An advance apology for those who are here for pictures of Evangeline. I've had something percolating for a while that I need to get off my chest, so this post is sadly Evangeline-free. We've been living in Hong Kong for well over a year, so I feel comfortable saying that I really like it here. Walking through our village a few months ago, I caught myself looking at the busy streets with a surprising amount of affection: everyone in parkas even though it was 65 degrees, huge bamboo steamers filled with dim sum, grandmas rifling through bins of sweet potatoes. These people may be crazy sometimes, but I have come to love them.
Without a doubt, it's been hardest to adapt to the pushiness and rudeness that one encounters on a daily basis. I think I've referred to this before, but most people in Hong Kong have a me-first attitude that can be baffling and infuriating. They take up elevator space at the expense of those in wheelchairs, push and shove and cut in line to get on to the MTR, and often pretend to not see the elderly and disabled who could really use a seat on the train or the bus. Perhaps the funniest thing to me are the people living in our building who intentionally close the elevator doors on others. I mean, these are your
neighbors that you're going out of your way to inconvenience. You're going to see them again, and wouldn't you want them to hold the elevator for you?
My best coping mechanism, beside a sense of humor, has been to adjust my expectations. If you don't expect the people around you to be courteous, it isn't nearly as frustrating when they're not. And when someone actually goes out of their way to hold the elevator for you, or gives up their seat when you're carrying both a tired child and a bag of groceries, you feel blessed by the milk of human kindness. Managed expectations take so much annoyance out of life.
But there was still one thing that was really hard for me to let go of, and it might seem surprising to you: turnstiles. Most of the turnstiles in the MTR stations are automatic; you beep your card on the reader and the little doors swoosh open so you can walk through. All stations have at least one extra-wide turnstile for people in wheelchairs and those with luggage or strollers. These turnstiles are activated on either side, so both people who are exiting and those who are entering can use the same one. When I am pushing Evangeline in the stroller, I almost always choose to go through the wide one. Yes, the stroller fits through the standard size, but it's easier to go through the extra-wide, and perhaps more importantly, I feel like I
deserve to go through it. And I always make a point to never go through the extra-wide when I'm not pushing the stroller, feeling superior that I'm leaving it open for someone who really needs it. Most of the time, this isn't a problem, but there was one place that turned out to be my nemesis.
In the East Tsim Sha Tsui station downtown, which we walk through every week to go to church, the turnstiles are (poorly) designed so that the closest one to the escalators from the arriving trains is the extra-wide. If you're trying to exit the station from the inside, you have to walk a little bit out of your way to get to a standard size turnstile, which is way too far for the average Hong Konger! So when a train arrives, there's usually a crowd of people trying to get through that single spot, and good luck to anyone on the other side who is trying to get in using that same turnstile.
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| My nemesis (on the left) in a calm moment from outside the station; there are more turnstiles off to the right |
Being the occasionally stubborn and self-righteous person that I am, every week coming back from church I would try to battle my way through the extra-wide. As you can imagine, this would rarely end well. During the struggle to beep my card before the person did on the other end, my card would register but then the other person would walk through, messing my card up. I would have to go to the customer service kiosk to have my card reset in order to try again. Every time this happened, I would seethe with rage about how rude these people were, that they wouldn't let a woman with a child in a stroller through the turnstile that is especially made for wheelchairs and strollers. We
deserved to use it, for crying out loud! One morning, I noticed that I was tensing up even before we got to the station, preparing myself for another ugly encounter, and that's when it hit me that I was still fighting Hong Kong. I was never going to win, no matter how many times I stood up for my "rights" and for the unwritten rules of a polite society. Seeing the usual crowd around the extra-wide, I said to Joseph, "Maybe I'll just use the regular ones that are out of the way." Joseph dryly replied, "Sounds like a good idea."
It might seem trivial to you, but it was important for me for me to admit defeat in my adaptation to the culture here, my Waterloo if you will..Hong Kong is tricky because on the surface, it is an extremely easy city for Westerners to live. I think you get lulled into a false sense of belonging, when in reality the local culture and attitude is quite different. Hong Kongers think their manners are infinitely superior to those of the mainland Chinese, but to a Western person, they don't seem that different. As uncivilized as they are to us, the rude behavior is acceptable here, and no amount of unpleasantness from me will alter that. I know that I have changed a little--I am definitely more pushy and have stopped apologizing when I brush past people. But I'm never going to stop doing all the things that normal Americans do, like stopping to help someone who just dropped the entire contents of their coinpurse on the sidewalk. My irrational hope is that these tiny acts of kindness will inspire others to be just a little bit nicer to the people around them. In any case, I'm just going to keep on being me, and Hong Kong can just keep on being itself, and that's finally okay.
