Canto Cutie - Volume 3

“Don’t look down on Hong Kong corals!”
The early morning light rays streamed through the clear water, casting
reflections onto the large mat of stony corals. The water was just warm
enough to swim in without a wetsuit, and the waves gently rocked me about
like a baby. Equipped with a snorkel and a weight belt, I could move in all 3
dimensions of the water column, but I chose to exhale and sink to the coralcovered
seafloor. Tiny blue and yellow fish swam past me, and the turquoise
stretched on as far as I could see, speckled with a coral branch here and an
urchin spike there.
This was the quintessential image of the tropical island life, yet I wasn’t on
vacation in Maldives, French Polynesia or the Carribean. I was back home in
Hong Kong, one of the most populous and polluted cities in the world, and
unable to leave because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Chek Chau
74
Spanning only 24 miles wide and 14 miles vertically, I’d always felt like Hong
Kong was limited in what it could offer me. It was a geographically
minuscule, self-contained semi-autonomous city, and I had spent my last 20
years zooming around the same subway lines and hiking in the same country
parks. Opportunities seemed limited for an aspiring marine biologist like
me, and by 18, I felt completely beat down by Hong Kong’s high-pressure
education system and was growing increasingly wary of totalitarian China’s
growing influence over Hong Kong. That’s why I left my city in 2018 to study
at a college in the United States, where the land seemed to stretch on forever
in the horizon.