The land in between (and then some)

Have you ever been in a show, maybe a high-school play, maybe a Broadway production, where for some reason you stayed longer, lingered behind, perhaps talking to a pretty girl, perhaps waiting for someone you knew, perhaps looking for something you lost under your seat, and you loitered long enough for the stage workers to start taking the set apart, exposing the inner workings of theatrical magic, deconstructing the illusion with the sweep of one falling cardboard façade that only a few minutes earlier was a castle of distressed princesses, a street market stall, a high-masted ship cutting through a life-threatening tempest? Perhaps you haven’t, but sure you have you at some point accidentally wandered into the wrong room while looking for the bathroom in a fancy restaurant, say into the place where they keep the dirty dishes before they wash them. That’s how I felt exploring the lands outside Hong Kong. There is not enough sunshine in that part of the world to reflect off the shiny buildings in HK and sparkle unto the dark land in between, the ‘new’ territories that lie to the island’s west. New? Territories? These desolate and miniscule parts of land are new only in historical scale. These are the overflow parking-lot of Hong Kong’s main arena, home to half of HK’s population (the lesser half, to be sure). In between the miraculous oasis-island and the Chinese mainland, almost four million people live in government owned and operated housing, in neighborhoods that make the projects in the south Bronx look like luxury high-rises on Central Park West. The density is unbelievable, and it reaches all the way to the sky. Ten-person families in one-room studios of 400 SF. That’s what you get for $75 a month. That’s what you can pay when you make $200. That’s what you get when you’re born in the wrong class. And that’s the last economic law I learn in Hong Kong, not that I didn’t know it before: somebody has to foot the bill. Happy new year of the dog.