I recently moved apartments. Just apartments - I didn't even move out of Hong Kong - fairly unremarkable as 14% of Americans move each year, skewing much higher for people in their 20s. It was my first move in three full years, all happily spent in a north-facing 27th floor flat in Prince Edward.
Bodies of water divide a lot of places. In fact, almost every city I've ever lived in has had great cultural divides between the inhabitants of major areas separated by a body of water. There's Boston and Cambridge, Washington DC and Arlington, Manhattan and Brooklyn, North and South Dublin. Even when barges and trolleys are replaced by bridges and underground subways and these areas become functionally convenient neighbors, old geographic barriers are erased much more gradually.
The gap between Kowloon and Hong Kong island is greater than any other I've experienced, at least in the realm of the expat. Locals might not see quite the same gap. There is a stretch from Soho to Causeway Bay that contains enough international conveniences for an expat to need never leave. It's pretty amazing how many people never leave Hong Kong island the associated dumb conversations I've had with such people. "Where do you live?" "Prince Edward." "Is that in Hong Kong?" Or the time my friend was asked the same question. "Hung Hom." "Oh...is that near the airport?" People seem to assume that I have to catch the Star Ferry back home, as if the MTR hadn't been invented yet. I'd tell people oh I'm just one station north of Mong Kok, still at the intersection of the Tsuen Wan line and the Kwun Tong line, and people would nod along to unfamiliar words as if I was explaining string theory.
I get it though. A lot of people come here from first world countries with no background in Chinese culture. They come because Hong Kong is one of those major world cities with everything to offer in jobs, food, culture and cosmopolitan individuals who can compare Hong Kong to cities like London, Paris, New York, Shanghai and Singapore. They're not here to discover their roots, not to engage with locals who compare Hong Kong to places like Zhongshan, Shunde and Shenzhen. They have plenty to do with their lives without trying to dive into local culture. Hong Kong island is also where I started off, where all of my aunts and uncles live, and still where I spent most of my party nights during the three years in Kowloon. For people who's jobs are in Central, who earn enough to survive a night of fine dining at the Shangri-La, it doesn't really make any sense to look off the island. In a different but extremely probable alternate life, I could have begun and ended my Hong Kong experience as an islander.
But circumstances saw otherwise. My engineering company happened to be based in Kowloon Tong, 30 minutes from Central. With my starting salary it made sense to look for housing up in the New Territories such as Sha Tin. I compromised and found a great place in Prince Edward. And once there, I explored like I've explored everywhere I've ever lived. I entered little tea restaurants with questionable hygiene, with terrible toilets, with no English menus and no complimentary napkins. Sometimes I felt out of place, like I did in a West Roxbury barbershop, or in an African restaurant near Howard University, or 3am in a Beijing Xinjiang establishment watching the World Cup. And like always, I took these uncomfortable terrors and turned them into experience and worldliness. And Prince Edward offered me so much of that.
Here I'll wax poetically of my treasure filled neighborhood. It'll start with the food, the myriad tea restaurants, the HK style breakfast cafes, the bakeries. One of my favorite streets hosted quality Japanese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese restaurants. There was the congee place where a bowl went from $14 to $19 over the course of my stay, the Guizhou potato noodles place that I didn't go to enough, that that hole in the wall dirt-cheap spicy noodle shop, where 1 out of 10 spiciest was more than I could handle. There was the Michelin rated dim sum place with a 40 minute wait, and the little homemade dim sum place a street over if you didn't want to wait. There were all those bars with bucket beer deals, dice rattling locals and a karaoke machine without long queues. There was that seamstress who operated at the edge of a tiny alleyway and a cobbler and keycutter doing likewise. There were shopping malls, hardware stores, haircuts, gyms, baby clothes stores, tailors, currency exchange, eyeglasses stores, doctors, furniture and appliance stores, toy stores, jade stores, pharmacies, Chinese pharmacies, traditional tea dispensaries, mechanics, tiles stores, police station, pet stores....I mean what was not within a 10 minute walk from my place? I'm at a loss to come up with real examples.
