Modern Relationship in HK

HK, as its meaning in Chinese, “the port of fragrance”, for people like me, it is just for temporary parking. No matter how small this Oriental Pearl is, no matter how familiar we are with all locations, still we feel like only passers-by in this city.

And some of us, become the familiar strangers. We used to know each other quite well, while now too awkward to become friends and even to communicate with.

Many are suffering from the relationship. They left their hometown and met in this city. The chemistry was on. After dating a couple of times, one was assigned to another city, leaving without calling this relationship an end, or having to call it an end.

Relationship was kind of distorted today. We can probably work in the same building and meet many times in the lift without talking, while could be MSN friends in a second without seeing each other. Relationship can be easy and fast like instant noodles, while sometimes too bland to endure the test of time and distance. Or rather, people are just too tired and too lazy to maintain long-term relationship, or lack of confidence to maintain?

I have been seeking for this answer but in vain.

Till one day I promiscuously reviewed a friend’s note on FB. Her anthropology study subject is about unmarried women’s abortion, which means she has to get approach to a world where people-like her and me-have never been, and people we have never known before. After a lot of conversations, she had a question: why we can communicate with strangers that well while it didn’t work out for many people we know and love?

And this time as an outsider, I finally found the point.

Communications are easy with strangers. We don't need to worry what we would expose in front of them, however for people we know, we fear of what people will regard us by the way we talk and behave, since we don't even know or trust ourselves. Once we do, the relationship is doomed. As time goes by, the period to mourn gets shorter and shorter, till one day, we don’t feel any excitement, even when true love is on its way getting close by, we doubt, we numb, and we fear, at last we refuse and deny.

In HK, with too tremendous speed and too surprising change of life and work, it is easy to make it come true.

I always wander alone around the island. I see the debauchery, with my eyes and with my mind. This city is as colorful as a huge dye vat, I feel like walking on the rim of it, watching people dyeing into different colors in it and imagined myself of how I would become, while too coward to jump in.

Today I am still wandering around the city with my great sentimentalism. Today I am still wondering, when will I run into someone, who is also walking on the rim, or, when will I be brave enough to jump?