I spent part of my childhood in Hong Kong, and this blog post looks back on my brief return in 2022, when I revisited the city with two friends from Singapore and reflected on both the experience and the thoughts it stirred in me.
27/12/2022 Day 1: From Singapore to Hong Kong
Zhiyang and I barely slept before the flight. Our plane was only due to depart at 6 in the morning, but we had already gone to Changi the night before, ate supper, and tried to get some rest in the lounge. Tried being the key word. Sleep was constantly interrupted by that peculiar excitement which comes before a trip, when the body is tired but the mind refuses to settle.
For me, the reason was simple. Hong Kong had always fascinated me. It felt like one of those cities that existed not merely as a place but as an idea: Chinese yet global, restless yet elegant, suspended somewhere between memory and reinvention. It had been almost a decade since my last stay. I was too young to understand what I was looking at. I only remembered staying in Tsuen Wan and attending a primary school called Lions Clubs International. My strongest impression was that Hong Kong felt fast and anxious as if everyone was permanently in motion.
Zhiyang who flew out with me was one of my closest friends from high school. We became close during our time boarding at St. Andrew’s Hall where we were roommates for slightly more than a year. His companion made this trip much more memorable.
We landed around 10 in the morning with no delay. The arrival process was much smoother than expected. There was a streamlined Covid test at customs: foreigners had to collect a temporary green pass with a barcode, fill in a form, then enter one of the cubicles for a throat swab. The whole thing took no more than five minutes. It was not nearly as tedious as I had imagined.
By the time we sorted out our SIM cards and bus cards, it was already 11. We still had to wait another half an hour for Korn to arrive. Korn was also a high school classmate, part of the same friend group. Zhiyang knew him well too as we had played basketball together before. Korn had gone back to Thailand for the holidays and decided, almost on impulse, to join us in Hong Kong straight from there after replying to my Instagram story a few days earlier. It was one of those arrangements that made little sense on paper but somehow worked. Looking back, I can only say that some of life’s best memories begin in coincidence. Or perhaps coincidence is just God remaining anonymous.
While waiting, I took a walk around the airport. Terminal One was bright and spacious, with a glass ceiling that let in warm bands of sunlight. The hall felt airy and modern, yet not impersonal. Between Terminals One and Two runs an electric train connecting the terminals, a small reminder that airports are really cities built for departure. Chek Lap Kok itself has a history larger than its architecture. If I remember correctly, its construction was pushed through during the final British years under Chris Patten, despite resistance from both Beijing and London. When it opened in 1998, it gave Hong Kong the transit capacity it badly needed and, in its own way, helped secure the city’s future as an international financial centre.
Korn arrived around 11:45. At last, it felt like the trip had properly begun.
The moment we stepped outside the terminal, we were greeted by a sharp, chilly breeze. After spending too long in Singapore’s humidity, I felt almost euphoric. During the whole trip, the weather in Hong Kong became the first thing I fell in love with and perhaps the most constant.
Our first stop was Lantau Island, just near the airport. On the bus ride, I saw rows of Hong Kong’s distinctive residential blocks, many of them public housing estates. Compared to Singapore’s HDB flats, they looked taller, more compressed, more vertical in the way Hong Kong often is. In a city where land is scarce and property punishingly expensive, height becomes necessity rather than luxury. Some older districts also still have tong laus, those aging tenement shophouses that belong to another era of the city, though we did not see many around Tung Chung.
One thing that struck me almost immediately: PRC flags were everywhere, quietly reminding you what country you were in.
We eventually got off the bus and walked toward a nearby fishing village. The place was quiet. There were not many people around, mostly elderly residents chatting over lunch or playing cards in small eateries. We picked a seafood restaurant that looked decent and had lunch there. Afterwards we walked another twenty minutes or so to our accommodation, a four-storey building standing almost absurdly in the middle of nowhere. We had chosen to stay there because it made it easier to cover most of Lantau Island. The room was bare-bones: a bed with white sheets, a small bathroom with hot water, and little else.
The afternoon was spent around Lantau, mainly Ngong Ping and later Tai O. We first visited the Tian Tan Buddha, the great bronze statue that sits above the island with a kind of calm indifference to the tourists below. By the time we reached it, the place was already crowded. From there we walked to the Wisdom Path, where the Heart Sutra is inscribed on thirty-eight wooden columns arranged in a figure-eight pattern. The setting sun was beginning to soften the sky, and somewhere along the way the light turned from clear gold into a whole spectrum of fading colour. We took a less obvious path uphill and ended up catching a sunset far more beautiful than we had expected.
