The rain had started again, a fine, persistent drizzle that blurred my tiny kitchen window into a mosaic of grey rooftops and ghostly neon signs. It was the kind of weather that made the city feel both intimate and suffocating, the damp seeping through concrete and into your bones. I was staring at a half-peeled potato, feeling the weight of the afternoon in the dull ache behind my eyes, when the doorbell chimed.
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It was Darcy, standing in the dim hallway, drenched and grinning. He held up two plastic bags, beaded with rain. “Supplies,” he announced, brushing past me. His presence was always like this—an unannounced, slightly damp force of nature that immediately recalibrated the atmosphere of my small flat.
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I watched, bemused, as he unpacked his offerings onto my counter. There were groceries: fresh greens, a plump chicken, ginger and spring onions. And then, with the same practical nonchalance, he placed several packs of menstrual pads beside the chicken. The juxtaposition was so stark, so utterly Darcy, that I let out a short, surprised laugh.
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“What’s all this for?” I asked, leaning against the doorframe.
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He was already filling the kettle. “You looked tired on the phone last night. And your mom mentioned her back was playing up again. So, strategic support deployment.” He gestured to the pads. “You said you were running low. Saves you a trip in this weather.” He said it with the same tone he’d use to explain a bus route—factual, helpful, entirely devoid of the awkwardness that often accompanied such topics.
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And then he got to work. He didn’t ask; he just started. He bundled my neglected laundry into a basket, wiped down the surfaces I’d been ignoring, and began deftly chopping the ginger for the soup, its sharp, clean scent cutting through the flat’s musty stillness. My mother, hearing the commotion, emerged from her room, and Darcy immediately enlisted her as a sitting-down consultant, asking her to taste the broth and advise on the seasoning. I saw the tension ease from her shoulders, a smile, genuine and unforced, touch her lips. In that moment, with the rain pattering against the window and the steam from the soup fogging up the kitchen, Darcy wasn't just a visitor; he was a quiet revolution in my living room.
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This, I thought, is what change looks like. Not in grand speeches, but in bags of pads and a pot of soup. But the other change, the big, impersonal one thrumming through the city, was a constant, low-grade hum I couldn’t tune out.
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“The times have changed, a new era has come,” I murmured, more to myself than to him, as I finally picked up my potato peeler again.
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Darcy glanced at me, his knife never pausing its rhythmic tap against the chopping board. “You sound like a headline.”
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“I feel like one. A reluctant one.” I sighed. “I have to admit I don’t understand all of it, Darcy. The new laws, the rhetoric, the Communist Party… what any of it really means for someone like me, peeling potatoes in a Hung Hom flat. I don’t want the era to eat me up and chew me out.” The fear was a cold, hard pebble in my gut. To keep it at bay, I did what I always did. “I’m trying, though. I’m taking those law classes at the night school. I sit there, trying to stay awake, trying to parse the new legal jargon. I keep a positive attitude. Fake it till you make it, right?”
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Darcy tipped the chopped ginger into the simmering pot. “What are the classmates like?” he asked, his back to me. “Do they really go fight for labour rights as you would expect under socialist rule? The vanguard of the proletariat and all that?”
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I let out a dry laugh. “They’re mostly like me. Tired. Trying to get a qualification that might mean a slightly less precarious job. No one’s talking about being a vanguard. They’re talking about rent and their kids’ school fees.”
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He turned around, leaning against the counter, his arms crossed. “I wonder. I think the new communist style isn’t about that at all. The romantic, barricade-building version. But if you ask me what it really is…” He trailed off, his gaze turning inward, towards the cityscape obscured by rain. “I wouldn’t know. I simply know what it isn’t. And it’s not about rising up in violent riots, and breaking the law.”
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The words hung in the steamy air. Violent riots. They were the ghost at our feast, the unspoken fracture in our city’s recent history. My head, already fuzzy from the day, throbbed. “That stuff really sogged up my brain, Darcy. All the noise, the images. If I didn’t know better, watching it all from a distance, I would think the violent riots brought about a socialist revolution. The chaos preceding the new order.”
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Darcy’s response was immediate, firm. “That’s a silly thought, and not what happened at all.” He spoke with a clarity I found both comforting and unsettling. “The rioters were against communism and were cracked down by the communist government for the chaos they caused. It’s the opposite of what you said.”
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The rain had stopped, but the city still gleamed with a wet, bruised light. From Darcy’s rooftop, the towers of Hong Kong were like a forest of black coral, beaded with a million droplets that reflected the sulphurous glow of the streetlights below. The air was thick and cool, carrying the damp, metallic scent of soaked concrete and the distant, mournful bleat of a ferry horn. It was on nights like this, in the quiet after the storm, that the city felt most like a confessional.
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Darcy was leaning against the railing, a silhouette against the luminous grid. He’d been quiet for a while, which was unusual for him. The energy he usually carried—the karaoke-shouting, convenience-seeking vibrancy—was subdued, folded away like a well-worn map.
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A question had been circling in my mind for weeks, a vulture waiting for a quiet moment to land. The silence felt like an invitation.
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“Darcy,” I began, my voice softer than I intended. “Do you think they did it? The rioters, the kids from… back then. Do you think they innately caused the system to change? That they moved the governors’ hearts, so afterwards, the policies were genuinely bettered to help the poor, and the rulers became more humble?”
