Maybe I was always going to notice the horse. It is, after all, a part of how I have learnt to see the world. But there was something lovely about coming across it there, before I had arrived. A small point of recognition. I like that it entered the story before I did, it gave me another way to remember the place.
I found myself reading about the city, looking at its history, its streets, the way it moved between worlds. Somewhere in that process, I came across the character 馬
ma, meaning horse
A familiar creature, written in an unfamiliar language.
The city seemed to make room for people in the most unexpected places. Hong Kong rises in layers, its buildings pressed close together, its streets climbing and folding into one another, staircases appearing where you least expect them. Not only the buildings that rise above one another, but the histories beneath them: what was here before, what was displaced, what survived by changing shape. The sea leaves its own archive on wood, wearing away the surface until the grain begins to tell a different story.
A city, too, is shaped by what passes over it. Some layers remain visible; others are buried beneath the latest version of things. We walk through the present as though it were the whole story, forgetting how much has been built into it, and how much of that history can remain unseen. Until, sometimes, an event brings the buried layers suddenly into view.
Isn't that what a community offers? Not the promise that nothing will burn. That when something burns, someone will come carrying water. Someone will stay.
