Across a small street from the trash collection point in Tai Hang, the workers rest in an alley. It’s their break room. They eat lunches there, sometimes shucking their fluorescent yellow vests for a few moments. Underneath the one small tree, they have water, sit on the curb, or listen to music. These folk, whose job is to collect trash from around the neighborhood and bring it, by cart, to this collection point, are critical to Tai Hang’s survival. These men and women serve as the intermediary between the towers full of apartments and the truck that picks up rubbish from the collection point every day or two. This is Hong Kong’s system, replicated all over the city. It allows for smaller streets, denser buildings, and neighborhood collection points. Many of the collection points, like this one in Tai Hang, also have public bathrooms. Well cleaned and maintained, these bathrooms are frequented by locals, tourists, and taxi drivers. In this one, one of two in the tiny Tai Hang neighborhood, the walls are tiled with mosaics. The men’s side with shades of red, the women’s with shades of blue, mirroring the colored signs. Everyone who’s ever visited us, after using them, has commented on how nice they are, and how they wish wherever they are visiting from had public bathrooms like these.
In the alley, on a weekday morning, I often use this bathroom. After four hours of zoom calls I’m confused and a bit tired, and head out of the house to get noodles on a stool in one of these alleys. I often eat at ten or eleven, in time with many of the taxi drivers and the fruit stand staff, folk who work early mornings and then have a mid-morning lull, like myself though unlike. In these off hours, when there are non of the weekend’s lines, we frequent Tai Hang’s famous cha chaan tengs, enjoying the milk tea that will draw crowds on a Sunday. These weekday mornings are part of my love for this neighborhood, part of why I know so many faces, and they me. Sitting in the shade of an awning, on a small stool, we smile and nod at each other over noodles and coffee. It’s a good life, in the alleys.
And so it is that walking back from bathroom to noodle stand on a Tuesday, I pass the trash collector’s break spot, and see one of the men sitting, having tea from a thermos at a small desk they’ve scavenged from the trash pile. The alley has a couple of items like this, office chairs or small shelves, re-possessed by this team for their bags and belongings, for their lunches and rests. The man is facing the wall, relaxing in a posture that speaks to burdens carried. In front of him, on a chair, is a round white clock, five past eleven. And in front of him, carefully held in tiny pots, are two white orchids, their stems crossed as they lean.
In the small shade of this alley, next to his trash cart and surrounded by a few chairs, someone’s laundry, and the miscellanea of discarded life, his table is a moment of peace that I’m glad to see.
Standing on the balcony I can see so many of us. Two teams play rugby on the pitch near the library. Next to the field a group does sprints on the 100 meter track. Around them dozens of joggers do slow loops. Across a wall and worlds away six tennis courts are filled with lessons. Behind those another ten are busy with private matches at their club. Behind those in the dark two boys play basketball in the schoolyard.
Across the street the park glistens, soccer courts and basketball courts and walking paths busy. Beyond that the Barbour is full of motion. The pilot boats head in and out to cargo ships on the horizon. The ferries troll back and forth. In between the elevated highway carries busses, taxis and cars, the former two outnumbering the latter. On King’s Road, closer in, the tram trundles in their midst. All these forms of transportation and the occasional airplane overhead.
As the evening settles on the harbor the neon comes on. I think of how many words like that are no longer accurate. Filming. Neon. An album as a disc. Ideas created by technologies that have been themselves turned over. In Hong Kong, where individual bulbs blink, creating the image of rain trickling down the ICC, so many of us live in the intersection of technology and reality. The tram’s rough hum, a sound immediately discernible amid the combustion engines and sports sounds, is of another era. The lit scoreboard in Victoria Park’s central court for a tennis game likewise, not of a different era but of a unique priority compared to the dozens of public courts visible around it, the concrete soccer fields, the basketball courts packed with recreational players. Likewise the Chinese Recreation Club’s fancy pools speak to a priority of wealth, when across the street a huge public pool occupies a chunk of Victoria Park.
I can see so many of us. The Pullman, in Causeway Bay along the park, is almost full. On Saturday I think it was, or close. A shock to see so many of the rectangles lit after years of the pandemic when the building was mostly dark. A shock to realize in that earlier surprise how comfortable I’d become with no tourists, without people in hotels, without travel. How awkward, in some way, it feels to have everything busy, to have Mandarin dominate Tai Hang’s coffee shops on the weekends instead of Cantonese or Australian, French or Singapore’s more British English.
I look at the office towers, still mostly lit, and the dozens of apartment buildings, where lights flicker on every minute as someone returns home, and am glad. So many boxes for humans. There’s both no space, and so many options. A paradox of density and the need for more, driven by the kind of services, the kind of life, available when so many of us are in sight.
On the back end of a good set of days I look at the Pacific from the wrong side and breathe. The air is clean here, a bit north of Los Angeles proper, still connected to its urban sphere. The airport we’ll head home from on this loop is just visible in the distance, a string of planes approaching. The weather, wet for southern California, feels welcoming. After a week on the east coast I am comfortable again in this country, operating by car and with poor cell signal.
Visiting America is an emotional journey. We have to prepare, to set aside the way things could work for the way things do work. We set aside walking to restaurants and to work, set aside trains from the airports and clean public bathrooms. In exchange we are hosted by friends we miss dearly in houses with kitchens nicer than any we’ve ever inhabited. Their children are larger, are two, four, five, eight almost nine. We watch these small people grow in leaps between visits, thrilled each time at their new abilities. So too will they be soon by YT, I realize.
Visiting America is a mishmash of meeting friends for dinner, meeting colleagues in co-working spaces, meeting potential customers in unfamiliar offices, meeting family in houses from our childhood. It’s a mishmash of memories and new experiences. On an e-bike one morning I swing by Four Barrel, my favorite SF coffee shop. For years it was two blocks from home. In line I find some fellow ultimate players and say hello, that it’s been too long. San Francisco is a city dense with our history, and I’m happy to revisit it, even momentarily. Yet half the time there is utterly new, meeting colleagues in buildings I’ve never seen before to work on companies that didn’t exist when I lived here. The variation is confusing, often within half an hour, from debating a hiring plan in a hotel conference room to biking to my host’s house on streets I’ve ridden dozens of times.
In many ways America is peaceful now, for us. We come on vacation, or half-work half-play, lingering a bit to see old friends. We re-kindle our commonalities with twenty odd hours of chat, of intense sharing. We go to the batting cages, to gyms, to bars and restaurants, for long walks, and to ultimate tournaments. We laugh, and we check in on our memories. It’s a good break from the stress of our lives, even if it brings stress of a different kind.