Anais Nin once said: ‘Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born’.
In the summer of 2018, I made one such new friend, and now, in July 2020, in this is very strange year we have all had - though one that Hong Kong has especially found trying - my thoughts return to her, as it has to many people I care for very much, in that very special city I said my goodbyes to at the end of last year. I met Yan* having replied to her ad for a room in one of Hong Kong’s best neighbourhoods. And when I say best, I mean that it boasts absolutely everything you could want in a Hong Kong neighbourhood. Especially that thing that Hong Kong has that eludes all other places in this world. That is, a very particular electricity that can fry you up and turn you into toast if you let it. Here, in these parts, skyscrapers wedge themselves between slivers of the sea, as a backdrop of mountains makes this the perfect place to forget how to navigate flat and landlocked cities. Here, streets stink of dried seafood and a fishy, dusty staleness that sticks in your throat, and here, a stony Sun Yat Sen stands erect watching over a swimming pool that is for some reason never open when you pay it a visit, alongside looming modern-style white structures that are presumably crucifixes and which seem equally strange when considered alongside a calligraphic object one presumes was placed there in a curatorial bid to have the city’s checkered cultural landscape represented in its entirety and which has resulted something of a public space nightmare salvaged only by the view of one of the world’s most breathtaking harbours. Here, on Friday nights, sweaty, shirtless runners circle Sun Yat Sen, and are joined by the troupe of dancing grannies you get everywhere, in Mainland China, too as they crop up all over the shop here. In fact, when people ask you what your favourite thing about ‘China’ is - and by China what is meant is China AND the special administrative regions that many fear are losing their specialness day by day - you always say ‘the dancing grannies’. Dancing grannies make everything in the world better. It’s impossible to be unhappy when you see a troupe of them shimmying about to the 80s Mandopop blaring out from their ghetto blasters. Just watch the way they move. Watch the joy in their eyes. Watch the delight they take in being outdoors with their best friends on a glorious summer day. Watch them and think about everything it is they have been through, how much it is that has changed in the course of their lives. It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around everything that generation has lived through in that corner of the world. And I racked up seven years over there. Anyway, back to my good friend Yan. The rent she had been asking for seemed implausibly low, so I had my doubts about the place and about Yan, too. But we hit it off pretty quickly. Yan has that edge to her many Hongkongers have, that speaks to the extraordinary pressures its people face day in day out in a city where rest isn’t so much a thing people do but is rather a thing one dreams of constantly. I think she was in her late forties, and was the opposite of polish, living mostly off dried noodles, Japanese crackers and very strong Italian coffee made with a large machine that sputtered and rumbled. She was dry and funny in a way that people are when they don’t really set out to be but have a very matter-of-fact way of thinking about things alongside that ability to laugh their way through dark places as and when they appear. Case in point: Over the two and a half years in which I lived with Yan - and which proved to be one of the best cohabitation situations I’ve ever had- Yan went unflinchingly through three significant bereavements. First, the death of her father, an extremely jolly and kind man who would leave cakes and sausage rolls for me outside my bedroom after trips to the bakery Yan had attempted to ban after he got sick. His death was marked in our flat per Cantonese tradition. Yan left out offerings to his ghost in the form of his favourite snacks set out on paper utensils overnight, of which unfortunately one of them was the famously flagrant durian fruit. Yan apologised ahead of the event for the smells and the strangeness, also warning me not to open my door that night in case I’d see his ghost, which might be frightening for me. Of course I found myself ignoring her advice, opening the door just after midnight when he had been expected to arrive and have his final snacks before departing for the nether world. No spectral apparition presented itself. Rather, feasting on dim sum was one one of Yan’s two beloved and ridiculously stupid house cats, Fufu, whose death that next year would be followed shortly by that of Mimi, his fluffy, flat-faced pedigree girlfriend who was so dumb she would get distressed and bewildered every time a released claw of hers would attach itself to a piece of cloth. I don’t think she ever fully figured out how those things were supposed to work. My best and oldest friend says I am essentially two very distinct people. A rather serious and grumpy boss figure who shows up to make sure things get done properly and that no one gets hurt or does anything wildly stupid, and an excitable, impulsive child. I suppose she has her finger on something. Just as cities are riddled with contradictions, so are people. Getting to know a person, or a place, only really starts to happen when you enter into that space of contradiction and embrace it. This is what it means to be truly seen. Yan did legal contract work by day, spending a lot of time in courts, work she’d describe of having to listen to two people snapping at each other for hours and hours on end, often senselessly losing a lot of money along the way. Her main client was a difficult and socially-awkward to the point of an astonishing rude guy whose work she would take on knowing that he would pay well because everyone else refused to work for him. To me, she called him ‘chrysanthemum’ because that was a word Hongkongers used to complain about people. Chrysanthemums look like assholes, apparently. (Like Hungarians, the poetic Cantonese spirit very much extends to their colourful use of swear words.) Hong Kong’s security net being what it was, Yan for various chunks of time was a full time carer for her brother, who had a severe respiratory disorder and mental disabilities. That was between carers she brought in from abroad (my understanding was, unlike many employers of foreign domestic workers in the city, Yan was a fair and decent employer). So her life was far from easy, and a lot of responsibilities fell on her lap that she had to suffer through alone. What