04: my visit to hong kong

a montage of emotions, thoughts and experiences throughout my trip back

coming back to hong kong always brings up a wave of confusing emotions. life here is filled with contradictions, cognitive dissonances, feelings of deep affection and resentment at the same time. every visit feels like at an attempt at reconciliation between the past and the future. i feel too young and too old, part of the zeitgeist and a bystander. this place knows my truest, most authentic self and also all of my attempts at elaborate masquerades.

hong kong is the closest thing i have to a hometown. i moved here when i was six years old. i know the streets like the back of my hand, but being an ethnic minority in such a homogenous society made it such that i never felt truly a part of the culture. i walk down roads i’ve walked down thousands of times before all while feeling like an outsider, like an unwelcome guest. some of this discomfort is undoubtedly my own personal baggage, my individual neuroses convincing me that everyone is silently judging my every move. but sometimes these neuroses are correct — an old chinese woman wordlessly stands up and moves to the other side of the carriage when i sit down next to her in the train. the shopkeeper refuses service when i come in trying to purchase some face wash. i can never tell how much of it is in my head. perhaps the old woman was simply sick of sitting? maybe the shopkeeper had a bad day? these streets are so familiar and yet so alienating.

Kings Road - I spent most of my teenage years here.

when i come back i also have the rare chance to see my friends who are usually scattered all across the world. these are my bosom friends. going through the trials of adolescence together means that there will always be familiarity between us that will never go away. but i still experience a strange estrangement sometimes; i mourn the people we used to be, the lives we used to share. our usual hangouts are now peppered with stories of our times in different countries. a friend dives into a detailed analysis on clubbing culture in hk as compared to london. another friend laments the lack of good jazz clubs here as compared to japan. another shares a triumphant story about getting her drivers license in ireland while we’re out shopping for earrings. nicole and i sit in Shake Shack and split an order of cheese fries. i suddenly flash back to us sitting in the same seats 4 years ago, when she was worried about her chances of admission to a university that she just graduated from in 2024. there’s a peculiarity in watching your friends metamorphose while doing all the things we’ve done together countless times.

i feel like i’m stuck in a temporal limbo here — the routines of 17-year-old me, but the responsibilities of 21 year old me. i wake up, eat the same homemade breakfast my mom made for me every day from elementary school up until graduation. 21 year old Ananya back in Vancouver does not have the patience to make it and is also too focused on her protein intake to have dosa every morning, but i allow myself on vacation. i head to the library where i spent the bulk of my highschool afternoons, opening up airtable instead of google classroom (rip). i walk through victoria park, listening to my 2024 summer playlist. i remember the one time in april 2021 when i went for a nighttime run, coincidentally at the exact same time that my friends were walking through the park on their way home from a club dinner. they laughed and cheered me on, running alongside me for a couple of minutes. 17-year-old ananya was secretly very annoyed because she wanted the alone time, but 21-year-old ananya just misses seeing them all together without having to consider time differences or flight calculations.

me at the library very busy with the task of Providing Shareholder Value

hong kong exemplifies all of the contradictions i feel within the city itself. it contains so many opposing pieces of scenery all at once. it has the metropolis - going into the causeway bay shopping district at night makes you forget about whether its day or nighttime, because of how bright the billboards are. it’s got the tranquility of the oceans too — there are 42 beaches in Hong Kong, 12 on Hong Kong Island alone. then you have the mountains. there are countless hiking trails in hong kong, endless paths to explore.

hong kong literally has it all. the hustle and bustle of the crowds makes it so that you never truly feel alone— you could leave the house at any time of day and see people, the MTR is still running at 3am when you’re on your way home from the bars. simultaneously, there are pockets of deep solitude when you seek them out. if you take a 20 minute ferry to lamma island, the beaches are relatively deserted. my last summer before heading to vancouver for university, me and my friends lit a bonfire, brought a guitar and some alcohol and stayed up all night, watching the sun rise together. it felt like nobody in the world existed except us.

