Hong Kong Story

…This time around, Hong Kong is clicking surprisingly well. Maybe it’s because I know that I’ll be leaving, and I don’t feel so invested and dismayed by the city’s shortcomings. Maybe my skin has thickened a bit and the things that rubbed me the wrong way now take a back seat and I can focus on some of the neatness in the city. And I’m finding a lot of it in Phase 1, Kwun Tong Industrial Center, where Shawn’s lab is. It’s a giant concrete industrial building in a giant concrete industrial area in Kowloon, and it’s a fractal microcosm of life. Friday night, Shawn and I were working late, and we took a dinner break around ten, and when we got back we took the elevator back up to the eighth floor, where the lab is, and there was a guy in the elevator about our age, carrying an INSANE amount of fireworks. I asked him in my stammering Cantonese what he was up to, and he said that he was headed up to the roof to shoot them off with some friends, and we could come. We popped back into the lab to drop off our bags and then sprinted up to the roof.
Kwun Tong Industrial Center is an old, crumbling building, dwarfed by the endless modern high rises that surround it, making their way like stoic soldiers up into the mountains that border Kowloon. The roof has one of the most dramatic views I’ve ever seen–it’s like a mix of bladerunner and 1984 and every other imaginable mix of a dramatic futuristic megacity and distopic future. The kleig lights blast down from the skyscrapers and construction cranes, lighting everything up like it’s noon, and even at midnight, the highway and sidewalks and trains below are in constant, dizzying motion.
And it’s onto this roof we climb in search of twenty-somethings with armfuls of high explosives. In the distance, on the other side of the roof, we vaguely see a couple people moving, so we head over there carrying the couple cans of beer we grabbed from the lab fridge. The roof is covered with rubble, abandoned machinery and construction bamboo, so it takes us a while to pick our way across. We climb over the last mossy concrete wall and find ourselves face to face with fifteen men wielding swords. There are shouts and a flurry of motion and more men rush out from the sidelines with bamboo, and they start fighting, sword on bamboo, whirling and jumping and thrusting and shouting ancient commands under the relentless floodlights and 24/7 helicopters heading to shenzhen.
Suddenly, it’s like one of those scenes where a cowboy walks into a bar and the piano player jerks to a stop and everyone looks over at the door in sudden silence. All these guys notice us and everyone’s holding swords and staffs and staring at us. We’re holding cans of beer and feel a wee bit exposed. I manage to stammer in Cantonese, “Hi. We’re from the eighth floor. We’re inventors.”
This breaks the ice a bit, and they go on sparring and practicing (as we find out) kung fu with one another. They’re Luo Hun Kung Fu practitioners, which I happen to have heard of only because the Luo Hun fighting monks are vegetarian, and it’s the only friggin vegetarian dish that you can order in any hong kong restaurant without a long negotiation, so we get to talking about food and fighting and one of the guys runs around us shadowboxing and thrusting his fists millimeters from our noses while shouting fiercely and we generally have ourselves a good old time.
And it’s the thing that I’m tasting about Hong Kong. At the street level, everything is dominated by money and commerce, and the life retreats up into the skyscrapers and rooftops and backrooms where it’s hidden from view, and walking around the city, you’d swear that everything is about money and speed, because that’s all you see, but every now and then, when you least expect it, you catch a glimpse of something very human and deep-rooted in the city, that extends beyond the overwhelming glut of capitalism that’s barfing all over everything, and it’s that glimpse that gives me hope and makes me feel o.k. about Hong Kong. The more time I spend in the Industrial Center, the more glimpses I get of life tucked away into small corners, and the more I like it.