The first thing you see in Hong Kong are the tower blocks. They are what you see most, too. They are the walls of the city, and most of the time they are the sky as well. Repeated over and over, between ten and twenty storeys, all slightly different but the same shape. All together, they look like a crowd of tall, old ghosts. They look like rows and rows of teeth in some old animal. They look like rock formations made millions of years ago by God and left to weather since then.
From the outside, they look bleak. Streaks of rust and water and damp fall down from beneath the windows. They’re built out of some grey render, rough, crude, unadorned. A few are, were, painted in pink stripes, and a handful are still bright colours, green, orange up to red, like ice pops. But most are just left in the material they were thrown up in.
All the windows are different. Each one a different make, brand, material, replaced piece by piece, adhoc. But all of them have the same air conditioning thrusting out of them, bolted on, sticking out like warts.
The blocks have holes cut into them, canyons dropping down all the way to the ground. These holes are like arseholes, fetid, hot, filled with rotten food and tissues and air con units, all shielded with a piece of corrugated iron from the litter dropped above. All these cold machines screaming away to suck heat out of their own flat and spit it into someone else's, like another kind of litter. The windows that open onto these holes are pointless. If you’re more than three floors down, no light reaches you. You can’t tell whether it’s day or night.
Doesn’t this sound dreadful? Doesn’t it sound like hell on Earth, hot, stinking, cramped hell? But the surprising thing is: it isn’t. The corridors and stairwells inside the towers are scruffy; mosaic tiles missing, dust, naked wires and bright lights. But they aren’t scary. There are no broken televisions, no drugs, no alcoholics, no shit, no tabloid hell, nothing like the fear at home. Instead, it’s like a terrace, a series of different coloured doors, each with a different grill on the outside. Decorated with Chinese exhortations: Double Happiness! or Best Wishes To Those Who Enter! or something else jarringly, unexpectedly upbeat. And during the day, the doors behind these grills are opened. You can hear the swish of fans, and the too-loud din of soap operas. You can hear the click of Mahjong tiles being shuffled, or the song of a choir in a church located on the fourth floor, or the hoot of a Chinese instrument you don’t know, echoing down the well as you walk past.
There are pieces of people everywhere. A pair of kitten heeled flip flops left on someone’s mat. A blue plastic trike outside your neighbours door. Umbrellas hanging off a pipe to dry. A red lantern, some socks, some washing. A pot plant, a wooden stool. People have set up karaoke systems in the flats, offices, work rooms, stores. Humanity has grown here, made it home.
It’s wrong to call these tower blocks: that makes you think of ours, standing on their own, isolated. They aren’t just apartment blocks either: there are shops at the bottom and on the first floor, offices, cafes, karaoke bars up until the fourth floor. These are just buildings: the fabric of the city, what it’s made of. What it is.
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