Grace and I returned to Hong Kong recently for the first time since we left at the end of December 2024. It was a short 2-day trip, but in that time, we managed to prioritize well and do the things and see the people that really mattered the most to us. Among the things that mattered was a trip to my favorite 冰室 for Hong Kong style milk tea and French toast.
I spent about five years in Hong Kong, which is longer than I expected to stay when I first moved there. Five years is enough time to live in an apartment, get tired of it, and move. It’s enough time to meet a bunch of people, forget some of them, go through a few relationships, and build some meaningful friendships.
It’s also long enough for a city to make its mark on you personally, and Hong Kong is a city whose influence on a person cannot be repelled. It’s difficult to think of another modern city that blends Hong Kong’s urban density and topographic incongruity with its unique cultural and social profile. Tokyo has the density, but not the ever-contested frontier of concrete and steel against the expanse of island beaches and subtropical forests. Singapore has the cultural diversity, but more “planned” and less whimsical. Plenty of other places have the street-level aggressiveness, but not the contrasting prestige of Hong Kong’s financial and luxury top-end. The international flavor of Hong Kong is imported by non-citizens and temporary residents who arrive on a career or economic impetus and bring with them the chaotic energy that one must have to drop everything and leave for a small island in the South China Sea in the first place.
It’s a place where every aspect of getting through even an unremarkable day applies pressure to what you know and are comfortable with. The heat and humidity are punishing for basically 8 months of the year. You learn to redefine personal space. At least for those of us who lived there as expats, we carry around an aloof hardiness of having simultaneously paid the most we’ve ever paid for rent while inhabiting the smallest space we’ve ever lived in.
It feels mundane to say, but by the time I moved to Hong Kong, I was 34, and a lot of the experiences that would lead to my disillusionment as an adult had already come and gone. Looking back, I don’t feel like Hong Kong changed me in the way that most people mean when they talk about deep, personal change, but spending that much time in a place with so many extremes along such a contorted set of axes has had a lasting effect on how I perceive a place, its people, and what it means for a city to have depth of character.
It was oddly cathartic to return for a couple days, but I don’t think I will ever live in Hong Kong again, and knowing that carries a wistfulness I’ve never really felt about a place.