she did have was a flat in an area where rent had soared since the arrival of a metro station a few years before. It had belonged to the family for generations in one of the few remaining old apartment blocks in the neighbourhood, shorter than the gleaming new ones, with crumbling corridors once (before my time) frequented by heroin addicts and stray dogs, a front door that never locked, and, most importantly, no lift. My room, it turned out, was so cheap because I had to walk up nine floors to get to it. Also, because I slept on a children’s bed in what was essentially a cupboard. Yan had her flat (which, technically she co-owned with an extremely difficult aunt who had divorced her uncle and was trying to get back at the family to by bullying Yan, in some occasions threatening to kill her, something that when the extended family heard about they called in police officers, who showed up at our front door perplexed to find a dishevelled gweilo in pajamas looking not very murderous. I, in turn, confused about their inquiries into Yan, misunderstood the event to mean she was for some reason in trouble with the police, and found myself lying about her whereabouts in a slightly misguided attempt to protect her from trouble she was not in. It was a very confusing day. Like me, Yan’s emotional alchemy is made of strong stuff interlaced with a softness in certain places select people get to see. You saw that in the way she interacted with Mimi, and Fufu, as with how she interacted with me. When her cats passed away, she was sad but stoic. “One cat come, one cat go,” she said. She was a good friend, and a thoughtful housemate. Leaving her and her flat was actually one of the hardest parts of the move. The day I left, pulling the two suitcases I’d whittled my life down to down that ridiculous flight of stairs as the city burned (that was the week students had turned their university into a stronghold, with journalists and all sorts locked in, police lined up outside, a lot of us very worried they’d get out at all, apocalyptic scenes and all that…) I realised how much I’d miss her, and I felt pangs of guilt for leaving, compounded by the fact that she had loaded me down with grapes and Japanese chocolates for my trip. “I had a friend like you, who lived in Hong Kong,” she said, when I told her I was leaving. “Very smart. Very sensitive. He die” she said. “It’s good that you are going”. Yan didn’t protest. She wasn’t against protestors at all. She just didn’t get involved in things. She was shrewd. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. “Something smells bad,” she said, of the unrest, and the government’s handling of it. “You know, the Chinese government. All they like to do is play. They use Hong Kong to play against each other,” she added. Yan didn't protest, and I am using her as example to talk about how many 'ordinary' Hongkongers responded to events. That's not to mean I didn't or don't support people who did take to the streets. But I am saying I was scared for them, and I saw the sense in hanging back, and wanted to do so myself. Stepping outside and into the throngs felt more maddening each day. And I felt relieved, albeit guilty, for not covering it. It felt like my brain was folding into a paper lantern that burned. I also worried that the crazier things got (or were swept up to get), the greater a 'justification' there would be for measures to be taken that would 'restore order,' which is certainly one way to read why the National Security Law looks the way it does, now. People who are not closely following what has happened over the last five years in Hong Kong, which were the five years I spent there, have asked this week what has been lost. Well, a lot. I arrived in Hong Kong the year thousands took to the streets over the course of 79 days, an event that many young Hongkongers describe of as having brought about their political awakening. A good friend of mine said that up until that point, she had never much identified with her Hong Kong. Now, it felt. for the first time in her life, she was connected to the city. She found her peers. Those were beautiful (and exhausting) weeks for many people. Protest has always been part of the fabric of Hong Kong culture, as have stirrings of a will for self-determination. But this was the first time that took expression like this. And of course, it was peaceful, orderly, leaderless, Utopian. Students built makeshift libraries in which to study. Everyone cleaned up their mess. I probably wrote better poetry about it than news reportage, but then I was always weird journalist, not really as tough and bulldog-like as you need to be in contexts like these, always burning into a crisp. But anyway, those were the weeks that captivated me, the weeks I fell in love with the city. Yes, sentimental words from someone who had the privilege to leave when the going got really tough. But something about those weeks in a city that had up until that point felt so abrasive, gleaming and harsh cracked open and let me in. Fast forward five years, and the city feels like it's on fire. In that summer of crazy, you could taste the teargas on the streets. Even on calmer days. It was the first summer I’d spent there more as a civilian than a journalist, after years of work that had felt like a bludgeoning. Somehow, then, fighting became a passion I couldn’t put down. I discovered the fun in ducking punches. Was it fun or was it relief? I couldn’t really tell. I had the arms of a boxer and, it felt, the brain of one - who has eaten far too many left hooks - too. That was, all, very weird. But then, everything that summer turned upside down. Hong Kong’s electric pulse had gone up by a thousand volts, my anxiety - already something I struggle with a great deal- went up with it. A strange year. Politically. Personally. A city that never sleeps was given curfews. I abided by them. Messages in group chats warned of possible triad chopping escapades. Reason felt hard to hold on to. Just, all this emotion. This drowning in emotion. Everyone’s emotion. I felt like Mimi staring at her claws, with no clue what to do about them. I feel tired contemplating talking about it. I feel tired trying to figure out what’s next for the city and for my friends there. Tired and sad. I kind of just don’t want to think about it at all. I want to think about dancing grannies, and Sun Yat Sen’s sombre stare, and the view of the harbour at sunset. But that’s selfish.
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Sarah KaracsA Berlin-based writer engages in the study of belonging and in-between places after years spent faraway from 'home'. Archives
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