hong kong

The first day of this year, I was at home, with loved ones all around me; the last day, I was alone, surrounded by strangers in an enclosed metal tube hurtling through the sky.1 The first class I paid attention to at HKU2 was Buddhism 101, where I was reminded of impermanence, and perhaps that is the best word to describe this year.3

Hong Kong is known as a major food and finance city.4 It is less known for the world-class mountains that the rest of the buildings have grown up around and onto, which is perhaps more a testament to Hong Kong’s strength in other domains than a slight on its nature. For reference, North Carolinians will often proclaim with great pride that their state is the best one because they are an equidistant three-hour drive from both world-class beaches and world-class mountains. This is, to be fair to my school state (and state school), fairly impressive in America. Well, in Hong Kong, you get areas like this, roughly fifteen minutes from the city center.

Repulse Bay Beach AND mountains. Not pictured: you can hike to this beach directly from a mountain. Sorry, North Carolina

Anyways, I begin with Hong Kong because I landed on January 1st. I suppose I had two first days of 2026. On one of these days, I landed and met Herrick. Herrick is one of the smartest, kindest, and most thoughtful people I know. For starters, he agreed to host me while I was on the plane from Vancouver to Hong Kong. He once lent me $60 to UberEats flowers to give my girlfriend. Our senior year, I was chairing a Model UN committee, and after he agreed to help on late notice despite never having done the activity, he ended up chairing an entire session. Herrick is probably the reason I passed chemistry, mathematics, and high school.5 Study abroad is filled with conversations that skate on ice — where are you from, what’s your major, etc — and I enjoyed swimming with Herrick this time around. We also met up with Tanya, the only character trumping this crossover in sheer glory being the guy at the waterfront who refused taking our photo. What an incredible introduction to Hong Kong that was, and this trio was.

Footnotes

  1. Most notably, I was sitting next to a man who would promptly take his shoes off, put in his headphones, and go on to maintain conversations with six different women across three timezones over the next fourteen hours. I know this because for ~ten minutes on the tarmac, he talked to me like I was his seventh woman. What an introduction to Hong Kong. ↩

  2. Notably, different from the first class I took at HKU. ↩

  3. An equivalence is “ups and downs” which is prima facie less poetic but when considering the literal differences in elevation, even more (contrivedly) so. ↩

  4. To some of my American friends, it is also known as China. Not a political statement on their part, more of an American one. Americans never cease to amaze me. ↩

  5. For most of high school, I studied with Raymond and Herrick on these two subjects. I would predictably get one IB mark lower than Raymond and two IB marks lower than Herrick. The astute reader will observe this somewhat capped my maximum score in these two subjects, one of which I now major in. ↩