"Don't lose the change, Hannah, you're going to need it." My dad had pressed two metal coins into my palm. I looked at them. The bigger one had the curves and rolls of a flower, of a warped 50 cent piece, the smaller one a nondescript bronze piece. They felt so light in my hand, I didn't know what they were for or why I would need them. I was certain that I was going to lose them, so small and so nondescript. Money wasn't something I thought of regularly, at eleven years old.
We were sitting on benches at the Star Ferry dock at Ocean Terminal, Kowloon side. The air was heavy with moisture in that particularly Hong Kong way, as if the sky would break open at any moment. It was so hot we had hardly been outside all day, flitting from restaurant to museum (planetarium, I think, even), to mall to restaurant, that sitting in the heat of the dock's waiting bay was a shock. My feet felt heavy in their velcro-strap sandals. My brother's fringe was plastered to his head, resting on my mum's shoulder. It was the early evening and way past the bedtime of a eleven year old, a nine year old and a four year old. Soon we would be peeling off these hot, heavy clothes and getting into lilo and stitch pyjamas and settling down in our makeshift beds. Me and my brother top-tailed on a rollaway, and my youngest sibling, who at four years old was a slip of a thing, curled up between two arm chairs pushed together. We wanted to be there already, actually. The coins in my hand was the price I had to pay to get home and into bed on our last night in Hong Kong.
The Star Ferry came into the wharf, rocking ungainly on the water. We stepped gingerly onto the moving gangwalk, navigating it with the deftness of kids well-versed with Easter Show rides. We took seats in the open-air compartment, sticking our heads over the side. A salty breeze moved languorously through the cabin. With a deafening honk of the horn, the Ferry was off, taking us back to Central for a mere dollar-twenty a piece. "Hannah, look to your left, look to the Island," my dad said, pointing his hand forward. "Keep looking," he murmured, looking down at his wrist, checking his watch.
My brother saw it first. "Wow!" he shouted from the unobstructed viewpoint between the railings - the unbearable lightness of being four! of being short enough to see through railings! - and he was right. Wow. The whole of the Hong Kong skyline had lit up with a fluorescent, neon-tinged ebullience. It was exhilarating in such a simple, uncomplicated way that both the child and the adult can enjoy. That primal urge to marvel when faced with something bigger than yourself. The journey across Hong Kong harbour is short - no more than Rose Bay to Circular Quay on the Ferry in Sydney - but in the early evening, when the lights on the building fronts are turned on (HSBC! SONY! CATHAY PACIFIC! they proclaim) it seems to go for so much longer. You are treated to a show of technological advancement and commercial spectacle that seem to defy belief. We sat there, open-mouthed, transfixed by these lights. (What was it that Frank O'hara said? Is it our prayer or wish that this is occur? Oh, what is this light that holds us fast?) Humans are like the mosquito, right? We are attracted to bright lights, to big cities. Well, in this moment, Hong Kong had the brightest lights, was the biggest city, of them all.
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