An Authentic Plastic City: a Shallow Love Letter to Pre-Protest Hong Kong
by Ari Joss
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While the protests rage on in Hong Kong, unlikely feelings have been flooding into my stream of consciousness. Of all of them, one prevails: homesickness. Seems unlikely when your hometown is falling to pieces.
However, upon reconsidering, this makes sense. My relationship with the city has been a complicated one, and like everyone else, I yearn for peace in Hong Kong. The privilege I have as a gweilo* shines through as I try — with my nostalgia-coloured glasses — to find something remotely un-protest-related to read about my hometown; but there is nothing but tourist guides and restaurant reviews.
If you want to read about politics, it may be best you look away. What I want to write about is the magic of this city through my eyes. You’ve heard the whole east-meets-west tangent dozens of times. You’ve probably also read about the hatred that breeds within the international schools. Well, here it is again, but in my words and with a little extra. This is my shallow love letter to pre-protest Hong Kong. This is fitting because Hong Kong is one of the shallowest, most transient places I’ve ever lived in. Why, then, is it so damn special to me still?
“This is my shallow love letter to pre-protest Hong Kong.”
I was born at Pamela Youde Hospital on Hong Kong Side* and spent the better part of 18 years living on a houseboat in Discovery Bay, with some stents in apartments in between. I — like many Hong Kong kids — have parents from somewhere else. It’s the only place that you could tell someone that you’re half English, half Jewish South African with various other tidbits from elsewhere, and no one will bat an eyelid at you.
Let me give you an insight into “expat” Hong Kong. Almost every “third-culture kid,” as we’ve been dubbed by some, comes from at least a little bit of money. As rent prices soar, lifestyle maintenance isn’t cheap. That didn’t really enter my psyche until I was a teenager, though. My childhood in Discovery Bay consisted of blissful memories of going to the lantern festival (read: mid-autumn festival) on DB Beach with my obnoxiously loud plastic lantern contraption, visiting the bakery to get a sausage croissant or to Sam the Juice Man, swimming in the residents’ club and stealing cream soda from the vending machines there, climbing up to the rock pools and returning with dozens of scratches and bruises, with most likely some tadpoles, too. Hanging out in the plaza on friday nights at Mcdonalds; playing manhunt by the boats; trying to buy shu mai or garlic noodles with our octopus cards without getting caught; jumping off my friend’s house because it was a boat. Promptly getting stung by a jellyfish minutes after.
Leaving Lantau Island was a particular fascination of mine. Taking the ferry to Central or getting the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) with your friends was no big feat at a young age, because the city was so safe. Walking down the International Finance Center (IFC) walkway was so exciting — it meant I got to stare at all of the business people, so alien to the quiet life I’d come to have known in DB. Being in Mong Kok and walking past the stinky tofu, the chaotic markets and chan chan tengs* and Yat Dim Sum, trying to order my food in my best Cantonese, and ice skating in Tsing Yi. Lantau and Hong Kong side, along with Kowloon, couldn’t be more different.
The expat bubble only became apparent to me after I changed from an international school to a local school. There were now 40 people in my class instead of 15. The teachers would go on strike. We didn’t have as many computers. This is an eye-rolling matter now, but to an 11-year-old, it was an interesting new world. I had a great group of friends from that school who watched me wobble through this new world like Bambi on ice.
The funny thing is, I never completely fit in at international school, either. When my parents divorced, my stepdad ended up having to take on the financial responsibilities of my brother and I, something that was no easy task. For this, I will always be grateful. However, I was not entitled to the ludicrous amounts of money that some Hong Kong kids are. I wouldn’t have it any other way. In my local school, I was the rich girl, whereas in DB I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the lifestyles of the other year six girls, who were donning Juicy Couture handbags by the time I left. I don’t remember being too shattered by this; I didn’t exactly want to grow up anyway. Luckily, my friendships with other expat kids were the kinds that money just can’t buy.
