Picked up the slack this past week and had spent more time setting up the studio space and less time staring meaninglessly at my investment portfolio value going up and down. Bought a couple of used furniture for the studio, felt good to be giving some useful objects a second chance before they end up in landfills. Also bought a couple of basic equipment to start my digital fabrication design work. Should be able to finish hooking up the machines this coming week and start designing and making functional and sustainable objects soon after!
Had a couple of lunch meetups with friends on Monday and Friday. Had some late drinks with some friends on Thursday again before one of them flied back to HK. While I was grabbing a quick dinner near the studio on Friday, I bumped into a couple of high school fellowship friends together with their teenage daughter sitting right next to me! The HK Cantonese community can sometimes feel small and closely knitted in this culturally diverse city. On Saturday, I met up with some friends to kickoff another season of bball fun. Overall, I had a very good dose of social activities this past week to balance the loneliness of living and working alone.
Went to a Talk on Friday night, it was about Hongkonger identity through HK history since 1841 with a bit of Christianity background. The speaker mentioned some studies saying that Chinese people are more keen on preserving their cultural identity after emigration, they sometimes hold more “Chinese-ness” than those who stayed in China. This got me thinking, with the mass exodus of Hongkongers since 2019, those who had left the city like me can actually be a key in preserving the “Hongkong-ness” of the city’s fast declining cultural identity?! Maybe my upcoming design work away from HK can actually be more meaningful than I think.
Joined a candlelight vigil yesterday night to commemorate a massacre that happened 37 years ago. The annual candlelight vigil can no longer be held publicly in HK since NSL was unilaterally imposed without public consent in 2020. Many original organizers of the candlelight vigil are still imprisoned to this day. It was bittersweet to be able to attend the commemoration last night and doing a Hongkonger thing that can only be done outside of HK. After returning to Canada, I feel an added responsibility to preserve the little “Hongkong-ness” in me in this culturally diverse and free country. I will continue to pray for the political prisoners in HK who had loss their freedom. May God be with them and that they won’t lose hope or faith while enduring the hardships.🙏🏻