hong kong’s culture seems paradoxical as well. the infrastructure is top-notch — the MTR system is punctual to the half-minute, affordable, and reliable. the city bus app allows for tracking of buses with real-time location and distance tracking down to the hundredth metre. i know i have to start running to catch the bus home if it’s less than 0.9km away and i’m still at the schoolgates. it’s also incredibly safe — it’s ranked as sixth in the safety index among 142 countries and regions in the world. ubering home is always a question of convenience as opposed to safety here. i could leave the house at any time and go anywhere i wanted without worry; there are no sketchy parts of the city. i cherish my nighttime runs here, a luxury i do not have when im back in vancouver. and yet the culture is so unfriendly. when my mom visited me and my brother for the first time, she was amazed that strangers in vancouver smile at each other on the street. when you step into a cha caan teng (hong kong cafe), they’re cramped and full to the brim, every hour is rush hour. the service staff simply do not have enough time to ask you how your day went. people scoff at you if you’re walking too slow on the streets. the fact that such a brash, unforgiving culture is also so socially cohesive and streamlined is sometimes astounding to me. 

i lost 20iq points in the following few hours after eating this hong kong toast due to the dairy hangover but its ok #noregrets

coming back here really makes me question my identity. i feel like i flit between personas and identities much more over here. or maybe i’m more aware of the personas i flit between? i’ve changed so much over the past few years; i’ve put myself out there, dove deep into my passions, crafting my sense of self brick by brick, becoming a person i feel proud of. sometimes it feels like a farce though.

three days into my trip here, my friends drag me out to lang kwai fong with them. i am reluctant; i feel jetlagged and i have work the next day. i don’t like drinking much and going to the bars makes me feel self-conscious; it is clear to me that i do not fit the beauty standard here in many ways and most of the time i can ignore that voice of insecurity but for some reason it feels much more difficult to do at a club. my friends reassure me that it’ll be a fun bonding experience, my friend nicole recounts our previous antics, her crying drunk at mcdonalds while we order hashbrowns and seaweed-flavoured fries at 2am, and i finally allow myself to be persuaded into going for old times sake. i think this will be a useful test; i’ve grown a lot in confidence and i’ve learned to let go in many ways in the past few years. maybe this time i’ll be able to truly enjoy myself with my friends without feeling out of place in dark room i step into.

it does not go well. we meet with some of my friends acquaintances, and they’re rude to me from the get go. they look at me with an all-too-familiar expression of disgust veiled under politeness. they whisper amongst themselves and try to not-so-subtly exclude us. my friend doesn’t pick up on this and at some point i start crying and my friends ask me what’s wrong. this is the first time in a long time people have acted so egregious and i’m not sober enough to rationalize it as them being prejudiced and so i get upset. i also think they would have had a better night if it weren’t for me coming along which i know is stupid but it makes me even more sad.

in that moment, i exist as a superposition of 9 year old ananya, 15 year old ananya, and 21 year old ananya all at once. i’m taken back to primary school; being called names in cantonese but not being able to respond because i didn’t even understand what they were saying. so i just ignored it, and pretended like i didn’t know they were taunting me. i’m also in high school and a so-called friend just called me ugly to my face and did an indian accent. my other friends laugh hysterically and then apologise, then laugh again. i don’t know what to do - this feels so incredibly mean but they’re my friends. i jeer back at them in good humour, act like it didn’t matter. i quietly cut them off 3 years later when we graduate.

i brush it all off, in one ear, out the other, ignore it, rationalise it, pretend it doesn’t exist. move on, shed that skin, grow and change and transform in so many ways and leave it all behind until one night it comes tumbling out and suddenly this time i am the one crying drunk in mcdonald’s at 2am. my friends slowly try to feed me hashbrowns while i cry.

in the first few days after it happened, i feel more rattled than i wanted to admit. not just because it happened, but because of how sad it made me. my anxiety got worse; i wake up every morning with a pit in my chest, wanting to cry. i am less patient with my mom and i snap at her for the smallest annoyances. an itchy need to escape comes over me. i want to lock myself in my house but also fill my day to the brim with activities so i dont have to think. i want to facetime a friend but i also want to throw my phone away. i talk to my friends who came with me and they reassure me that those people were rude to everyone in general and i shouldn’t waste my time being upset about their small-minded judgements. but that doesn’t make me feel better and now i feel irrational for being so upset about this. i feel like i’m being annoying, i dont know wether to bring it up or to leave it and let myself stew. why am i so shaken? i genuinely feel like i’ve grown and changed so much in the past few years, gained confidence and am largely comfortable in my own skin. stuff like this makes me wonder if it’s not me whos truly changed, maybe it’s just my external circumstances?

a few more days pass, and i start wondering about what i am to learn from this experience. i try my best to reframe things in an empowering manner, re-interpreting situations to give me as much agency as possible. this is sometimes frustrating - i get irritated at myself for not having fixed the problem already. i confuse myself with cognitive traps i set up for myself. eventually though, a little thought comes along. a small thing to be grateful for.

