Canto Cutie - Volume 3

The driver spoke of his childhood free-diving for scallops, and how his
adolescent self would fish underwater breathing air pumped down from
the surface. As an adult, he made his living by being a bus driver, but
occasionally picked up boat-driving gigs in his spare time.
“It’s great that you can study marine conservation and learn more about
the seas here,” He said in the middle of the field trip, referencing my
marine biology major, “At your age, I didn’t study hard enough to go to
college, but it didn’t matter, because I had to work and support my
family anyways.”
Despite his lack of formal education, he knew multitudes about our
local seas, in stark contrast to my ignorance of Hong Kong marine life.
Studying in California, I was familiar with sunburst anemones, kelp
forests and sea otters, and could tell you everything about trophic
cascades and ecological theories, but I knew so little about my
homeland’s waters. Why did I venture across the Pacific Ocean in
pursuit of a marine biology degree without even looking in the waters in
my backyard?
After that field trip, I decided to enroll in a community science volunteer
program established by a local non-profit conservation organization.
They were recruiting divers to help take photos of transects laid out over
coral reefs at a marine park. I had not SCUBA-dived in four years, but I
was desperate to learn more about the biodiversity of Hong Kong.
Before getting to dive, we had to attend a briefing session about the
corals of our city.
“Hong Kong has 84 coral species within our tiny territory, which is more
than that of the entire Carribean Sea,” The lecturer said. “However, Hong
Kong waters are a stressful environment for corals to live in.”
Located at the edge of the tropics, Hong Kong waters become a little
chilly for corals. Aside from low temperatures, the destruction of coastal
habitats by overfishing, dredging, reclamation and sewage discharge
wiped out 80% of the corals in Hong Kong’s Tolo Channel in the 1980s.
I sighed. This sounded more like the Hong Kong I was familiar with.
Even though the field site I visited with my internship was quite pristine,
my city was imprinted in my brain as a land of contaminants. I
remember the countless times where I would walk by the harbour where
small fishing boats and yachts mingled over the glistening, filmy
seawater, and smell the most curious odor of fish mixed with gasoline. I
recalled hiking up to a viewpoint over a secluded beach, and seeing the
sand absolutely obscured by plastic trash with labels ranging from
Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Cantonese.
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