And so concludes my exchange saga as I step away from the immigration officer and onto US soil again. Was any of that real? Was it only a fever dream? Is it any less real if it only happened inside my head? These would be the questions I ask myself over these next few days while I stay with my friend, Jessica, and her family in their Boston Chinatown apartment before I head back to Dartmouth. I think my Korean exchange friend, Wooseok, the one who managed to visit almost every MTR station and went to authentic Cantonese restaurants and practiced his Cantonese on a daily basis, said it best:
In all honesty, this was my first time ever living abroad mostly by myself, making all the novel experiences compound and take up a more sizable portion of my memory bank than any other four month period would have. I envy those on the year-long programs, though, unbeknownst to me during my departure, the exchange ended at a most serendipitous time. Hong Kong would go on to experience its worst wave of covid yet, with one flight attendant that skipped quarantine during the week I left acting as patient zero and being all it took to breach and ultimately take down the zero-covid bubble, with my family remaining there eventually catching it in September. Those that would stay for the second half of the year had to endure yet another semester of online classes, prompting many to leave and finish the semester elsewhere. The funniest thing is, I would go on to meet one of the first 10 CUHK students infected in January 2022 during his exchange here at Dartmouth right now (September 2022).
Throughout it all, I can assuredly say that there were many, many favorite days to choose from. From that epic bike ride with Ivan and the boys, to the cable car rides of Lantau, to Disneyland and Ocean Park, to Lamma and Cheung Chau islands, even just aimlessly wandering the streets of Central and Tsim Sha Tsui, and of course, the hikes up to Suicide Cliff, Braemar Hill, and Sunset Peak, giving us unimaginable aerial views of massive skyscrapers juxtaposed with rising mountains, one commonality among it all was doing it with amazing friends and new people that I never could have imagined meeting while stuck in my quarantine hotel at Chek Lap Kok. With more sunsets watched (and enjoyed) in these few months than in the rest of my entire life, I now have a newfound appreciation for nature I didn’t even develop after becoming a Dartmouth student, and that fact was made ever more apparent when that nature is readily accessible without a car, and with friends willing to explore with you, nowhere is too far of a journey to experience with them by your side. As the weeks went by, each day waking up became more enjoyable despite the shortening length of sleep I received each night, fueled only by Tong Kee Bao and the anticipation of not knowing what the day would hold, what new adventure awaited us.
Some of my Favorite Photos
Hong Kong, Listified
I was also taught that one’s experience of a new place is not solely limited to the visual sense. As I had mentioned while writing of my time at home this summer, the auditory aspect of a new place, especially one that’s very foreign from the one you grew up in, is often overlooked for its more flashy counterpart, your visual memory. Same goes for your sense of taste. Both of these sensory memories are, in my opinion, harder to reconjure without its source than visuals, and you are often not aware that they even exist until you encounter either that sound or taste again in a different environment, like me finding a white noise video consisting of MTR rides. Despite this, I could still name some of the most iconic sounds of Hong Kong, that, to this day, will give me chills upon hearing them:
- The slow clicking of the street crossing buttons as we wait, and the rapid staccato of clicks as the light turned to “walk”.
- Everything about the MTR. The happy 8-bit style music played by the braille map within every MTR station. The escalator clicking. Swiping in with your octopus card with its minor 6th beeps. Platform and train announcements in the order: Cantonese, Mandarin, British-accented English. The screech of a train pulling into the station followed by two major third beeps announcing doors opening. “Please mind the gap”. “Please hold the handrail.” “請勿靠近車門, 请不要靠近车门, Please stand back from the train doors.” Followed by 18 “doots” of C(5).
- Don don don, donki! Donqui…jote! Miracle Shopping at Don Don Donki
- The clatter of plates and teacups at dim sum restaurants
- The smatterings of Cantonese you hear all over the place, whereby even if it was unintelligible to us, it was a cool thing to hear nonetheless, like hawkers at the street markets.
- The growling engines of taxis, and the roars of the busses.
- The silence and serenity of a dark night on top of a mountain with nothing but a calm chilly breeze.
- The pounding of waves at the many beaches of Hong Kong, someplace you wouldn’t normally associate with sandy beach vacation destinations.
- And for myself as a personal memory, both Rach 2 and the Paganini Variations, and the Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto after seeing them performed with the HKPhil…
As well as the smells, flavors, and foods of Hong Kong:
- The smell of CUHK Campus and the native greenery in the morning as I sat at the UC bus stop, taking in the views from the mountaintop.
- Cha Chaan Teng, the quintessential Hong Kong diner experience, and the one that almost all the CUHK cafes were modeled after.
- Dim Sum Dishes like Liu Sha Bao (Molten Egg Custard Buns), Char Sui Bao, shrimp wraps, vermicellis, congee, and of course, Hong Kongnese and Portuguese egg tarts.
- Sushi, but especially “conveyer belt” sushi, if not the flavor, then the novelty experience.
- A surprisingly large number of Italian restaurant visits.
