I do a 360, straining to identify traces that match the vague images in my head. I have been here before, many times in fact. Feeling dizzy, I try to steady myself at an extremely busy intersection in Hong Kong. I have to admit defeat. I am lost at home. Yet, I am right at home. Having been a Canadian immigrant grown accustomed to suburban houses and shopping malls for over two decades, I go back home, my first home, my original home. Nervous and excited, I make my way into the city. The place is an immediate plurality of adjectives: strange, dense, new, fast and overwhelming. However, amongst the seemingly organised chaos, the shape of Hong Kong is familiar, albeit taller and glitzier. The constant reinvention between the mountains and the harbour can only be appreciated from the tops of buildings these days.The macro-view is spectacular, offering an understanding of a city in terms of large infrastructural transformations. More land is being reclaimed from the Victoria Harbour. Underpasses are being shaped by an extraordinary amount of steel. Plans for an activated waterfront promenade are announced in multiple renderings. Alongside simultaneous infrastructural projects are skyscrapers ready to remake the skyline. I am in awe of the action. Up in the sky in Hong Kong, I imagine transplanting some of this activity to my other home, Toronto. A sense of impasse immediately washes over me. Often bogged down by bureaucratic wranglings, even one of these projects would take years of debate in the council chambers. My Toronto seems stuck.
Other than the harbour, space for oneself is in short supply, even within one’s own apartment. Not only do today’s Hong Kongers work, eat and shop in hyper-efficient mode, it is all conducted in impossibly small spaces. Naturally, real estate is an obsession and everyone knows square footage prices by heart. Not even the condos that have sprung up in Toronto in recent years have prepared me for the typical Hong Kong apartment. Having lived in suburban houses that are minimum 2000 square feet, I find myself trying to understand a family living in a three- bedroom apartment of 600 square feet. Granted it is efficiently laid out and every possibility for built-in storage is maximised. I stand in the miniscule kitchen, imagining and projecting my life if I had stayed. No doubt I would have adapted, just like everyone else, however I cannot imagine the effect it would have had on my psyche. It is no wonder that the streets are full. They are in effect everyone’s living room and backyard and everything in between. The built environment has supported and reinforced pressure cooker compact living at every level from the skyline to the apartment, leaving very little room for one to stop and think. A part of me understands and is envious of this lifestyle – after all, isn’t this density and activity the holy grail of all our mixed-use plans? At the same time, I am not sure I truly want to be a part of this.
urbanism | memory by joanne lam
going home
where is it?
Coming down from the dense skyline to the street level gives a different vantage point. Hong Kong streets are just as intense as I remember, except they remain so 24/7. Everyone needs to get somewhere in a hurry, above and below ground. Without the high-tech efficient public transportation system, the city would surely come to a standstill. The crowds are not only on the main streets but on side streets as well. I easily blend in, but have trouble keeping up with the average walking speed. The whole city is hopping, a true metropolis, every planner’s dream except it is not master planned by planners. Driven by scarce land and high development pressures, Hong Kong has willed itself into being. No one is untouched by the energy pulsing through the city – a far cry from the vast sprawling malls in the Toronto suburbs that pretend to reproduce this madness. On a closer look, the buildings that are so shiny from high up take on a duller sheen from street level. In the older areas, ground floors have been renovated for stores that rival those on Fifth Avenue, but the apartments from the second floor up are covered in a thick layer of gray dust, betraying years of pollution. Although I do not feel claustrophobic, the streets definitely feel saturated. I long for a breather, a break from the relentless movement. I instinctively head for the water. Many hours sitting by Canadian lakes have shown me the best place to find peace and quiet.
Joanne Lam
As I doubt my commitment to today’s Hong Kong, I question my loyalty to Toronto. Frankly, neither the hyper-compact environment nor the sprawling suburbs seems like home. Perhaps it is both a curse and blessing to immigrants; destined to continuously question the basic idea of home, I am also freed from its physical and cultural trappings. My home does not lie in one city or the other or both, but rather in-between. It shifts. It occupies a space in time, allowing one to be both insider and outsider simultaneously. I stop pretending and start to navigate Hong Kong with a tourist map. It is a blatant case of the city telling me that I do not belong. However, every now and then, I stumble upon a staircase, or a bridge, or an intersection from a particular corner that I remember so well, and I know. I am home.
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