next to my house is a free art gallery. i am thankful to spend an afternoon wandering around it aimlessly. i have the same conversation with a friend about my workaholism that i am sure i’ve had with her at least a dozen times, and i’m grateful for her endless patience , watching me learning and relearning the same lessons through the years. i’m grateful for the view from the rooftops. the bustling city can be nice to watch from above. i sit alone in cafes and read and occasionally watch the people going about their day down on the streets and feel strangely calm. i’m grateful for my long nighttime walks through the neighbourhood. they give me time to reflect and unwind; i’m usually too impatient for long walks while back in Vancouver. now, i walk down all of the roads i’ve walked down countless times. sometimes i feel like an outsider, but other times i feel like the city is giving me a warm hug. i recall all of the beautiful memories hong kong has given me; the beautiful sunset i was treated to walking down the hill from my school when staying back late for clubs, inside jokes shared in the small park next to my apartment complex, my favourite oolong tea i would buy as a reward after every school test. 

rooftop cafe that i spontaneously decided to read at for 20 minutes while waiting for a friend; a beautiful pocket of calm in an otherwise hectic day

one of the goals i set myself this year is to become better at handling my emotions. sometimes when when complex personal and social situations came up, I would shut down out of anxiety and simply remove myself from the situation. i thought this was the cleanest, simplest way to deal with drama within myself and other people, just flat-out refusing to engage with social complexity at all. at some point i realized that i wasn’t doing myself or anyone else around me favours with my stubbornness to ignore the complex reality that i live in. i suppose this event is helping me pursue that goal — having messy emotions is a prerequesite to learning how to deal with them. it’s also okay to be bad at handling it at first.

a week before leaving, and in comes the realizations. i go to get a massage with a friend, and have an epiphany about my relationship with pain and suffering. how very tpot of me. i couldnt make it more cliché if i tried.

at first, the massage is incredibly painful. i wonder if i should be feeling this much pain, if i should ask the masseuse to be more gentle. i wonder if she will judge me if so. i wonder if i’m supposed to dislike the experience as much as i am disliking right now. i feel like there’s something wrong with me??? why do i feel so much pain???? and then i realized, i do this shit with everything. when i feel pain, i question the pain so much. i wonder if i’m normal for experiencing it, i wonder if it’s stupid for me to feel it. i feel the pain, and then i experience the meta-pain of doubting my experience of the pain. i impose beliefs on when i should and shouldnt experience pain (shockingly, there are very few occurrences where i allow myself to feel pain). i twist myself into all sorts of pretzels trying to avoid it, under many clever rationalizations; i am “transmuting obstacles” or “reflecting on myself”. during that experience, i realized i can very well just do nothing. the pain can just be there, and i can just be there with it.

when handling uncomfy emotions, it’s natural to be uncomfortable. that doesn’t mean i’m doing anything wrong. it probably means i’m doing things right. when i write it down like this, the truths sound so simple. but it’s been a long journey for me to get here. and i will probably have to relearn this lesson many more times.

the harbour is right next to our house. the last time i visited, me and my dad sat by the window watched the sunset together while catching up. it’s one of my most treasured memories. i think about it every time i look out the window now.

i’m currently sitting at the gate of the airport, waiting to board my flight and racking my brain for a conclusion to tie all of my thoughts up, but nothing comes to me. i dont really have a neat way to finish this piece off — i had specific intentions for it starting off but the events of the trip kind of just took me and ran off. i guess i’m just coming to terms with how much i have to learn about myself. how winding the path to self-love is. but i’m closer to it than where i was before, even though it’s taken me a long time to reach here. i’m learning that it’s okay for things to be painful. i dont have to plaster over it or shy away from it. i can just sit with it and know it exists.

i sent a draft over to sophy before finishing it off and asked her for her thoughts. i like the way that she saw this post. 

i’m slowly learning to see the world as it exists. hong kong is not perfect, but there are many things to appreciate. this place can be cramped and lively and unfriendly and safe and familiar and alienating, all at the same time. it doesn’t have to be one or the other. my life isnt simple, static, picturesque; it’s messy and confusing and contradictory, but that’s precisely what makes it so magical. things dont have to resolve themselves immediately, and it’s not my job to ignore either the good or the bad in order to develop a simple narrative. i give myself the permission to take my time with it all.