Transport around Lantau, however, was a headache. If you missed a bus, you could easily lose half an hour. The cable car had a queue of nearly two hours and was expensive enough to make the wait feel insulting. We even tried hailing a cab, but none came. By the time we finally boarded a bus to Tai O, it was already past seven.
Still, Tai O was worth the trouble. The fishing village had a quiet, strange beauty to it, especially at night. Three things stayed with me most. First, while wandering through the narrow lanes, Korn claimed he smelled weed somewhere nearby. Cannabis is illegal in Hong Kong, but the whole village already had a slightly shadowy feel after dark, and the idea did not seem impossible. Second, we spoke to several elderly shopkeepers and found that they spoke neither Mandarin nor English, only Cantonese. That genuinely surprised me. I had always assumed that in a city as global as Hong Kong, bilingualism was close to universal. But here were people who lived entirely in one language and seemed no less complete for it. Perhaps globalization is not as absolute as people think. Perhaps a person can still belong fully to a small world and live well within it.
The third moment was the strangest. While we were eating at a local restaurant, the television suddenly began blasting the Chinese national anthem. Later I learned it was part of a government broadcast. It felt awkward, almost absurd, and in that awkwardness I sensed something larger: the post-handover condition of Hong Kong distilled into a few seconds of background noise. So much here felt layered with political tension, but often in indirect and slightly uncomfortable ways. I knew I would return to that thought later.
We caught the last bus back to Tung Chung and got in around 10. Nothing much was open by then, so we went grocery shopping at the community centre. On the way back, we passed a void deck where Korn decided he wanted to challenge a primary school kid to table tennis. The outcome was never really in doubt.
And that was our first day. Hong Kong had only just begun, but already it felt like a place that refused to remain merely scenic. It wanted to be thought about.
28/12/2022 Day 2: Cheung Chau — I miss you already
I woke up because of the cold. The temperature in that part of Lantau changed a lot between day and night: comfortable in the afternoon, then biting once the sun was gone. Even under a thick comforter, I still felt chilled. When I opened my eyes, sunlight was already pouring through the window. We had slept in later than planned.
After saying goodbye to the landlord, we went out for breakfast. Hong Kong has breakfast houses and bing sutts everywhere, and I came to like them very quickly. Most meals are served as a set: a main, a drink, sometimes a side. There is something efficient and unpretentious about that format. We ate at a bing sutt in Tung Chung filled with local residents starting their day, which always makes breakfast feel more real.
After that came our first proper entry into the city. On the bus ride, we passed Disneyland and crossed Tsing Ma Bridge before finally arriving on the Kowloon side. Watching through the window, the landscape shifted gradually from mountains and open space to dense urbanity, as if the city was revealing itself in stages. And yet even as the buildings thickened, Hong Kong’s defining backdrop remained unchanged: mountains behind towers, sea beside concrete. Few cities are able to look so crowded and so open at the same time.
After dropping our bags off in Jordan, we headed straight for Cheung Chau. The plan for the day came from Ming and Shawn, two of Korn’s friends from NUSC. Both had grown up in Hong Kong before moving to Singapore, so they knew the city in a way we never could. In hindsight, their suggestion was brilliant. Cheung Chau showed us a side of Hong Kong that the skyline cannot: less polished, less financial, more local, more human.
We first took the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour, perhaps the most iconic short ride in the city. The skyline rose on both sides through a veil of fog, monumental and slightly distant, as though Hong Kong preferred to make an impression before it made an introduction.
Ming and Shawn were already waiting near Central Pier. We rushed over, exchanged greetings, and managed to catch the ferry to Cheung Chau at the last minute. The boat was packed, with no seats left on either deck, so we ended up standing outside on the balcony. In retrospect that was perfect. The sea air was cold, the mood was bright, and the view made the whole trip there feel cinematic.
We spent much of the ferry ride chatting. Ming and Shawn were warm, funny, and very generous as hosts. At one point they tried teaching us basic Cantonese, which mostly resulted in us sounding ridiculous for the rest of the trip. Still, there is something endearing about being bad at a language while trying sincerely. It makes you more aware of where you stand in the world.
Cheung Chau may look tiny on the map, but once you arrive, it opens up. Around the jetty was a lively market selling food and souvenirs. Fishmongers and street vendors added to the old fishing-village atmosphere. We wandered around eating whatever looked interesting: ice cream, fish balls, chitterlings, frozen pineapple, mango mochi. It was one of those days where walking itself seemed to generate appetite.
