Last Night in HK

After a drink with friends at LKF, I took a taxi home that drove through Kennedy Road to Stubbs Road. It was probably the first time in many many years that I passed through the route that I would take going home everyday from elementary school to high school until I left for Canada after Form 4 (Grade 10).

I couldn't help chatting with the taxi driver about all the buildings that I remembered. There was the school St. Joseph right down the steps of my old school St. Paul's Co-ed. Before we passed by the entrance of Hopewell Center on Kennedy Road, there were these haunted houses that were no longer there. I believe that Yonfan once shot some scenes outside those vainished haunted houses for his movie DOUBLE FIXATION.

Before hitting Tang Shiu Kin Hospital, there was a steep bunch of stairs and a road that led up to the apartment building where I was born and raised in Shiu Fai Terrace. There was a heroin addict who had built a hut (and lived there for years) somewhere hidden in the middle of the path between my apartment building and Wan Chai.

One summer day, I remember people complained that there was a nasty stench from the hut. They thought that someone had died there. My friend and I heard about the news and gathered our courage to check the hut out. My friend went inside and found the dead body, but I was too scared to go in. We called the police. Once the policeman came, he wouldn't let me go inside to look at the body. I really regretted that day of not having seen the dead body.

That brief cab ride reminded me of the verses of Wordsworth's immortal "Tintern Abbey":

These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

  As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:


  But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din


  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them


  In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,


  Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;


  And passing even into my purer mind,


  With tranquil restoration: -- feelings too


  Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,


  As have no slight or trivial influence


  On that best portion of a good man's life,


  His little, nameless, unremembered, acts


  Of kindness and of love.

Just as I am getting used to Hong Kong, I have to go back to Los Angeles again.