HONG KONG—It wasn’t my first time in Hong Kong. But prior opportunities to visit had been sporadic, brief and few. 

My memories of the city consist of one trip in my childhood, one during my twenties, and a particular journey where—in an effort to recreate an extremely budgeted version of “The Amazing Race”—my friends and I flew to Kota Kinabalu, crossed to Penang, then to Bangkok, onward to Xiamen, and eventually to Hong Kong. I have only a fuzzy recollection of riding an overnight bus from Shenzhen to the Hong Kong border.

Succeeding physical connections to the city simply involved its international airport, being the layover hub for elsewhere. In 2015, on my way to elsewhere, an intense typhoon caused us to get stuck on the HKIA tarmac for hours. Eventually, all planes were grounded and we deplaned.

A decade later last month, I got a chance to make (better) sense of Hong Kong as a participant of a workshop organized by Para Site, one of the city’s oldest and independent art institutions.

Coming to Hong Kong was to be expectedly regaled by its high-rise architecture, bridges, harbors and skylines. Topographically, it is a city of islands and mountains, with real estate so pricey that the cost of living is steep. Progress is amply demonstrated in the highly wired city, with new structures constantly being built. MTRs, ferries, scheduled buses and double-decker trams (locally known as ding-ding) efficiently transport the population of citizens, migrants and tourists to their destinations. An artist who grew up here told me that the cityscape practically undergoes transformation every three years. 

Cultural spaces seemed like clear products of this transformation. From a carceral space to displaying art, Tai Kwun Contemporary was once the biggest prison in Hong Kong. M+ Museum, one of the top art centers in Asia, sits on reclaimed land. During my day and evening walks, it was common to view old and new buildings seemingly merge into each other—the past and present narratives melding into undigested forms. One can also say that either the structures were converging or one was being co-opted by and slowly disappearing into the other.

It was easy for the visitor to marvel at the everyday being translated into a turn to convenience—fast internet, cashless services, and modern transport system. But surveillance cameras were noticeably everywhere. To sense a city when one was equipped with awareness of its history was to also be tempered by degrees of caution and care. Always bring your passport (which one should always do, anyway) advised one Filipino graduate student. Spot checking for no reason happens here, he said.

In line with the exploration and discussion of writing as infrastructure (this year’s theme for the Para Site workshop), observing the ebb and flow of the physical and social system was inevitable. 

Throughout facilitated and casual discussions—some of which were about the ways we/they have created alternative (or not usual) conduits in order to distribute or “make public” various modalities of writing—I also speculated and generated more questions when exploring Hong Kong as a space:

How does one feel welcome in a new place? The inclination to make sense of how the body is regulated by new interfaces and infrastructures is what often shapes our feelings and memories of a prescribed “somewhere.”  Places dictate our movement and our positions. So, what will make a place feel safe? How does one attempt to thrive in blocked channels? What will make a certain somewhere charming or ordinary, intimate or impersonal, or, worse, unexpectedly hostile?

Day 2 activities brought us to the Crip Future, Queer Market at Eaton House on Nathan Road, the oldest street in Hong Kong. Upon leaving the event, I heard a familiar language and observed a group of Filipino migrant workers convening nearby. A woman smiled and spoke to me. Printed on her t-shirt was the text PROTEKSYON HINDI KOLEKSYON (protection not collection).

It was on Day 5 when the guest speakers from the KUNCI Study Forum and Collective from Jogjakarta, Indonesia, tasked us to each take turns leading a group for 5 to 10 minutes around Hong Kong (or at least an area of it). It was a shifting of our focus from taking a precise path made easy by our guides and phone apps to randomly walking our way to “see” the city for a certain period of time. The temporary power to steer the ship was a process that required collaboratively navigating and negotiating an alien terrain. 

The starting point was Asia Art Archive at the Sheung Wan area; the finish line was at the Para Site headquarters in Quarry Bay.

First to pilot our group was Y, a curator and writer from Hangzhou. She set the mood by instructing us to take only one photograph during her 10-minute leadership. It was an interesting handicap: a measurement on restraint. Y took us to climb several staircases, and Hong Kong’s hilly landscape was made more apparent to our leg muscles by this unscheduled workout. Within this cosmopolitan radius, we soon found ourselves in a public square where the neighborhood elderly hang out. We took time to appreciate the small turtles in the park’s pond.  

I was next to lead, and my mantra was simple:  Follow the path of least resistance by walking down inclines and slopes. And only on streets where there was shade, I added. We zigzagged toward the direction of the shadows, along pathways where the sun didn’t shine, and we eventually ended up in the bodega sections of herbal and medicinal shops. If we had earlier witnessed turtles lounging in the park’s pond, there we saw the next sad fate of a turtle’s life. Dried turtle shells were tied together and ready for selling, and on the floor of another shop were big fish tails being prepped for wrapping—shark tails, I was told.

R, a designer and artist from the United Kingdom, soon took over my reign and instructed us to zoom in on the city’s typography. My eyes darted from big signages to the smallest of texts—a combination of Chinese and Cantonese characters, Roman alphabet and images. As if on cue, we (or, at least, I) became more attuned to how the city absorbed its people, and even how the public was visually directed and seduced to consume.

P, a HK-born and UK-based artist, had us observing building facades: dilapidated and sleek structures functioning and standing beside each other. We stopped at an unused playground and later in front of an old apartment which, P explained, was once a pawnshop. As we marched our way to more non-touristy, inner pathways, I noticed details that I had neglected to see in the past few days in the city. We collectively saw (and gushed) at the prices of food far cheaper than in where we individually stayed. We saw less of the “contemporary” and more of the “lived” spaces, which made me think of movie scenes reflecting Wong Kar Wai’s (or even Stephen Chow’s) urban environment.

By then I was beginning to hear the “what if” questions that life likes to throw at us: Can you imagine living here? Will the concept of you have space here?

The cultural theorist AbdouMaliq Simone’s musings on how a city pulsates was the thought process that D, of KUNCI, had referred to us. To observe a place was to understand that much of an individual’s personal and social involvements is never without conditions. Our mobility is calibrated, mediated, encouraged, and even controlled by the governors of such infrastructures. The people also affect the landscape, but as the marginalized Asian in me had always experienced, my ability to roam freely was always informed by such troublesome factors as passport, financial capacity, color, gender, and appearance.

On Day 9, Typhoon “Wipha” entered Hong Kong around dawn and a Typhoon Level 10 warning was issued. With the city practically closed, the transport system was suspended and everyone was advised to stay indoors.

It was during this interim that three of us—Y, artist and writer from Chengdu; L, writer and archivist from Manila; and myself—slowly and methodically braved the weather to make the roughly 100-meter walk in search for the nearest open food stall. With the grim reminder that travel insurance is considered void in moments of force majeure, we witnessed the strong winds rolling garbage cans across the street, shaking lampposts, and ripping tarps from buildings.

By evening Wipha had exited. And, like clockwork, the stores reopened, the transport system was immediately up and running, and even the shirtless male joggers were back on the streets. In our area, the bits of debris left on the ground served as small reminders of the typhoon that had just passed.

On the day I left, check-in at the HKIA entailed facial recognition at practically every step of the process. The exchange for the fast and safe flight back to my rain-battered and flood-drowned country was the maddening three-hour period I spent just to book a cab home from the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. I was just glad that I actually got a ride.