Encounter with a Hongkonger at a Hostel in Taiwan

On the rooftop terrace, we talked about traveling; things like finding stylish and affordable accommodation through online searches, riding bicycles around small towns usually missed by annoying crowds of tourists, and avoiding expensive metropolises with barren cultural lives.

We gossiped about other people but revealed nothing about ourselves. Each trip is an escape from one’s identity.

We complained about real estate speculation in our cities despite the economic recession, which is actually a long and sophisticated process of cross-border money laundering by people fleeing their homelands. We discussed immigration and shifts of citizenship during regime handovers, pandemic outbreaks, and wars far away or impending.

Having witnessed the same cruelty of history respectively, are we sharing the same fate after all?

“Did you hear about the big movement in Hong Kong in 2019?”

“Yes, I did.”

Two hundred meters away, a train clanked by, drowning out our words. The hostel’s fish flags fluttered in the whispering wind. A bird leaped from a broken beam of an abandoned house, flying away from the commotion. In forty minutes, the sun would set where the train had gone. Tomorrow, we would depart with the same train to where the sun was setting.

It was the moment closest to a taboo topic, an unnamed incident from several years ago, in our conversation during each of our journeys from the silenced past to an uncertain destiny.