Hong Kong
Photos from a first trip to Asia in 2013.
In May 2013, I took a month-long trip to Asia with a childhood friend. Our first stop was Hong Kong, where she’d lived for a few years after college while working in finance. Riding the escalators from the Central to Mid-Levels districts and staring up at the towering office buildings and residential complexes, I was struck by the city’s vertical orientation. If I looked long enough, the skyscrapers seemed to teeter, a characteristic last month’s deadly high-rise fire drove home. From our humid first afternoon at Victoria Peak to greeting Florentijn Hofman’s “Rubber Duck” in the harbor, we were constantly ascending and descending. This vertical hierarchy seemed imprinted on locals—one of the reasons my friend finally left was because people there were so obsessed with status and money.
The city was a feast for the eyes. We visited Chungking Mansions, the squalid shopping center featured in Wong Kar-wai’s 1994 film “Chunking Express,” and I watched from above while drunk expats in red soccer jerseys spilled out of Lan Kwai Fong bars and climbed atop dumpsters. In markets, vendors sold frogs, pigs’ feet, mangosteens and tiny turtles. People assumed I spoke Cantonese, and shaking my head, I felt very American. My friend berated me for taking photos of the Filipina domestic helpers who gathered in Central on Sunday, their day off. Years later, during the pandemic, I watched demonstrators march down those same streets, protesting China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms.
Steven Tagle is a writer living in Switzerland. He was an ICWA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Fellow in Greece (2021-2023) based in the Evros region and islands of Chios and Crete, from where he explored the culture, history and economies of the country’s border zones and their importance to national politics, society, economics and geopolitics, including Greece’s mounting role in the Eastern Mediterranean and transatlantic alliance.