. It is a city where people work long and strenuous hours, squeeze themselves into tightly packed buses or subway trains and arrive home to cage-sized flats. Migrant workers are abused and cyclists are run over by speeding mini-buses. Demands for a better life by the ordinary majority are systematically ignored while the privileged minority are pampered to their hearts content. Frankly, it is easy to understand the causes of Pietros intense frustration. His litanies of death remind me of the warning my friends gave me years ago when I first announced my intention to move here, Hong Kong will kill you. I dismissed it as a bigoted remark made by narrow-minded people opposed to any type of change and on August 21st, 1989 I landed in Hong Kong to begin my own mission impossible. To survive the impossible, my strategy was simple: befriend people, absorb the culture and live like the locals. I began implementing my strategy in a setting familiar to me: the beach. I went to the nearest beach and started to walk back and forth on the sand like I was on a catwalk, showing off my muscles and hairy chest while fishing for glances of desire. Everything went unnoticed and I inferred that Hong Kong girls must be shy. What did not go unnoticed was my skin. I went home severely sun-burned and spent the rest of the evening taking care of my leaking blisters. The second day I was more resolute than ever to make my first acquaintance. I met a group of young people eager to befriend a gweilo and they took me to place I had no clue about: the karaoke bar. Being Italian, you must like drinking wine are the last words I remember from that evening. Instead of the Sangiovese I was accustomed to drinking, my companions continuously filled my glass with Ballantine that, as a guest, I politely accepted and consumed as if it were water. What followed was the worst night of my life, filled with nightmares and hallucinations. On my third day I adopted a softer activity and for the first time in my life I stepped into a massage parlour for a reflexology session. I suspect that because I was a novice at reflexology, the pressure applied to my feet overstimulated the circulation of my blood and caused the formation of coagulated blood clots which interfered with my bowel system. I ended my third day spending the night in the emergency ward of a local hospital. I felt miserable and scared. Hong Kong was not the fragrant port I had read and dreamed about - on the contrary, it was more like a vast, endless ocean. The words Hong Kong will kill you repeated over and over in my head. Lingering alone in the dimly lit hospital room, I came up with one of the best decisions of my last 25 years: I would retreat to the countryside to find myself and rebuild my self-confidence. I moved to Yuen Long, learned to grow vegetables and harvest fresh oysters at Lau Fan Shan and socialized with Hung Shui Kius elderly who taught me the Cantonese language. The rural retreat fed me for two years and nourished me for the years to come. It will be 25 years I have lived in Hong Kong and, unlike Pietro, I love it as a place I can call home. Hong Kong is a place of dichotomy and contradictions - comfort and unpleasantness, uniqueness and shortcomings - as a much as any other city but it is also a very special place to me. Cheung Chau is not Capri, Canton Road is not Via Monte Napoleone, Time Square is not St. Mark Square yet Hong Kong remains a fascinating city of the modern world. I admire the scenes of thousands of citizens packing narrow city streets to voice their aspirations, I like the colourful chaos of its indoor and outdoor markets, the matchless efficiency of services provided, the convenience to choose among hundreds of different cuisines, the luxury to mourn deaths at the Grand Hotel (as funeral homes are superstitiously dubbed). Hong Kong may have its shortcomings but no one can deny that it is a remarkable place. A candle sits on top of the anniversary cake waiting to be blown out. Along with the candle, I wish to blow out all of Hong Kongs fear that opposes genuine social progress and labels it as evil. Government officials, property tycoons and business cartels have lined up together for too long in fearmongering Hong Kong people to believe that catastrophe will strike if they choose to follow socially progressive ideas. My wish is that Hong Kong learns to not fear any open-minded leadership that can bring it on par with the rest of our evolving world. Happy anniversary.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 08:19:50 +0000
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