Driving out of Hong Kong’s Chep Lap Kok airport to the city you cross no less than five bridges connecting the island network. The most spectacular is the Tsing Ma suspension, over a kilometre long and held up by three tall pillars which grow to stern giants as you pass under their legs. It’s night but the meridian cycle has been disrupted. Nose pressed up to the backseat window, what seems like an endless wall of high-rise appears at the edge of the water and reflected in it. The glittering towers make me feel all at once that it is the old world I have come from and my arrival is to the future. A thought in the gut about the labourers of these scrapers: how many built them and how many died during? In wonder and fear of the accelerationist gloss of the city at night-time.
Looking on Google Maps now I find that the vertiginous development could have been Yat Tung Estate (population 37,000), or ‘Le Bleu Deux, Coastal Skyline’, or ‘The Visionary’. In the daylight street views the mountains are jade green and make the towers look smaller, like air-dropped impositions on to ancient terrain. A line from artist Chooc Ly Tan: Disobey to the dance of Time!
Onwards we wind past crane dragons and shipping containers on the port, around raised road networks with views onto the high-sheen malls of Central and the floodlit racetrack of Happy Valley, before climbing the coastal road to Deep Water Bay.
From overcast Berlin I was refreshed just to hear this name – so lush-sounding, I imagined diving straight in it. Searching for Deep Water Bay online the first article I came to was one describing it as the richest neighbourhood per capita in. the. world. I scanned forward to the mansions of movie moguls and casino gangsters turned real estate developers. Another kind of vertigo before I had even left my desk, along with the all-too familiar apprehension that comes before visiting my family’s other side.
Any first feeling upon entering a foreign place, if it smells like exoticism or romanticism, should be kept in check. The first smell of place as I leave the sliding doors of departures is a smell I remember from my last visit as a child, at the cusp of the British–Chinese handover, more than I will remember any sight. The smell is months of heat and an abundance of water, evaporating off tarmac and among the vegetation of ravine forests and roadsides, coaxing the scent out of pink orchid trees, and all edged with petrol. The colonial botanists catalogued many indigenous plants and, like the roads, handed them names. Impatiens hongkongensis Gery-Wilson, Tutcher’s Maple, Dunn’s Star Anise, the damp-loving yellow-budded Hong Kong Balsam. The territory’s name comes from earlier dynasties, when the resin of the fragrant Heung tree (Hong 香) was used to make incense products exported from the harbour (Kong 港) to Southeast Asia and Arabia. The trees remember all that happened in between but the air still smells good.
On the coastal path running between Deep Water and Repulse Bay, I notice red cotton-like flowers, a black stork, long tendrils of tree trunks hanging down the banks. An attendant line of boats – leisure, rather than fishing – and other islands across the water, misty but close. Because I am new here, I also notice how much space the dog-walking business expats take up on the path – long leashes or none at all, big dogs roaming – so that oncoming joggers or workers (junk collectors, service staff) have to skip aside or stop to make way.
The beaches are more spacious and, despite the area’s real-estate prices, for everyone. Those I am walking with (white) express distaste that the teenagers (Filipino or Malay) are sitting drinking from beer bottles at 8 a.m., at the end rather than the beginning of a day. I have already clocked the group in terms of vicarious pleasure: they must have watched the sun rise, warm with the afterglow of a good night and the promise of sleep soon. Alcohol surely can’t be allowed on this beach, the adults say to each other – but neither strictly are their dogs. They admit to remembering doing similar during their youth, but an inherited feeling of the right to space overrides any generosity of perspective.
Above the beach is a built-in BBQ and seating area that the Filipino community uses for weekend and holiday grilling and karaoke. When I pass one afternoon with my sister, a trio of girls about her age share a golden mic at the corner of a table loaded with charred chicken and sheaths of corn. She tells me that when she first moved here she was briefly excited about the prospect of al fresco karaoke, before realising that it wasn’t for her. “Not for expats, you mean?” I ask, and she nods regretfully, now up-to-date with the unwritten divisions of social space that mean that communities live in parallel, intersecting mainly on the grounds of labour. The city contains several cities, with people organised on top of one another, and everything happens at once.
“The city remains a site of futurisms for those outside. Yet for those who live and work here, the imagination of a future feels impossible”, wrote Hong Kong-based critic Hera Chan in a social media post around the lunar new year. Instead, the metabolism of a present-living work culture, preoccupied with productivity and seizing the moment, or simply getting by. This myopia of the Now is relatable from the point of view of the old modernist metropoles, too. In addition to the pace of hypercapitalism and the suction of phone screens, the inability to project further ahead here has to do with the territory’s deadline for total assimilation into the Chinese regime. This particular impasse induces both anxiety and activism among many Hong Kongers, as they approach the halfway point of a fifty-year timeline from British Imperial rule to Chinese: the transition period of the “one country, two systems” principle, which designated that Hong Kong’s capitalist administration would remain separate from the policies of the Communist Party of China until 2047. China has already silenced critical voices in Hong Kong, a background threat that is at odds with the whirlwind of sinofuturism projected by outsiders. S. describes the anticipation of daily living to me as always holding one’s breath, or trying to catch it.
Back on the bay, a temple to Tin Hau, the Taoist goddess of the sea, who is something of the region’s patron saint, frames a view on to the deep-breathing ocean. I light a stick of incense and photograph the shrine on the shore, send it into the scentless image bank of memory-card time.