When I was freshly 13, I went to boarding school in Scotland, and there I stayed until I was 18, flying back and forth each holiday and staying in Hong Kong for extended periods of time. This is when I really began to consciously fall in love with the city. Boarding school was the best time of my life, but the trips back to Hong Kong were just as exciting. I realised that Hong Kong was something special; it had a quality I’d forever be trying to describe (and even now), likely failing to do so.
Life as an expat teenager in Hong Kong could be a complete oxymoron. You have the freedom from a very young age to go out and have a good time. There are endless junk boat parties, hikes, drunken lan kwai fong trips (my first time going? Age 15. RIP Déja.), good food, beaches ... the list goes on. If your parents brought you up right, they’d have showed you all the local things to do; all the better if you had Canto-speaking friends so you didn’t have to rely on speaking your broken Cantonese to the chan chan teng lady to order your yuenyeung* and french toast.
What lingers in the background is the insane pressure to keep up. Your parents actually care for your wellbeing? No Lan Kwai Fong. Can’t afford the junk party for your birthday? Just a party at home will do. Stuffing yourself with the amazing food? Well, the Hong Kong girl uniform is skinny.
After school, I finally got my confidence and the baby fat had long melted away (read: burned away, through a few years of disordered eating; the standard for many teenagers in Hong Kong). I got to do things I didn’t always get to do, as I worked a few jobs. The thing about this shallow way of living is that once you leave school, you can kind of say, “Fuck it.” The Mean Girls movie ends eventually. Some people who leave the Hong Kong expat bubble feel this way too, and you make connections. The people that you’ll meet when you go out or on those iconic DB ferries turn out to be really special people. Perhaps you’ll rekindle things with friends who you lost touch with.
“Life as an expat teenager in Hong Kong could be a complete oxymoron.”
There’s something about being back home that’s so special, especially in a city as transient as Hong Kong. It can make some people feel invincible — you realise that you had it so good in Hong Kong. No one really buys drinks in clubs, because if public drinking is illegal, it isn’t exactly enforced. You can buy your alcohol at “Club 7” (7-eleven to all you non-Hong Kong kids), chances are LKF Gollum will be there to open your beer for you, and you stand in the blocked-off road, seeing who you’ll run into. You can drift in and out of places as you like, and maybe end up somewhere in Wanchai, singing “Sweet Caroline” as if it were your dying day. When you’re in school, everyone knows everyone is a burden. But when everyone’s back for the holidays, running into someone you know at Carnegies’ makes dancing on the bar all the more jovial, fueled by a hint of nostalgia. What I’m trying to say is, I’d like to personally thank Hong Kong for making my nights out in other countries seem pretty average by comparison.
You can be in a remote Lantau village one hour, eating a pineapple bun at the bakery, and watching buffalo pass you by the next, then going out at midnight on the same day. Days in Hong Kong hold promise and mystery, and walking down that IFC walkway makes me feel the same way it did when I was a kid.
But, all good things come to an end. After a few months in Hong Kong, you feel constricted, exhausted, and the toxicity that you thought had dissipated takes its toll. You crave the fresh air of wherever your university is — chances are the quality of it is better than Hong Kong’s. The drugs get overwhelming, and you can’t drink like you could on school nights when you were 16. Perhaps you miss the freedom of living in a sharehouse, or of being your adult self.
You go back to uni with a clear head. Then, two weeks in, you’re doing your laundry and you see someone’s inevitable Instagram story of the harbour. And as cliché as that photo is, you start counting the days until you’re back home.
No matter what happens in the future, the Hong Kong I remember will always be this way. To all the people counting down the days, picking out their Sevens costumes or listening to Skibs unironically perhaps, this one’s for you. I’d like to thank that train-wreck of a music video, “Hong Kong Kids,” for prompting me to write this love letter to the most authentic plastic city on the planet.
*Gweilo = derogatory slang for white people in Hong Kong. Used without insult mostly.
*Hong Kong Side = Hong Kong Island
*Chan chan teng = Hong Kong-style canteen, serving eccentric dishes that combine its colonial and chinese influences.
*Yuenyeung = mixture of coffee and Hong Kong milk tea.