Hong Kong for the Holidays
Looking for a last supper with the expats leaving the city
A friend of mine who has lived in Hong Kong for just over a decade describes the city as a cluster of variously intact, utterly incongruous, distinct and separate worlds. A honeycomb matrix of lives and beliefs and values that exist next to one another but remain absolutely apart: from the country club crowd to the visiting mainlanders, the protesting youth and the Western-facing business set — all of these lives, these stories bubbling over in a proliferating multiverse of sorts around Victoria harbor.
In my short visit, just a week in town, I know that I cannot hope to see beyond the surfaces of these and any other bubble-worlds in town. I recognize that, even pressing my face to their iridescent surfaces, I will likely see little more than my own reflection, my projections, rather than any sort of profound truth within. But as I made my approach, in mid-December of 2022, holiday season, I had the sense that I was arriving for a sort of last supper in Hong Kong. The end of days for an open, Western-friendly port town and freewheeling money hub. Stories of expats and business interests fleeing (and more threatening to flee) in the face of increasing control from the mainland — and, with it, an erosion of human rights protections, and a growing autocracy — seemed to suggest Hong Kong was at an inflection point.