The Jetsons come to Hong Kong
My first impression of Hong Kong was that it seemed eerily similar to a scene from the Jetsons. The Hong Kong island side of the city is built on a hill, at the bottom of which the banking business community sits and at the top of which the banking businessmen have historically lived. These two parts of the city are connected via an enormously long elevator, which runs down the hill in the morning and up the hill in the evening, constantly ferrying ex-pats to and from their offices. Much of the rest of the city is connected via raised walking platforms. We discovered that trying to get anywhere by walking on the street-level is basically impossible as the city is planned around the raised pedestrian walkways.
20 feet above the sidewalk, moving through Hong Kong
The pedestrian walkways lead you from one mall to another, of which there is no shortage in Hong Kong (apparently subway developers also buy and develop the land above subway stations and build shopping malls, thinking that they are easy to access. Thus above every major subway stop there sits a shopping mall). These shopping malls put malls in the U.S. to shame. They are enormous, first of all. They also seem to cater to people who have more money than god. It would be as if Bergdorf Goodman’s decided to expand 1,000-fold and put a store on every corner in New York City. Only in Hong Kong would you find a homeless person create a shelter out of Armani shopping bags.
What does it mean when you can find Armani bags and no place to sleep?
Hong Kong overflows with dichotomies. From the bamboo scaffoldings on skyscrapers to the poor Chinese paupers begging for change from the soon-to-be-poor Western banking elite. As we took the “Mid-Levels Escalator” down to the water on a Sunday for a dim sum brunch our wonderful host Pam prepared us for another interesting social juxtaposition. Every Sunday hundreds upon hundreds of immigrant domestic workers, mostly from the Philippines, line kilometers of pedestrian walkways. They were fully camped out, with seats and umbrellas and games of bingo and cards happening everywhere you looked. The photo below is just the beginning of a several kilometer long stretch of people doing the same thing — the image on the left is from Sunday, the image on the right is the following morning.
Sunday on the left, Monday on the right
The people pictured are just a handful of the thousands of immigrant workers on Hong Kong island who are housed by their employers and find themselves without a home on their one free day, Sunday. Faced with a dearth of meeting locations and (I am assuming, because I had a hard time finding them…) affordable entertainment options, the workers have created a teeming (looking) community that arises every Sunday and leaves just as quickly at the end of the day.
