This week in PostMag: the people who make Hong Kong tick, romance novels, and the UAE
This week, we shine a spotlight on Hong Kong’s shift workers, and speak to the world’s premier collector of Ming-dynasty furniture
A few days before I sat down to write this post, I noticed every chair in the office was empty. Everyone had walked across the room, mobile phones at the ready, their noses pressed against the window. What was it? Particularly gorgeous light across the harbour? I craned my neck to see. The whole department was gawking at the neighbouring building, where two workers were shimmying up the arm of a crane, seemingly unbothered, at our eye level 21 storeys up. We all stood in awe.
It made me think: who powers Hong Kong? It’s easy to be swept up in the glitz and glam, to believe that’s what makes a city run, and there are few places in the world where that’s more true than here. One ride on the Star Ferry, with its mesmerising views of Central’s skyscrapers, is enough to make you think: so that’s where it all happens.
But in truth, it’s much less these glimmering towers and the suits inside them that keep this city humming than the cha chaan teng managers and convenience store cashiers. Hong Kong Shifts – the much-loved Instagram account, out now with a new book – uncovers and honours these stories.
Fai, the Star Ferry sailor who shuttles us across the harbour. Sing, the clementine farmer growing the sweet citrus at your local shop. Man, the cashier at the till who tops up your Octopus card. In this week’s print issue – and on our website – we feature a selection of these vignettes, beautifully captured and collected by Maxime Vanhollebeke and Cynthia Cheng.
As writers and editors, we collect stories, too. But a “collector” in the proper sense? I’ve never been much of one. Beanie Babies and Pokémon cards – what I imagine must have been the gateway drugs for future collectors in 1980s and 90s America – never really took. So it was all the more interesting to read about Grace Wu, the world’s leading collector of Ming-dynasty furniture, who seems to believe her path was destiny. “I think they have chosen me,” she tells Fionnuala McHugh about the Ming pieces.
It’s the kind of fate reminiscent of a romance novel – a genre that Jo Lusby discovers is on the rise in China and worldwide. In fact, readers have been voraciously consuming tales of love for years but only recently, with the help of e-books, has the genre been able to shake its stigma.