My favourite place on the island was Tung Wan Beach on the eastern side. It was long, narrow, and unexpectedly beautiful. Somehow it reminded me of Stephen Chow films, where beaches often appear not just as scenery but as emotional space, places where comedy and sadness quietly overlap. Stephen Chow has always been one of my favourite Hong Kong filmmakers. Beneath the absurdity and humour of his films there is often something deeply serious about longing, failure, and becoming. I thought especially of A Chinese Odyssey, where love becomes inseparable from fate and sacrifice. One grows up thinking love is a reward, then later realises it is often also a burden, or at least a form of pain people accept willingly. Perhaps that is why it matters.
We sat there on the beach watching the waves come and go, and I found myself thinking again about Hong Kong itself. I loved the city not only for what it was, but for what it seemed to promise. If there were ever a chance to make it better — though “better” is always a dangerous and subjective word — I would want to be part of that. I wondered whether the British truly understood what they had built here, or whether Beijing fully understood what it had inherited. To me, Hong Kong was an extraordinary blend: Chinese industriousness, discipline, risk-taking, and resilience on one side; British legal and administrative order on the other. It was not perfect, but it was rare. And rare things are fragile. You can often feel, in a city, when change has already begun before anyone is willing to name it.
Later in the afternoon we visited Cheung Po Tsai Cave, named after the pirate who supposedly hid treasure there. The entrance was narrow and steep, and getting through it took more effort than expected. But nearby the view was stunning. The sun was beginning to fall, and the sea turned gold under the light.
On the way back, we stopped at a scenic café to rest. I ordered a cold strawberry milkshake, which was a terrible decision in winter. By evening, when we took the ferry back toward Central, the return to the city felt almost dramatic. The towers rose ahead of us once more, glittering and severe. Ming and Shawn brought us to a local restaurant for dim sum, and I remember keep thinking they were among the most charming hosts anyone could ask for.
At around 10, we said goodbye and headed back to our lodging. It had only been day two, yet somehow I already felt strangely familiar with Hong Kong, not just because I used to be a resident here. It seems that the once familiar city had begun to let me in again.
Good night, Hong Kong.
29/12/2022 Day 3: History, art, and thoughts about the future
We woke up late again and still felt tired from the day before. The cold weather made it too easy to stay in bed, but eventually we got ourselves moving and headed out.
Our first stop was the Hong Kong Museum of History, which I had been especially looking forward to as someone who has always loved history. Whenever I travel, I want to understand not just what a place looks like, but how it became itself. Museums are perhaps the quickest way to do that. They compress centuries into a few rooms and, when done well, allow a city to explain itself.
The museum had five major sections tracing Hong Kong’s history from prehistoric times through colonialism, war, development, and finally the handover to China. As I moved through the exhibitions, it became impossible not to feel how much Hong Kong had endured and transformed. The city’s story is full of disruption, but also reinvention. That is perhaps why it feels so layered today.
At that point I found myself asking again why I cared so much about Hong Kong despite having no deep personal connection to it. I was born and mostly raised in mainland China until fourteen, which means I understand both the beauty of China and many of its frustrations from within. China carries the weight of its own history: empire, hierarchy, Confucian social logic, political centralization, all of which still shape its present. It is easy to say China’s problems are too large or too ingrained to resolve. Many people do. Some even conclude that Chinese societies can never fully sustain democracy or the rule of law in the same way Western ones claim to. I have always disliked that kind of fatalism.
When I looked around the Chinese-speaking world, the two most obvious counterexamples were Taiwan and Hong Kong. Taiwan demonstrated that democratic development was possible. Hong Kong, meanwhile, represented something slightly different to me: not just political openness, but the coexistence of Chinese culture with a legal order that felt robust, disciplined, and internationally legible. That possibility fascinated me. I think part of why I care about Hong Kong is because I once saw in it a model for what a freer Chinese society might look like. Whether that hope was naïve or not is another question. In a way, I have always believed that every civilization has its own internal questions that cannot simply be outsourced. For the Chinese world, governance has long been one of them. Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China each offer a different answer, and none is complete. But Hong Kong’s answer struck me as unusually compelling.
After spending around three hours in the museum, we went for lunch at a small cart noodle shop a friend had recommended. The shop was tiny, and from the outside it did not look particularly special, but the food was excellent. There were photographs on the wall of local celebrities who had eaten there, which felt like the sort of endorsement only Hong Kong could make look casual. Korn loved the meal and asked me to bring him to more places like that. Truth be told, I was simply lucky. I had no real expertise in Cantonese food either.
