I went to Hong Kong this past weekend and witnessed people waiting in line and people obeying traffic laws. I saw efficiency everywhere from the metro design to the layout of buildings and restaurants. There were even more people and more crowds in Hong Kong than in Shenzhen, but the rivers of crowds moved seamlessly. I felt less need to push. I was free to just flow with the crowd.
The crowds were also filled with foreigners. I didn’t go a single place where my friends and I were the only foreign faces in the crowd. This meant no leering, no staring, and no pointing. I threw my self-consciousness away and soaked up every moment of anonymity with joy. Finally, I thought, freedom from my foreign face.
These two freedoms from chaos and conspicuousness had their price, however. With order comes rules, and at times I found myself frustrated with their abundance. Why do I have to wait until the light says I can walk when there are no cars coming? Why can’t I eat or drink on the metro? I missed the freedom to bend the rules in chaotic Shenzhen. Even conspicuousness has its benefits in Shenzhen. Conspicuousness sometimes brings privilege and ease. Our foreign faces bring us attention in Shenzhen, but they also bring us help. If we look lost, people notice. They also help us easily find each other in a crowd. We were no longer special, and therefore on our own.
Being on our own wasn’t so bad though. Order in the form of the extensive metro made Hong Kong easy enough to navigate, and Western comforts like air-conditioning, Western-style toilets, Starbuck’s on every corner, spacious department stores with Western sizes, and shops with bagels, scones, and sandwiches made up for any losses.
Most of our frustration was due to our own bad planning. It took us half the day on Saturday to actually begin our activities. We came with way too many people—there were 10 of us at one point. So, the first half was spent getting through customs, exchanging our RMB for Hong Kong dollars, meeting up with one of our friends who had forgotten her passport, and finding a hostel to stay in for the night. Finally by about 2:00 we were ready to sight see. Most of us, including myself, were immediately distracted by the abundance of shopping and headed to H&M in our excitement at finding Western sizes. The crowds, long dressing room lines, and the price of the clothing deterred me from buying anything, but a few of my friends managed some purchases.
Another annoying factor in our planning was the fact that only one of us had a Hong Kong cell phone SIM card. So we had no way of contacting one another if we got separated. This turned out to be a problem in the huge H&M store. We had set up a time to meet with our non-shopping friends at a certain metro stop, but the combo of shopping, crowds and our lack of knowledge about the city delayed our reunion. So, another wasted hour later we finally regrouped and headed to dinner and the outdoor markets.
The outdoor markets include rows and rows of outdoor stalls adjacent to jam packed neon lit streets. The neon lights were so bright it looked like day and gave the crowded streets a strange electric quality. People looked like 3-D computer projections with the brightness setting too high. After sauntering along the neon-lit stalls for an hour or so, we still hadn’t had our fill of the lights and headed towards the bay to watch the lighting of the skyscrapers, which begins every night at 8pm. The buildings across the incredible skyline light up in unison while symphonic tunes played over a loudspeaker near a huge courtyard lined with Hollywood boulevard style stars in the sidewalk overlooking the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront.
After we had our fill of lights, music, the skyline, and pictures in front of a Bruce Lee statue, we headed back to our hostel to change our clothes for a night on the town. Our friend Serena, who has lived in Hong Kong before, took us to a street filled with bars which were overflowing with foreigners. She took us to a great bar with live music that we recognized (yay, no more techno!). So, we happily danced the night away.
The next morning we headed to a temple to “shake sticks,” as Serena calls it, and get our fortune’s told. You take a cup filled with flat bamboo sticks that are each numbered. Then you kneel on a mat in front of an altar, along with the fifty other people lined up in front of the altar, and think hard about a question you would like to ask the soothsayer while shaking the cup until a single stick falls out. The number on your stick is the key to your fortune. Once you have your number you return the sticks and head to one of the hundreds of booths with soothsayers sitting behind them.
We finally decided to stop at a booth with a cute old lady sitting behind it. We soon found out she had been fortune telling for 60 years. She pointed to an old photograph of her mother and grandmother sitting at a table on the street. They had also both been fortune tellers, and the bench sitting near her booth was the same one in the photograph that her mother and grandmother’s customers use to sit on while getting their fortune’s told. Serena served as our translator, and one by one we told the old lady our numbers and our questions.
My number: 78
My question: Will I/Should I work in China next year or will I/should I go home to America?
Her Interpretation: You are very stressed and worried. You need to relax, travel with your friends, and go with the flow (Some story about Confucius was told here but it was lost in translation).
Her Prediction: You will never make a lot of money, but you will be happy.
Great, I thought, she unfortunately confirmed what I already knew. I was secretly hoping she would give me an answer like you will stay in China and make a great fortune or you will go home next year and find happiness. Instead she had to be so realistic and inconclusive. Keep in mind that the other three girls who got their fortune’s read asked similar questions, and she didn’t tell them they were stressed or would never make much money. Oh well, at least she didn’t say I would be poor and unhappy. It could be worse.
With our fortunes read, we felt it was time to go back to Shenzhen—back to the chaos of China, back home. It’s funny to think that Shenzhen feels so much more like home than such a Westernized place like Hong Kong, but it is true. I’ve grown accustomed to the chaos, the inefficiency, the randomness that is Shenzhen. It gets on my nerves at times, but I am glad that I live in Shenzhen and not in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is too normal, too ordered, too much like home. I wanted something different, something to make me stronger, something that would force me to understand another culture, and Shenzhen provides those needs. Shenzhen is China. Hong Kong is something else.
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