- Hong Kong lemon and milk teas.
- Pocari sweat, my actual lifesaver.
- Hot pot galore, and all the various soup bases you can have with that.
- Soup dumplings.
- And Chinese classics, like Ho Fun, fried rice, and 两送饭 (rice with two entrees).
Along the way, despite not having taken an official Cantonese course during my exchange program, I picked up a few words and phrases here (but I am under no illusion that I am able to converse with such a limited vocabulary, and please forgive me for my atrocious romanization with lack of diacritics since I didn’t learn how to):
- Numbers 0-10: ling, ya, yi, sam, sei, mm, luo, ca, ba, gao, sum
- Thank you: mm goi (sai)
- Hello: nei hou
- Ok: hai
- CUHK: zong man dai jok
- Iced Milk Tea: leung naaih cha
- Taxi: dik see
- Hong Kong: heung gong
- MTR: gang ti
- Question: man tai
- Large/very: tai
- Kowloon: gao long
- Mong Kok: wong gok
- Tsim Sha Tsui: jeem sa zeoi
You could probably say that I had a bias already before arriving, but after arriving, my suspicions were only reinforced. The US has a lot to do in terms of catching up on urban planning, smart land-use, and undoing the damage wrought by the post-war car-centric suburban experiment:
- Over 50% of HK is in affordable public housing of some sort. It’s not always the best, but when there’s almost always a housing shortage, something is better than nothing. Though in all honesty, Hong Kong is also very restrictive on new developments and contributes to its own housing crisis somewhat.
- Have I mentioned the freakin MTR? I don’t need to say anything else about it at this point. The only thing that sucks is the lack of service between 1 – 5am.
- With Kowloon Motor Bus being the dominant bus company and additional companies covering what they don’t, if the MTR doesn’t take you somewhere, you’ll almost always find a bus that does, and even then, a minibus will take you there just a well.
- Hourly ferries between all the major islands, and even some of the more remote ones.
- Centralized transit payment system highly integrated with the rest of the city, with almost everything except restaurants taking Octopus card for payment.
- As far as a city goes, you don’t get much cleaner than Hong Kong. Public waste management systems here go off.
- Safety is unparalleled—almost every single U.S. exchangee has mentioned how comfortable they feel walking alone at night in such a huge city, something you could never find back in the states. I won’t go into any political speculation of why this is the case, only stating this fact.
Hong Kong is certainly not without its flaws, though.
- The obvious number one complaint voiced by almost everyone I knew was the slow but steady political and cultural assimilation into Mainland China that has and will continue to happen. While I do not profess to know anything remotely close to even an inkling of the geopolitical knowledge needed to form an opinion about the situation, I am saddened by the slow repression of Cantonese/Hong Kong culture that mainland politicians seem to be pushing, especially with regard to Cantonese as a language.
- It’s speculated that the Hong Kong government keeps housing prices artificially high by restricting new housing developments, on undeveloped land while only a small proportion (somewhere in the 15% range) of Hong Kong is actually developed. While keeping a balance between city development (I would hardly call it sprawl like we have here) and the natural beauty of Hong Kong’s greenery that makes it such a great place is certainly a difficult task, I think there’s certainly viable options for more affordable housing that are not being considered (i.e. the land closer to the border near Shenzhen).
- The tropical climate, especially when I first got there in September, was brutal. The AC made it much more bearable though.
- Expensive AF. You’d find NYC prices and higher at most of the high-end and chain places, though there is certainly a much larger proportion of cheaper food and items than in a western city.
- Too many freakin mosquitos and little gnats!
Acknowledgements in Photos
Here are the people that made the whole thing something to look back and cry about. Images roughly ordered in the frequency with which I hung out with all of them, but of course, family comes first (see captions).
And finally, not pictured are the CUHK OAL staff of Alex, Louis Wong, and Shally Fan, Noelle Warinsky from Guarini, and Prof. Benoit Cushman-Roisin, the Thayer exchange programs advisor, for making the whole program possible. Plus, the past exchangees Moon Cheong, Jake Epstein, Nicholas Washington, and Yanling Lei gave me helpful tips during my preparation before arrival when I called them to talk about their experiences. I passed on my knowledge to the future years’ exchangees with my super long prep and bucket list document, and the bucket list/rough list of places I went and recommend starts at page 15, which you can check out if you’re interested. Also attached here is the playlist of YouTube videos I made and collected throughout the exchange.
Now that we’re a year out from the exchange, I satisfy my nostalgia by visiting Hong Kong in Google Earth VR. If you’re ever around, ask me to show you and I’ll give you my tour of this crazy place 😀 I hope I did a sufficient enough job conveying the joy I experienced these four months to all of you through my writing, and that you enjoyed reading about my experience and had 1/100th the amount of fun as I did experiencing them 😛
Oh and just in case you made it this far, sorry I took forever to write the second half of this experience. I could’ve made life much easier had I worked on this daily, but I guess I was just having too much fun! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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