Let's enjoy life in this crazy and unique city

Hong Kong is one crazy city. How often do you see six guys grabbing hold of one of their friends and ramming him or her against the side of a door or a tree, all the while singing, “Happy corner to you”?

And this is done for fun. Fun? Where I come from, Canada, fun does not involve making one another infertile.

Regardless, every culture has its own traditions and rituals. Despite all the Disneys, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, we still have our own nuances, those things that make our cultures unique.

So what makes Hong Kong unique? Hong Kong is going to the bank and opening an account. As I slid $10,000 across the table to a very professional-looking branch manager, I noticed she was writing with a Hello Kitty pen.

A few minutes later, she asked if she could take my picture with her cell phone. Realizing it was too late to escape with my money, I agreed and hoped that maybe one day, I’d see that $10,000 again.

Hong Kong is opening all the windows when it is 8 degrees outside and everyone is shivering in bulky jackets and knee-length scarves. And in one office, someone had the audacity to turn on an air conditioner!

Shivering, I asked the person beside me why we didn’t just close the windows and turn off the air conditioner, to conserve the heat and warm up the room. Their reply? “We don’t want bad air”. Bad air? What ever happened to warm air?

Hong Kong is a language made of so many tones that no matter what I say seems to come out completely wrong. Thinking I could impress my new local friends, I decided to tell them my last name in Cantonese. Instead of “ngoh sing sam”, my sentence came out as “ngoh sing gam”. I found that if I say the latter, people either break out into laughter or stare at me blankly trying to decipher what I just said.

Hong Kong is many things. It is having all the showers busy in your hostel at 2 a.m. It is taking every photo with a “victory” sign. It is singing karaoke until 6 a.m. and taking the KCR home. It is falling asleep on the KCR and waking up in Lo Wu. It is running around “happy cornering” each other.

All of you reading this know what I’m talking about. After all, this is Hong Kong.

So what makes Hong Kong unique? It’s you. It’s me.

It’s everything from the Hello Kitty pen at the bank to the happy corner ritual.

Be proud of this city. I guarantee that there is no other place like it anywhere in the world. Enjoy.

Jonathan Suter
Exchange student from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, now studying at The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Letters to the Editor, with the writer’s name, address and daytime contact number, should be sent to: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Room 202, Humanities Building, New Asia College, or faxed to 2603-5007, or e-mailed to varsity@cuhk.edu.hk. Letters may be edited for reasons of space, style and clarity.

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