Being Chinese | What Hong Kong has taught me about fate, luck and feng shui

Some autumns ago, a midlife crisis brought me to Hong Kong, where it has been inspiring how savvy people are about Chinese cosmology

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A man stops to read an advertisement in Yau Ma Tei in 2021 for a feng shui master’s services for Chinese zodiac signs facing a challenging year. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

Published: 9:30am, 25 Jan 2025Updated: 10:57am, 25 Jan 2025

In the streets of a subtropical city like Hong Kong, the start of sweater weather is not announced by flashes of red foliage, but by the smoky scent of chestnuts being raked in roadside woks by hawkers.

Around the corner from where I live, sweaty weather ends officially, if not actually, when the public outdoor pool closes for the year and a laminated orange sign reappears outside a long-running restaurant, saying perhaps five of the most heartening words in Chinese: “Lamb brisket hotpot on market”.

In the retail streets I pass by daily, where lingerie, fast fashion and medical mask shops come and go and a drone store from Shenzhen is ushering in the future, the festive pop-up shop always returns, resplendent with lai see envelopes and Lunar New Year decorations from red to purple. While once feng shui masters smiled from vermilion, orange and yellow almanac covers on ubiquitous news-stands, now the books bring their earthy colours, along with reams of advice for the year ahead, into convenience stores and bookshops.

I’m descended from Chinese who left the old country before it was rocked by the Cultural Revolution and attacks on most things traditional, and I like to joke that the China in my heart is straight out of the Qing dynasty. This may be why I deeply appreciate an underrated aspect of life in Hong Kong – the sense that quaint Chinese ideas, customs and habits have stood the test of time and market vicissitudes and are holding up just fine, thank you.

So it was that on the most recent winter solstice, my mother called me from Singapore to send me on an errand.

She had left it too late and now she couldn’t get her hands on a Hong Kong Authentic Almanac Calendar in the usual shops there. Would I save the year and go calendar shopping on my side of the South China Sea – and it must be the old-school kind from a Hong Kong publisher, please.

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