But I use the past tense because I don't go to those now because I live island side. When I moved over, I truly felt a subtle paradigm shift in my life. Standing in the lobby of my new apartment building, with a doorman, ornamental chairs and chandelier, I felt present in a new, more respected part of society. True, my old apartment building had a doorman and my rent in Kennedy Town was actually decreasing. But I was surrounded by people who walked around with that island side gait, with lots of English speakers and suits in the crowd. In Mong Kok I often felt like a peculiar outsider - here I felt among peers, with plenty of other CBC or ABCs working for international companies. In Mong Kok I had gotten into interesting conversations with people who lived very different lives from me, from whom I learned much but who seemed to never understand me. Here I felt like I had a real chance to make lasting friends based on mutual respect. I was face to face with a physical embodiment of 'class' and all its associations. I went out and bought a delicious flat white and a burger that could have been made in Wisey's.
And then I tried to get into town on a Saturday morning. The taxi stand increased at a faster rate than taxis could arrive, the buses were congested and the tram was sooooo sloooooow. It took me 20 minutes to get to central on a good day, 30 stressful ones on a bad day. Prince Edward-Central had been 25 consistently. In fact, basically everywhere I ever wanted to go became less convenient. I was confused why anyone would want to live there at all before the MTR arrived. It's so damn inconvenient. Sure some people appreciate the quiet and the restaurants are nice....but man these buses lower the quality of my life. Why do so many well to do expats choose to live in Kennedy Town and so few in Prince Edward?
There are lots of reasons, but the crucial one is that a lot of these people would not find the same enjoyment in the nooks and establishments I just waxed so heavily on. And while it's understandable, it's also pretty sad. There's no right or wrong, no judgement here, just a tear shed for the platitudes of joy in our lives made inaccessible by fear, ignorance or habit.
Bodies of water divide a lot of places. In fact, almost every city I've ever lived in has had great cultural divides between the inhabitants of major areas separated by a body of water. There's Boston and Cambridge, Washington DC and Arlington, Manhattan and Brooklyn, North and South Dublin. Even when barges and trolleys are replaced by bridges and underground subways and these areas become functionally convenient neighbors, old geographic barriers are erased much more gradually.
The gap between Kowloon and Hong Kong island is greater than any other I've experienced, at least in the realm of the expat. Locals might not see quite the same gap. There is a stretch from Soho to Causeway Bay that contains enough international conveniences for an expat to need never leave. It's pretty amazing how many people never leave Hong Kong island the associated dumb conversations I've had with such people. "Where do you live?" "Prince Edward." "Is that in Hong Kong?" Or the time my friend was asked the same question. "Hung Hom." "Oh...is that near the airport?" People seem to assume that I have to catch the Star Ferry back home, as if the MTR hadn't been invented yet. I'd tell people oh I'm just one station north of Mong Kok, still at the intersection of the Tsuen Wan line and the Kwun Tong line, and people would nod along to unfamiliar words as if I was explaining string theory.
I get it though. A lot of people come here from first world countries with no background in Chinese culture. They come because Hong Kong is one of those major world cities with everything to offer in jobs, food, culture and cosmopolitan individuals who can compare Hong Kong to cities like London, Paris, New York, Shanghai and Singapore. They're not here to discover their roots, not to engage with locals who compare Hong Kong to places like Zhongshan, Shunde and Shenzhen. They have plenty to do with their lives without trying to dive into local culture. Hong Kong island is also where I started off, where all of my aunts and uncles live, and still where I spent most of my party nights during the three years in Kowloon. For people who's jobs are in Central, who earn enough to survive a night of fine dining at the Shangri-La, it doesn't really make any sense to look off the island. In a different but extremely probable alternate life, I could have begun and ended my Hong Kong experience as an islander.
