K.S.
The following is based on an interview I had with a friend of mine. He has agreed to sharing his story here, on the premise that not even our closest friends can recognize it is him. Therefore, his name and many of the details have been altered to protect his privacy. But during the process of my writing, I altered everything through my cinematic imagination. Now I don’t know whether the story is still about him anymore.  I sent my writing to Albert (his pseudo-name), and he said this is exactly what he wants: him but not him. Therefore, I think the phrase ‘based on true events’ doesn’t apply to the story you will read.

Albert and I are sitting on a wooden bench outside of K Station on a Saturday afternoon. He is sitting on my left. He doesn’t want to go to a café or a restaurant, where people usually chat comfortably. He looks tired, but amicable. I suppose he has always been amicable. So, we just chat, with our eyes on the people walking into and out of the train station.

Albert was born in a small village, a place with nothing but trees and stars. Both of his grandfathers were sailors in Hong Kong, so the family had the privilege to come to Hong Kong permanently. He came to Hong Kong a few years after the handover. He neither remembers the handover nor the millennium. But he remembers the day he came to Hong Kong. It was supposed to be 1st November, but that day it was raining very heavily so he had to come the next day with his family and a one-way permit. “We took a bus for more than 4 hours to arrive at Shenzhen, and then another hour from Luo Hu station to Mong Kok East station and finally a 30-minute taxi ride to where we live. I remember that I couldn’t stand the leather smell in the taxi, and we had to make a few stops on the way, just for me to throw up.” By calculation, he was eight at that time.

They lived in a 50-square-foot room, with a mini TV, a mini fridge, and a bunk bed. His father and mother slept in the lower bed while the three children, Albert, his elder brother and elder sister, slept in the upper bed. The family shared a toilet, a kitchen, a living room and a door to the corridor with 2 strangers, a male in his mid-twenties and another one in his mid-thirties. “I said to my parents that I am so glad to be in Hong Kong. To be honest, I don’t remember having said such a thing. My parents told me that. But I guess I said it for a reason, considering how different Hong Kong and my village are.”

I met Albert in our primary school. Thinking retrospectively, he already passed as a native Cantonese speaker at that time (at least to me). “It was because we watched Hong Kong television shows all the time in the village. They were more interesting than the shows on the other channels. We would sit in front of the TV after coming from school. I guess we just learnt the language that way.” But our classmates, including me, knew that Albert is not from Hong Kong. He was transferred to our class three months after the school year started. Our teacher told us where Albert is from, and asked us to treat him nicely (and I think I did). I couldn’t notice it, but Albert says he felt isolated then. He couldn’t truly make friends with anyone at school. For one, he didn’t learn much English in the rural school, so he performed very poorly in English (I can imagine that it was particularly devastating for him, especially when he could get scolded for getting a 97 out of 100 in the rural school). He only wanted to catch up. Also, he heard people calling him and his siblings ‘Mainland Boy’ and ‘Mainland Girl’, which were derogatory terms for people who come from where he used to live. “I think my social anxiety, inferiority complex and diligence first developed during that period. I knew I was inferior to everyone around me, in school and in my family. I know that I still am. The only thing I could do was to study hard, at least that was what everyone kept telling me”. And he went to an EMI secondary school, a school better than mine. He was never the loquacious type. 

In secondary school, Albert learned to blend in. He longed for true friends, and he never told anyone about his roots. With his flawless Cantonese, better family finances (he now has his own room) and outstanding academic results, people at school started wanting to hang out with him. “But for some reason, I couldn’t. I couldn’t talk to my classmates properly, boys or girls. My face turned red instantly and my heart beat so fast. My forehead and my palms were always wet. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t control these physical reactions. I think I was quite a creep at that time.” His classmates, however, interpreted his crippling mind as a manifestation of “maturity and melancholy”. Finally, a group of students repeatedly asked Albert to join them for social events. Albert started to open up, but only to a limited degree. He kept his distance from the group, worrying that one day his friends would discover his identity as ‘the Mainland Boy’ and fearing that a sense of guilt would overcome him from numerous lies he had to tell in front of his friends about his origin. “But now that I think about it, my classmates somehow knew. I couldn’t talk about some of my ‘childhood nostalgia’ in Hong Kong. I literally don’t have them.”

Despite Albert’s thick shell that he built around him, a girl fell in love with him. “She was very nice to me. She asked if we could be together, so I said ‘yes’. And one night, I said I have something important to tell her. I thought if we were together seriously, this is something she must know. So we came out and talked. For the first time, I confessed to a Hongkonger, that I am not from Hong Kong. She laughed and said she had thought that I was trying to break up with her. She said she didn’t care at all. The only thing important to her was that we liked each other. I felt so relieved after that. I felt like she is the one for me. But we broke up when we went to University. It just couldn’t work. The longer we hung out, the more I felt like we were from two different worlds. We had very different values about life.”

