People

There are a lot of people in Hong Kong. They are not quiet people either and so Hong Kong is also a noisy place. Both aspects are in stark contrast to our usual life in rural Connecticut. Both are in many ways refreshing but I can imagine there will come a time when I crave for peace and quiet.

I walk to work everyday and vary my routes for interest and to discover as much as possible in the side streets of our neighborhood. Street life is so complex that there are often new things to be seen, even on streets that I have walked on many times before. The other day I was with Jacob and he noticed a movie theater that I had never seen before. (I have been talking with a colleague in the General Education Centre who is a film critic and he has promised to get me into Hong Kong Movies beyond Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan.) But the last half of my walk to work is along a walkway. It is about 20 feet wide, sometimes elevated above the roads and sometimes a tunnel, going under/over who knows what. It always appears to be crowded with people, going in both directions. Some of them are students/staff going to/from PolyU, but that probably represents a minority. The numbers are swelled by the fact that the walkway also connects to stops for buses that go through the tunnel to Hong Kong Island. But for the most part the destinations and purposes of all these people is unknown to me. But I have ample opportunities to observe.

There is a wide variety of ages. I actually see more elderly people in the streets closer to our apartment building. Sometimes they are by themselves, shuffling along or sitting on one of the benches, watching the world go by. Sometimes they are with a younger person who is playing the role of support or guide. Normally they are female, either a daughter or granddaughter or a paid helper, usually Filipino. I am told that older people do well here (I think Hong Kong has the second longest life expectancy in the world), as long as they have family. The other interesting category of people I see before I get to the walkways is children being escorted to school. They are wearing their neat school uniforms and walking hand-in-hand with an adult. It could be father or mother or, again, a Filipino helper. It has the look of a relaxed stroll, rather than the rush that you might expect in the United States. The pace of walking or the more relaxed life in general seems to allow interactions between the two of them, conversation, jokes, physical affection.

A variety of paces can be found in the walkways. Some people are ambling along, whereas others are moving much more quickly, intent on getting somewhere. Needless to say, I am in the latter category. Surprising to me, given the variations in speed and the fact that there appear to be no rules like pass on the left, there are no collisions and almost no physical contact. People have the skills to get extremely close to each other without actually touching. There is not much space to go around in Hong Kong and so people have learned to be comfortable with small amounts of personal space. Sometimes this is manifest in interesting ways. For example, I can be in the supermarket, perhaps 2 feet from the shelves, inspecting the merchandize. Local people will think nothing of occupying the space between me and the shelves, apparently oblivious to my presence. It would be thought of as extremely rude in the United States, but here the understanding of personal space is so small that clearly there was plenty of room. This understanding allows the migration of lots of people through the walkways with efficiency and lack of trauma.

Another aspect of the people that interests me is their dress. This is a big city and so dress is important. Elizabeth notices fashion much more than I do so you should go to her poisedforlife blog for more complete descriptions. I find myself noticing clothing quite often because it seems interesting. I am not just talking about short skirts on the younger women, although that is quite evident and it is almost always the women that are interesting. It might be the tops, with either cut or color or some combination of the two being striking. Or it might be the words written on the t-shirts, making statements that are not quite right, grammatically speaking. None of the phrases have stuck in my memory, but Hong Kong is famous for these t-shirts.