But circumstances saw otherwise. My engineering company happened to be based in Kowloon Tong, 30 minutes from Central. With my starting salary it made sense to look for housing up in the New Territories such as Sha Tin. I compromised and found a great place in Prince Edward. And once there, I explored like I've explored everywhere I've ever lived. I entered little tea restaurants with questionable hygiene, with terrible toilets, with no English menus and no complimentary napkins. Sometimes I felt out of place, like I did in a West Roxbury barbershop, or in an African restaurant near Howard University, or 3am in a Beijing Xinjiang establishment watching the World Cup. And like always, I took these uncomfortable terrors and turned them into experience and worldliness. And Prince Edward offered me so much of that.
Here I'll wax poetically of my treasure filled neighborhood. It'll start with the food, the myriad tea restaurants, the HK style breakfast cafes, the bakeries. One of my favorite streets hosted quality Japanese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese restaurants. There was the congee place where a bowl went from $14 to $19 over the course of my stay, the Guizhou potato noodles place that I didn't go to enough, that that hole in the wall dirt-cheap spicy noodle shop, where 1 out of 10 spiciest was more than I could handle. There was the Michelin rated dim sum place with a 40 minute wait, and the little homemade dim sum place a street over if you didn't want to wait. There were all those bars with bucket beer deals, dice rattling locals and a karaoke machine without long queues. There was that seamstress who operated at the edge of a tiny alleyway and a cobbler and keycutter doing likewise. There were shopping malls, hardware stores, haircuts, gyms, baby clothes stores, tailors, currency exchange, eyeglasses stores, doctors, furniture and appliance stores, toy stores, jade stores, pharmacies, Chinese pharmacies, traditional tea dispensaries, mechanics, tiles stores, police station, pet stores....I mean what was not within a 10 minute walk from my place? I'm at a loss to come up with real examples.
But I use the past tense because I don't go to those now because I live island side. When I moved over, I truly felt a subtle paradigm shift in my life. Standing in the lobby of my new apartment building, with a doorman, ornamental chairs and chandelier, I felt present in a new, more respected part of society. True, my old apartment building had a doorman and my rent in Kennedy Town was actually decreasing. But I was surrounded by people who walked around with that island side gait, with lots of English speakers and suits in the crowd. In Mong Kok I often felt like a peculiar outsider - here I felt among peers, with plenty of other CBC or ABCs working for international companies. In Mong Kok I had gotten into interesting conversations with people who lived very different lives from me, from whom I learned much but who seemed to never understand me. Here I felt like I had a real chance to make lasting friends based on mutual respect. I was face to face with a physical embodiment of 'class' and all its associations. I went out and bought a delicious flat white and a burger that could have been made in Wisey's.And then I tried to get into town on a Saturday morning. The taxi stand increased at a faster rate than taxis could arrive, the buses were congested and the tram was sooooo sloooooow. It took me 20 minutes to get to central on a good day, 30 stressful ones on a bad day. Prince Edward-Central had been 25 consistently. In fact, basically everywhere I ever wanted to go became less convenient. I was confused why anyone would want to live there at all before the MTR arrived. It's so damn inconvenient. Sure some people appreciate the quiet and the restaurants are nice....but man these buses lower the quality of my life. Why do so many well to do expats choose to live in Kennedy Town and so few in Prince Edward?
There are lots of reasons, but the crucial one is that a lot of these people would not find the same enjoyment in the nooks and establishments I just waxed so heavily on. And while it's understandable, it's also pretty sad. There's no right or wrong, no judgement here, just a tear shed for the platitudes of joy in our lives made inaccessible by fear, ignorance or habit.
2 comments:
Loved your description of your Prince Edward neighborhood. You captured the "messy vitality" of a vibrant urban ecosystem. This was the urban milieu that I grew up in, closer to Kowloon City and the old Kai Tak airport. It is a milieu of ordinary people making an ordinary living, all managing to survive by finding their own niche in society and helping each other out, in a form of social symbiosis. There is no class here. Only reality: the reality of survival.
"I took these uncomfortable terrors and turned them into experience and worldliness."
Beautiful Cal! I can confirm from my own experience how wonderful that process is, and how tough (in the best way) it leaves you. Good luck out there.
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