Flux
2016—25
Compiled in 2025
Photography (B/W) + Text
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The drone of cicada song drifts into the apartment from the wooded hillside across the road. It arrives in waves. Internal chorus and coda mingle, abruptly fade and restart again, reminding me of an internet dial-up connection from 1999. The ebb and flow of their song becomes less noticeable as the morning wears on, subsumed by more powerful currents, ones I’m familiar with. Twenty floors down, fleets of buses dispose of their contents at places of employment. My neighbour is chopping vegetables, and another is vacuuming their floor, my ceiling. I succumb to the morning’s gravitational pull and drift out of bed.
I’m not part of the horde entering a workplace. I left my job a year ago. Instead, I watch people crossing the footbridge from the MTR into office towers—a blur of bodies attuned to globalised time. Minds already plugged into the day ahead, problem-solving, putting out fires, looking miserable, indifferent, or just anticipating lunch.
Me, I’m liable to be found at the cha4 chaan1 teng1 near my home, slowly drinking zaai1 fe1 and chewing on do1 si2. The breakfast of champions. My thoughts are still muddled as I wake up, still buffering. I think back to when I was young, post-mum, my next-door neighbour, Gail, would sometimes drive me to school. I remember sitting in her old car, the upholstery having an aged but intoxicating smell, leather mixed with cigarettes, waiting the requisite few minutes for the engine to warm up, and watching Skittles—her cat— through the window, perched on the hot water heater down the side of our house, herself observing the morning, getting in her mindfulness. I think I’m trying to be that cat.
Maybe that’s what I’m chasing—a slower mode of time. One that doesn’t demand so much forward motion of me. I think about modes of time as I pass by the flamingos (013) in Kowloon Park in the late hours of the evening. I’m later reminded of a scene from Mr Palomar, Italo Calvino’s novel, where the title character visits the great hall of the crocodiles and thinks: ‘What are they waiting for? In what time are they immersed?’1
The flamingos shift as a cohort, hardly perceptible, the adults a pinkish-white against the surrounding shadows of their pond. The younger ones, grey-ish, muddle in with the water. I watch them watching nothing in particular, immersed in their own kind of flux. Their own time. Their wings must be clipped. Are they aware of their innate ability to fly? Do they still carry this instinct? Migration is hardwired into their bodies, into bone, into feather. A seasonal instinct, now artificially suspended. I wonder if they feel the invisible tug of elsewhere while standing in this Tsim Sha Tsui pond.
Perhaps time circles back on itself in a loop. A repeat button of sorts. Like our flamingos, circling in each other in place, migratory creatures with nowhere to go. When I arrive home at night, the cicadas are singing again. They’ve reclaimed the soundscape now that the traffic’s lessened, and the last tram’s returned to the Shau Kei Wan Depot. I open the sliding door wide. Their song drifts into the apartment. I resist turning on the aircon and sit under the ceiling fan for a bit. Their arhythmic chorus prepares me for sleep.
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