In the afternoon we visited M+, the huge visual arts museum in West Kowloon. It was far larger than the history museum and we spent most of the rest of the day there. I would not normally call myself an art person, but I found myself genuinely drawn in. Good art, I think, does not necessarily teach you something entirely new. Sometimes it simply shows you what you had been seeing all along, but without knowing how to name it. In that sense, art is less about decoration than perception.
By evening we took the MTR to Hong Kong Island for dinner with Joshua, a senior I knew from Singapore. He graduated from Oxford and was planning to become a barrister in Hong Kong and had a strong grasp of legal practice both locally and abroad. Since I was already considering law seriously, I naturally asked him all sorts of questions. It is rare to meet people who can think clearly and speak coherently at the same time; Joshua was one of them. I also admired how deliberate he seemed about his future. There was no vagueness in him. He knew where he was going.
We ended the dinner around 11 because he still had to prepare for the bar exam in a few days. I had no doubt he would do well.
On the way back, I started reflecting on my own future again. Good conversations often do that to me. At the time, it seemed likely that I would study law if I ended up in Singapore or the UK, but what would happen after that remained unclear. My dream, in some distant and perhaps idealistic sense, was to establish my own law practice and gather enough influence to use it for something meaningful. It sounds abstract, maybe even quixotic, but youth is partly the permission to still believe large things may be done.
30/12/2022 Day 4: A day apart
Korn woke up determined to go to Disneyland. I told him I would pass. I had been there before and remembered it mostly as crowded and artificial, and more importantly, it was not the Hong Kong I had come to see. Korn thought otherwise. Zhiyang found himself caught in the middle, so in the end we agreed to split up for the day and meet again for dinner.
I had already planned my own route the night before: Tseung Kwan O.
Why Tseung Kwan O? Not for sightseeing, at least not primarily. I was going there to visit the Junk Bay Chinese Permanent Cemetery, where Wong Ka Kui — Koma Wong — was buried. As the lead singer of Beyond, he had been a major presence in my life growing up. His music had given me comfort and strength at different points, and when I thought of Hong Kong, I thought of him. Before heading up, I stopped at a florist to buy flowers. It seemed impolite to visit a grave empty-handed, even though I suspect Koma himself would not have cared much for formality.
The trip turned out to be more difficult than expected. The entrance to the cemetery was badly marked on the map, and I spent a long time not realizing I had already been circling around it. Worse, the graves were high up the mountain, and there was no transport. I ended up climbing for nearly two hours before finally reaching his resting place.
His grave was surprisingly modest. Had it not been for the flowers and wreaths left by fans, it would have blended almost unnoticed into the hillside among the others. The morning mist was beginning to lift. Behind me stretched the sea. In front of me was his epitaph, which roughly read: Life is not about what you get, but what you do; long live the spirit of rock and roll.
Standing there, I felt a quiet sadness, that peculiar heaviness that comes from standing before someone who represents something bigger than themself. Koma’s songs had always carried a certain faith in struggle, the idea that effort and sincerity could overcome almost anything. When I was younger, I believed life worked more cleanly like that. Later I realized it usually does not. Still, in difficult moments, I often returned to his music, and it never failed to give me some strength.
I stayed there for close to three hours before leaving for Lei Yue Mun in the afternoon. I wandered without much purpose, through fish markets, a public library, and nearby housing estates. The city revealed itself again in those ordinary spaces. Hong Kong is famous for its skyline, but a place is never most truthful in its postcard image. It is more truthful in its markets, stairwells, side streets, and tired neighbourhoods, where life proceeds without regard for how outsiders imagine it.
By evening the city began to glow. Streetlights came on, grills started smoking, conversations grew louder. Hong Kong at night does not so much settle as change tempo. I went back to Jordan to meet Zhiyang and Korn, and the three of us had dinner together at a dim sum place recommended by Korn’s family. Later, Korn and I decided to go clubbing, so we headed to Lan Kwai Fong and picked a venue that felt relatively international.
That night I told myself I might return to Hong Kong one day and experience it differently. Next time, I thought, I would speak to more people, stay out longer, and try harder to meet the city on its own terms. But at the same time, I felt there would be nothing wrong if this ended up being my last visit. To be frank, I no longer saw much left here for me, or perhaps I had already taken from the city the reflections I came for. Maybe it was time to move on to a new and larger arena. Surely that would be better for me.
RJWANG19 
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