A list of food that costs 10 HKD: some fish balls, a chicken kebab, a plain bowl of congee, a cup of coffee. Skip a day and the 20 HKD tier becomes available: 1 liter of milk, fried dumplings, BBQ pork rice. But fasting is not really a common practice within Buddhism, and the aroma of freshly made meals rising from the restaurants below makes completing your homework increasingly difficult.
My cousin used to live under these circumstances—a notion of home condensed into 20 square feet “coffin houses.” He becomes an engineer in such a small living space, converting his bed to a work desk, a dinner table, or to whatever suits his purposes. The belief that intimacy breeds affection is not applicable here, however; he tells me that to some extent, he does resent his parents for subjugating him to such a life.
“Who would want a postcard of this?” A fellow student mutters under her breath as the postcards of squalor, illuminated by neon lighting, are passed around after the tour. The tour guide herself was amazing, but the homeless masses under the bridge were probably left unamused by the group of gawking tourists, one donning a particularly perky mustache, knowing that at some point, the urban culture that is their reality was unabashedly romanticized.