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It was a child’s question, in a way. A question born of storybooks and naive hope. But it was one I couldn’t stop asking myself in the dead of night.
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Darcy didn’t turn. He took a slow sip of the cheap beer he was holding, the condensation dripping onto his fingers. He was always so present, so grounded in the immediate—the taste of the beer, the feel of the cold can, the grumpy voice of the noodle vendor. My question was a ghost, and he was a creature of solid, unhaunted flesh.
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“That’s a really good question, Bauhinia,” he said finally, his tone measured, not dismissive, but weary. “But I bet, in the midst of the epidemic, no one really thought much about the violent riots anymore. We digested it.” He gestured with his beer can towards the sprawling, silent city. “All of it. The anger, the slogans, the tear gas, the headlines. We ate it, our stomachs churned, and we moved on. And the poop that came out…” He paused, a grim, pragmatic twist to his lips. “Well, that could be for better or for worse for the poor. But it’s just shit. It’s not the meal anymore. The meaning is gone.”
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His metaphor was crude, biological, and devastating in its accuracy. It stripped the event of all its romantic, revolutionary potential and reduced it to a process of collective metabolism. We consumed the trauma, extracted what nutrients of fear or resolve we could, and excreted the remainder into the soil of our present, where it would invisibly, ambiguously, fertilize the future.
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“That’s a pretty sad situation,” I whispered, the words catching in my throat, “for those kids who thought they were making a change for the better. That their sacrifice was for something.”
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I pictured them not as faceless militants on a news broadcast, but as children I might have passed on the MTR. A girl with a backpack covered in anime pins, a boy with bad skin and nervous eyes, their hearts pounding with a terrifying, beautiful conviction that they could etch their names onto the bones of history. And now, according to Darcy’s digestive tract theory, they were just… waste product.
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He turned to me then, and his face in the half-light was uncharacteristically grave. “They would be lucky if they are considered sane after the wave of insanity passed.” He let out a short, hollow breath. “History always took the side of the winners, sadly. And the winners get to write the diagnosis. Were they heroes or hysterics? Freedom fighters or a public nuisance? It depends on who’s holding the pen when the final report is filed.”
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The words settled over me like a fine, cold ash. I thought of Bensimon, of his search for the unique, authentic register. What was the authentic register of a shattered dream? It wasn’t a loud, high-pitched scream; that was the sound of the event itself. The authentic register was this: the quiet, weary acceptance on Darcy’s face, the hollow ache in my own chest. It was the silence that had replaced the chanting.
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“Everyone had the urge, you know,” Darcy continued, his gaze drifting back to the city. “To want to be part of history. To feel like your life is a sentence in a textbook, not just a footnote. To believe you’re standing on the right side of a line that future generations will draw.” He finished his beer, the empty can making a soft, metallic crunch as he set it down on the concrete ledge. “But being on the right side… is probably not what everyone gets right. It’s a lottery with terrible odds.”
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A memory, sharp and unbidden, surfaced. It was from the height of it all, a day when the air itself tasted of static and burning. I wasn’t on the front lines; I was always a spectator, a witness from the periphery. I was in Mong Kok, trying to get home, when the crowd surged. I saw a young man, couldn’t have been older than twenty, his face masked by a black scarf, standing on top of an overturned newspaper stand. He wasn’t throwing anything. He was just shouting, his voice raw and breaking, repeating a single phrase over and over into the chaos. It wasn’t a political slogan. It was: “Do you see? Do you see us now?”
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At the time, it felt like a demand, a challenge hurled at the impassive towers of power. But now, filtered through Darcy’s bleak pragmatism, it sounded like a plea. A desperate, lonely question asked into a storm, hoping against hope that someone, somewhere, was really looking.
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Was that the unique register Bensimon sought? The sound of a human soul trying to tear a hole in the fabric of indifference? And if so, had anyone truly heard it? Or had the sound been digested, along with the smoke and the violence, and excreted into the forgotten past?
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“What do you do with that?” I asked, my voice small. “With that urge? If you know the odds are terrible and the history books are written by someone else?”
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Darcy finally smiled, a faint, tired thing. “You live, Bauhinia. You go to work. You complain about the price of fish. You go to snig karaoke and sing terrible, high-pitched songs with your friends until you sound like dying ducks.” He nudged me gently with his shoulder. “You find your own little patch of history to tend. It might not change the world, but it’s yours. It’s sane.”
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He was offering me his Hong Kong again. Not the city of grand historical narratives and political upheaval, but the city of the dai pai dong and the MTR, of karaoke rooms and the shared, strange comfort of urban myths. It was a history of the present, a history of persistence.
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I looked out at the gleaming, beverage-container buildings. Somewhere in this city, the winners were writing their reports. Somewhere, the losers were trying to remember what it felt like to be sane. And here we were, on a rooftop, somewhere in between—the digested and the digesting.
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The sacrifice of those kids hadn’t made the rulers more humble, I realized. The system hadn’t been fundamentally changed by their hearts. Darcy was right. It had just been metabolized. The poor were probably no better off, and the policies were likely just different, not better.
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and then Add to home screen.