A few thoughts before leaving for Beijing…

A picture by the fountain

On Friday, I went to Tsuen Wan with Auntie Chick in order to visit the place where I grew up in Hong Kong “Lok Yurn Fa Yuen”. I remember this picture I had taken in front of the water fountain at the centre of the apartment complex when I was about four; it must have been taken after school on a birthday party day because I was wearing my school uniform, with a birthday hat on my head and goodie bag in hand. The moment I stepped into the fountain area, 18 years later, I remembered that picture and vaguely remember walking home, holding my sister’s hand down that same path.


Ummm so I think this was the actual fountain...but I forgot to take a picture of myself with it LOL

I don’t have very many memories from my time in Hong Kong. There is me jumping on my parent’s bed with my brother at home, the only air conditioned room. There’s me crying because my siblings cheated me out of some toy. There’s me asking my sister’s piano teacher if I could play piano, (I actually sat on the bench) and her smiling and telling me that my four year old fingers were still a little too small. I remember the sight of my mother’s back (because she was always leaving) and the hand of my Pilipino nanny Sarah (who I didn’t like because I wanted mommy) as we walked through the streets with vendors selling all sorts of trinkets to and from school. I remember the night before leaving for Canada, going out to dinner with my mom’s parents at a restaurant, and walking back through streets selling all sorts of delicacies like live snakes.

This was the apartment where I lived, no memories of the exterior.

Coming back to where I came from (literally), is a bit of a surreal experience. It’s been a week now in Hong Kong and I am getting used to the weather and the hustle and bustle (getting used to it, not necessary preferring it) and I wonder how life would have turned out if 1997 didn’t happen (see how important politics is!). I can imagine more the lives of my parents before they had me (as children we never think of our parents as people and not our parents). What a feat moving to Canada really is, how different and distant are the lands from each other. Leaving Vancouver to go to grad school in Toronto is hard enough for me already; I will complain about getting to go home only once every four months while I now realize, my parents have never gone back to their “home” in Hong Kong in 18 years. My sister went back for the first time in the fall of 2006 and I am second. There are political reasons (haha) of course, with my dad’s paranoia about grandpa’s past as a KMT official (the governor of Suzhou! Crazy eh?) and I think they are planning the trip soon. But still. I think of those European pioneers that journeyed for months on a ship from Europe to North America in search for a better life and perhaps, gold. My parents were pioneers too.

About a man

Journalistic photographers often face the dilemmas of the ethnics of photographing distressing scenes such as people in pain, poverty or death. On the one hand, photographing is a medium that helps to convey the message to the world, but on the other hand, one feels like they are exploiting their subject. As an aspiring photographer, I run into this dilemma every time I take a photograph of a street person, a vendor or a building. As a thinker, I run into similar issues. Here I am, I think think think about the social condition of Hong Kong (and every other place I will visit in the next two months) and there is a helplessness and uselessness of just thinking and not actually doing anything but sightseeing, shopping and eating. I am going to study to be a social planner and do all sorts of things, one part of my brain says, but my heart still pounds and bleeds. And so I write and hope that these few words will remind an older “social planner” me and those around me, what life is really all about. Please Anna, never forget and don't ever stop bleeding. There are sights that should never exist.

So I saw the same man again today laying face down on Fa Yuen Street in Mong Kok, which is one of those little pedestrian streets with three rows of vendors with a traffic of thousands of people daily. He’s got a wheelchair and he lies face down on the pavement on top of a blanket, wearing only shorts. The only noises he makes comes from his hand, where he bangs his tin cup every few seconds. His black shorts cover the only parts of his legs, both legs have been amputed from the knee down. I don’t know much about amputations but the scar looks horrendous (can these scars look nice, I don’t know), kind of like a bow except with skin.

There are a million reasons of how this man arrived at his present state. He could have been one of those people who gambled his life away or as innocent as a person who just fell into hard times. Maybe he’s a war veteran or someone who is being used as a bait to get money for sympathy (think Cambodia). I don’t know, only God knows but damn I can’t get the image out of my head. In a city like Hong Kong (as in every city but in varying degrees and dimensions), a mix of merit and hereditary separates the rich and the poor. I accept that, but I believe that we can make this gap more narrow and tip the scales a little bit more to be a compassionate society. This is why I think Plato and the other Greek philosophers are so important – meritocracy is such an quintessential value in our society. But if we only give others what they deserve, as Shakespeare writes in Hamlet, than “who will escape a whipping?”

“There’s gotta be more to life than chasing down every temporary high to satisfy me” – Stacy Orricio.



And to end off on a completely different random note...HK Disneyland! Just because this is my coolest jumping picture to date. Another walk down memory lane, I remember going to LA Disneyland when I was 8 with my auntie and cousin