Compilation

Pearl of the Orient

I come from Hong Kong. Asia's World City, Pearl of the Orient, city of lights and hopes and dreams and aspirations, marketed to be authentic. Glamorous. Beautiful. That's what the magazines and tourist sites label my city as, after all. A mystical, world-famous Asian city full of opportunity, where the East meets the West. Hundreds of people pour into Hong Kong from the airport every day — some of them here to find work, some of them here to explore, and some of them here to live among us as citizens permanently. No matter what their goal, all of them share one thing in common — hope, a flickering spark that lights up their eyes, causes their hearts to thrum synchronously to the beat of the city. They look at the skyscrapers, gleaming in the sunlight that beams down upon them. They look at the streets, crowded and bustling with life with people who rush to and fro, from one place to another. They look at the brilliant lights that criss-cross the night sky and cast the entire city in splendor. They look with their eyes, and they think it's beautiful. They think it's wonderfully, vibrantly beautiful.

But their eyes miss the scorching sunlight that blinds us and beats down on our backs in the daytime. Their eyes miss the old lady pushing a cart full of cardboards in the bustling streets to earn her family a living, her back too hunched and her joints too swollen to move any further. They don't see the pollution the light does to the ones who can't afford luxury, the people in Mong Kok who live too close to the lights to sleep at all. Starving families living in Sham Shui Po's cage homes like animals. Beggars who suffer from the biting cold of Hong Kong's winter. Slums overcrowded with people who forage for food not in the wilderness, but in overturned trash cans by the sides of dirty streets.