A walk on Tai Ping Shan Street

Turning onto Square Street in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan neighborhood is as close as one comes to a transformative experience in this city. First, you pass the mystical Man Mo temple where young locals burn incense to petition the gods for career success. As you walk up a small hill, you stare at one of Hong Kong’s iconic ladder streets whose massive granite steps seem to ascend to the heavens. The din of restaurants and traffic on Hollywood Street below recedes. The pedestrian crowd thins.

Then you come face to face with a dramatic Bruce Lee mural. It resembles the close-up camera-work of a fight scene from one of his movies. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are fixed, one assumes, on an approaching attacker. He’s wearing the yellow jumpsuit he wore in Game of Death.

I go out of my way to walk through this part of Sheung Wan, especially in the evenings after work. It leads to one of the most eclectic parts of Hong Kong. This small neighborhood reminds me why I still enjoy living here after nearly 10 years, the last three marred by the quashing of 2019's pro-democracy protests, COVID-induced isolation, and creeping authoritarianism. It’s a placid enclave that fuses Chinese traditions, British colonial hallmarks, and aspects of the city’s modern history in ways that feel quaint and airy rather than congested, utilitarian, or gaudy like much of Hong Kong.

When I first moved to this city, I knew Sheung Wan as a drab warren of streets lined with vendors hawking identical goods – mostly Chinese herbs and salt-cured seafood – and small machine shops bending metals into pipes, street signs, and other prosaic fare. Many of these small proprietorships are vestiges of the city’s trade with mainland China, and brought wealth into Hong Kong in years past.

Sheung Wan has little in common with the city’s massive finance sector, with its heaving office buildings, flashy luxury shops, and throngs of accountants, bankers, lawyers, and recruiters crowding into pricey restaurants at lunch hour and upscale bars in the evenings. Instead, it has taken on some color by adding vegan restaurants, coffee shops, and boutique hotels. But it never shed its workaday trappings, and COVID finished off its attempts at rejuvenation.

Nonetheless, Sheung Wan has been my chosen home for much of my time in Hong Kong. At first I lived in a humdrum old industrial building in the warren of Old Sheung Wan. The second floor had been converted into apartments with refurbished walls and gleaming European appliances. Mine looked out onto a small park ensconced in the perma shade created by large surrounding buildings. The elevator was a cargo lift with malfunctioning air con that circulated warm air and offered no respite during the months of the year that are inhumanely torrid.

Years later, I moved onto the forty-third floor of one of the most recognizable buildings in the neighborhood where young finance professionals, foreign journalists, and well heeled local families live. My home office looked onto a forest of apartment towers that lit up in a mass of yellow, orange, and white lights at night. My life there still mostly revolved around the warren of old Sheung Wan.

A new job and another new apartment shook me out of the warren and into a part of Sheung Wan I hadn’t explored. I began walking different streets on my way to and from work, and in this way came across the Bruce Lee mural.

Passing the mural leads to Tai Ping Shan Street, a short stretch of road, lined with boutiques, craft stores, cafes, noodle shops, art stores, and Buddhist temples. Its buildings are low-rise walk ups, allowing pedestrians to feel a connection to the sky, maybe their first of the day after trekking through the cavernous rows of office and apartment towers.

These buildings were built generations ago when simple, square units arose to house the city’s growing population. Some have recessed windows that allow a sense of privacy. Many are protected by aluminum anti-burglary window grates that form quaint geometric patterns and can be seen in older parts of the city.

You can walk in the center of the street. Traffic is rare and when a vehicle appears, it’s usually a slow moving Tesla, not a bullying taxi or diesel spewing delivery truck.

There’s a mix of locals and foreigners. A traditional noodle shop with a curbside counter exists comfortably with French and Norwegian restaurants.

The store facades are all fresh, matching the upscale fare they sell: handmade ceramics, designer sneakers, and tee-shirts that look like the ones precocious teens wear in art house films. It's a stark contrast with the nondescript storefronts of most of Hong Kong’s streets.

For those more spiritually minded, there’s a meditation school and a small shop selling crystals. For the fashion minded, there are high-end boutiques. But there are no pushy sales people.

On one Sunday afternoon, a woman set up an easel on a side street, painting a landscape with watercolors as local tourists looked on. On a recent Friday night, members of a film crew shooting nearby descended on a noodle shop and huddled over plates as they sat at small tables lined up on the street, their cameras and booms on the ground next to them.

A tiny art shop sits on a corner toward the end of the street. There’s room only for a small table and two chairs, one usually occupied by a young woman on hand for prospective buyers. The walls hold photos and paintings with themes of Hong Kong and mainland China: a photorealistic rendering of Yao Ming about to take a foul shot, for instance. I’ll stop and stare at them just before descending a steep stairwell with a temple on the side, sometimes redolent of incense.

I walk along Tai Ping Shan Street enjoying its atmosphere at a remove, as if walking through a diorama. I feel distanced from the people by language, culture, lifestyle. But it sustains my interest in this city and in life as a foreigner, even if my connection to it is tenuous and contingent on what I’m feeling that day.

Perhaps it suits me because its quaint and homey vibe can have a precarious tinge. Like much of life these days, it feels fragile in comparison to the forces swirling around it: a declining population; a political class reconstituted in a less democratic fashion; and tycoons who could converge at any moment, changing the complexion of the street and life on it.

Bruce Lee’s adage “Be water” – an exhortation to move fluidly and shape shift in harmony with the circumstances of a fight – became a mantra for the 2019 protesters whose tactics quickly adapted to the movements of the police. Perhaps it also serves as a gentle admonition to accept reality as it is and avoid resisting the forces of change that are inevitable, and unstoppable.