Albert kept hiding his ‘true’ identity as he went to one of the most prestigious universities in Hong Kong. There, his sense of social isolation became bigger. He wasn’t the ‘progressive’ type who could make friends with anyone at school. In secondary school, he was more the ‘approached’ than the ‘approacher’. At University, no one seemed to approach him. “Never mind”, he thought, because he could still focus on studying. But the workload was simply overwhelming, and he soon realized that a list of straight A pluses in his academic transcript was an unachievable goal for him. He was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. “The question that consistently occupied my head was ‘why me?’ I tried my best to prove to everyone that I am equal with everyone else, if not better. And yet, I failed in the only thing that I was good at. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what I was doing. People achieve much more than me, people seem much happier than me. I had no idea that it was depression. I didn’t know what it was. The worse my mental state became, the worse I was in life. Eventually I just broke. I thought nothing could help. I would be like this, forever.” With the support of his family, he left school for a year and underwent treatment and counselling for his suicidal thoughts.

Albert says he is “much, much better” now. He successfully graduated from University (although not with the grades he wanted) and got a job at a public hospital. He likes his job. For some reason (and he stresses that it is definitely not a noble reason), he likes hanging out with patients. The professionalism in his work environment also suits him (except for his high-maintenance boss). “I still have bad thoughts. Sometimes I want to escape from this world. How quiet the world would be if I just ended it all. But I learnt how to cope with these thoughts. Now, I just go to work during office hours and exercise after work. I spend time with my family and friends on the weekends. My colleagues and I get along pretty well. We go for lunch and sometimes dinner. We talk about many things, but still, not about who I really am.”

The recent events in Hong Kong led to some disturbances inside of him. He reads news and comments from both Hong Kong and from Mainland China, and it is their hatred against each other that saddens him the most. An internal conflict between his rural past and present Hong Kong emerges. “I understand what people in the Mainland think, and I understand what people in Hong Kong think. I went to the marches in June. I also go back to my village from time to time. Everything changed in the village. The buildings look different, but the natural scenery is still there. How people talk, dress and live are all still the same. Yet, I simply cannot affiliate with either side; what they say to each other and the way they say it. People are reduced to their political views. Are they only what we have now? Lately, I am not really sure what is right and what is wrong anymore: so many videos and pictures, so many analyses. But people like me are the most hateable type, right? I am unable to pick a side and (am?) ‘pseudo-neutral’. I can easily be condemned by both sides. Hong Kong people might hate me for where I come from, and Mainland people might hate me for where I live now. But I have friends from Hong Kong and friends from Mainland China (also from other countries). I seem to get along with each of them pretty well in discussions like these. I guess I have both good things and bad things to say about each side, and I select my words very carefully.” A second sun rises above Hong Kong. Its light is so glaring, so inescapable. People are forced to see the light, and to see how they look under the light. Some people like what they see, some people don’t.

“No”, he replies when I ask whether the world has been harsh on him. His face twitched a bit. “I don’t hate the world. I guess the world is cruel to everyone, if not crueller to some other people. Rather, I think people are nice to me. People I met are nice to me. My family loves me. I have good friends and great friends. But still, I guess it is difficult for me to have a sense of belonging in a place or in any group of people. It is a very… tiring feeling.” He still searches for that simple child in the village who doesn’t live there anymore.

“Where to next?” I ask Albert. “I don’t know. I like doing what I am doing now, but not forever. Maybe somewhere far from Hong Kong and Mainland China. I went to Denmark once for a few months because I heard it was the happiest place in the world. It was indeed the best time I’ve ever had in my life. But still, I didn’t fit in. I wasn’t able to hide. My face, my accent, my culture. I am still an outsider.”

Albert says I can share his experiences, only if no one could find out who he truly is. When I publish this story in any public space, people who know both of us will start speculating, and Albert cannot bear the slightest risk. “Being examined like a research subject? I don’t know why you want to share this with other people. I am insignificant. I don’t want people to guess who I am either. It is quite a moot thing to do, and I fear the power of the internet.”

After our little chat, Albert wants to do some jogging. He asks, with an amicable face before he leaves, “Do you hate me, after hearing what I have told you?” “Of course not. Don’t worry about it.” I reply, shaking my head. He smiles politely, walks straight into the train station, and gradually blends into all these people. Before he completely disappears from my sight, all I can see is half of his tired face.

Published on: December 27, 2019 < Back >