To Sham Shui Po
This story was written in my head a long time ago, ever since I moved to Hong Kong, for the second time, in 2015. Before that, I had been living in Beijing for eight years. While working on the first draft of this novel, many people asked me if it was going to be an autobiography. It was difficult to say: the integrity of our being, our knowledge, as well as our creativity are the result of the experiences we have lived, the people we have met, the decisions we have made, and our dreams (which we must not forget either).
It is possible that the people who know of my adventures are, to a greater or lesser extent, going to enjoy trying to identify which parts of the novel are close to the truth of my life and which are a product of my imagination. I encourage you to play along. Besides, whether or not this is an autobiography is not important; it is a fictional story that takes place in what is, to my mind, one of the most magical neighbourhoods in Hong Kong: Sham Shui Po.
It is true that I lived in that area during my second stay in this Asian city. I was worried that progress might change it soon, even destroy it. Though that may seem far-fetched, it’s actually very possible. Rapid development due to globalisation is one of the greatest tragedies of our age. I decided to freeze in time the life on the streets of Sham Shui Po with this story. I used my imagination and creativity to express different world views that coexist in Hong Kong.
I spent many nights in apartment 10B of Nam Fung Mansion (The Mansion South of Maple Street, in English) writing notes and reflections on the neighbourhood. Unconsciously, I was already working on a story that wouldn’t fully take form until I made the difficult decision to return to Europe after having lived in Hong Kong and Beijing for over a decade.
During that crucial period of my life in Hong Kong, there was love, heartache, a lot of change and a single constant: Sham Shui Po and its people. By simply participating in the day-to-day life of this community, I made important decisions. My community was probably not aware of how much our conversations had an impact on my life. As I lived there, I turned thirty. I grew as a woman, and I became an adult. As I grew and my life changed, so did the narrator’s story.
My neighbors in Sham Shui Po welcomed me even though I was a foreigner, I did not speak their language perfectly and my cultural roots were completely different. We didn’t care. Kindness was the bond that united us from day one and for a very simple reason: every human being lives with the same ambitions, joys and concerns.
That’s the irony of life: it can be extremely simple and complex but the foundations are the same for everyone. What makes us different — and this is the beauty of our diverse humanity — is the way we deal with the great unknown of what it is to live.
I made the decision to move to Asia at the age of twenty-one, with only a few months left to finish my bachelor’s degree in college. A few weeks before catching the first intercontinental flight of my life, I was given some wise advice: keep your eyes wide open. I followed this strictly. I allowed everything to surround me and to take over me. But during my first few years in China, my young gaze made a mistake: it did not seem very willing to let go of the Western veil that filtered my interaction with this new environment. Those things that did not make sense to me at the time, my brain stored away as both strange and exciting. I resisted the intoxicating beauty that surrounded me perhaps out of the unconscious fear of embarking on a totally unpredictable and irreversible initiation journey.
It was thanks to the affection of the local people I encountered that I began to interact with the environment and understand Asia in a different way. Western beliefs, taught and rigidly held as true and reasonable, had to be unlearnt with great effort on my part.
I remember the feeling of frustration during my first Chinese lessons. None of that devilish-sounding language made sense. Until one day, suddenly, the words and the beautiful Chinese characters began to take on a meaning of their own. The language started to flow through my mind in a structured and spontaneous way. When that happened, my uber patient Chinese teacher shared with me something very beautiful: “You have now entered the room of Chinese.” As she explained, this meant that my Western mind had stopped resisting pre-established structures of thought and had given itself permission to flow to a new way of communicating ideas. She was absolutely right.
Over time, that semiotic shift also affected the construction of my identity. Giving a clear answer to the question “where are you from?” became very complex. Access to other cultures and ways of thinking shaped my identity, contributing to creating a more sophisticated version of my being. It humbled me and taught me never to take anything for granted.
Western worldviews tend to be communicated almost as hegemonic. In the collective consciousness, its narratives, lifestyles and norms are forward-looking, a result of progress and a more civilized world. Mysticism and traditional lifestyles have no place in a modern, post-industrial society.”
The more we expose ourselves to the world and other ways of living, the more aware we are that we don’t know anything. It is my belief, that human beings would have a better chance of a full life if they surround themselves with good people who could help them navigate the uncertainty of the future and the decisions that they make along the way.
I got drunk on Asia. I let its people teach me other points of view, that the world could be interpreted in many different ways. I didn’t keep anything back. I felt that life had given me such a special privilege that there was no room for caution. I gave myself over to my heart and intuition and stopped rushing to get to a specific place in life. I began to wonder if in the West, the idea of happiness had become a commodity, born out of material desires and the need to conform, and based mainly on external factors that we labeled as guarantors of happiness. What was the real key to success in life?
If there was one thing that the people I met in Asia had taught me, it was that they understood happiness as a realization that started from within. That focus on the present was for many of my interlocutors the key to being able to live in the now and react with less suffering to the constant change around them.
Such wisdom is evident in the people of Sham Shui Po, a neighborhood of entrepreneurs. It should be noted that although they do not work from co-working spaces, or run startups, this neighborhood is mainly made up of local street-level establishments run by families who make their businesses their livelihoods and the foundations of their dreams and ambitions, without enjoying the stability of an employer or a guaranteed salary at the end of the month. Their financial security is predicated solely on the belief that their daily efforts will pay off and that these businesses will be the vehicle on which to follow the path of life during these years of dramatic historical change in Hong Kong.
However, the future remains unknown for this city that has been chosen by many as an exclusive free port from which to materialize dreams and visions for the future. In the same way as the main character of this story, many of the inhabitants of this hyper dense metropolis built their identity as immigrants at the same time that Hong Kong was (and still is) trying to find itself. The identity of the people of Hong Kong has been growing during constant waves of immigration and shifting leaderships right up to the present day and now the plurality and diversity of voices characteristic of Hong Kong is at risk of fading away.
Since Beijing took control of the territory after the British withdrawal in 1997, uncertainty has weighed on Hong Kong. Within months of completing this manuscript, in June 2020, the Chinese Communist Party passed a national security law that destroyed the status quo that for decades had made Hong Kong a place of freedom and opportunity.
The characters of Sham Shui Po featured in this book are fictional but their stories are inspired by some of the people, conversations, and points of view that resonated with me during my stay.
This story also wants to pay tribute to the qualities shared by all my dear Sham Shui Po neighbors, whom I miss so much: brave, honest, unique, natural, sensitive, passionate, genuine, resilient, self-confident, focused, humble, optimistic, loyal, considerate, kind, loving and free from prejudice.
Originally published at https://www.irismir.net on December 17, 2020.
