It was an unseasonably cold November afternoon. I finished my workout at the gym and hurried back to the office. I walked down the precipitous Wyndham Street, where dense traffic from Midlevels collected and emptied onto Queen’s Road Central. The cacophony of car horns and audible traffic signals for the blind reached a deafening crescendo, drawing everyone’s attention to the busy crosswalk that marked the start of Pedder Street. There, pedestrians built up along the curb and stared unseeing at their mirror image on the opposite side. Double-decker buses and delivery trucks pushed forward in every direction and shook the ground like a wildebeest migration. Dispassionate traffic lights changed at even intervals, trapping and releasing machines and humans competing for speed. The opening bars of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue started to ring in my head. It was lunch time in Central. One of Hong Kong's busiest intersections Outside Marks & Spencer, a homeless woman ...
A biweekly column on Hong Kong by Jason Y. Ng