The air on the rooftop tasted of distant rain and the city’s breath—a familiar blend of exhaust fumes, salt from the harbour, and the faint, greasy aroma of a thousand concurrent dinners. Below us, Hong Kong stretched into the night, a frantic, glittering circuit board. The buildings stood shoulder to shoulder, a dense forest of concrete and glass that, in the hazy orange glow, looked less like architecture and more like a collection of beverage containers, emptied of their human contents, waiting to be recycled. Tall, slender juice cartons stood next to squat, colourful soda cans, all of them plastered with the neon logos of banks and smartphone companies.
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Next to me, Darcy leaned against the rust-streaked railing, his silhouette a comfortable, familiar shape against the luminous grid. The shoulder of his dark jacket was dusted with a fine, white powder. Light toothpaste, I realized with a sudden, fond clarity. It stood out against the dark fabric like a soft, accidental fall of snow, a tiny, domestic meteorology that spoke of a rushed exit from his flat. That was Darcy. He carried the evidence of his life on his person.
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“I really like living in Hong Kong,” he said, his voice quiet but firm, cutting through the low, perpetual hum of the city.
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I made a non-committal sound, waiting.
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“I mean,” he continued, a smile in his words, “it's not the best city in the world. Objectively. It’s expensive, it’s crowded, the air is… well, you can taste it. But I feel it’s my home.” He gestured vaguely, expansively, towards the sprawling vista. “I know the sounds and sights of my home, and the people. I know the specific grumpy voice the man at the dai pai dong uses when my char siu fan is thirty seconds later than he thinks it should be. I know the way people move on the MTR, that specific blend of rushed urgency and profound resignation, all seeking the path of least resistance, the ultimate convenience.”
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He turned to me, his face earnest in the ambient light. “I like how it’s always crowded. It means you’re never really alone. And I love how everyone here, no matter how modern we seem, loves to rationalize and accept the strangest urban myths. You know, like the one about the mysterious ‘Player Girl’ spreading STDs through Central MTR station. It’s this shared folklore. It’s a bit rough around the edges, and sure, the buildings are all looking like matchboxes stacked too close together, but generally… I feel it’s where I show off myself the best.”
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I couldn’t help but smile. “It sounds like you’re running for election to be voted the next town planner.” I leaned my elbows on the cool railing, looking down at the ant-like traffic. “I neither dislike nor like it. Not like you do. To me, it’s just a place I’m stuck in. And maybe, because of a kind of Stockholm syndrome, I’ve come to accept it.”
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He nudged me with his shoulder, the one with the toothpaste snow. “You’re more Hong Kong than you think, Bauhinia. You have that same rough, practical edge hiding something softer.”
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I scoffed, but the comment lodged itself in me, a small, sharp seed.
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An hour later, we were submerged in a different kind of Hong Kong ecosystem: a Snig Karaoke room. The air here was chilled to arctic levels and smelled of stale cigarette smoke from decades past, aggressively scrubbed but never fully erased, and the cloying sweetness of the synthetic peach scent they pumped through the vents. The walls were upholstered in a fabric that seemed designed to absorb both sound and hope, and a massive, flickering flatscreen displayed a stock photo of a tropical beach that was the absolute antithesis of our current reality.
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As Darcy scrolled through the endless song list on the clunky remote, my mind drifted back to another conversation, another voice. Bensimon’s. He had been talking about music, about performance, his tone as measured and precise as a surgeon’s scalpel.
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“When people sing,” he’d said, sipping his black coffee, “they default to a belief that singing as loud and as high as they can is the pinnacle of skill. But moving people, or finding your own pretty, unique register, has nothing to do with that brute force.” He’d paused, considering. “Some people’s voices are just… vanilla. Pleasant, but uninteresting to hear. It’s like in drama—some actors carry emotions effortlessly in the quietest whisper. Others can scream their lungs out and you feel nothing.”
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The memory was a perfect, polished stone in my mind. And then Darcy found his song.
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Darcy’s idea of art, I mused, would make Bensimon blush with secondhand embarrassment. To Darcy, being a great artist meant three things: dominating the karaoke machine, being a virtuoso at cooking raw meat during chaotic BBQ and hot pot buffets, and possessing the refined palate to tell the difference between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. He didn’t get the popular, soulful anthems like "Lion Spirit" or "The Sea is Wide, The Sky is Free"—songs that were woven into the very fabric of local identity, songs that spoke of struggle and yearning. Their emotional complexity was lost on him.
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No, his choice was a Cantopop classic of a very different calibre: a duet called, with a painful lack of irony, “Let’s Sing High Pitch Together.”
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The opening synth notes, tinny and exuberant, filled the room. Darcy handed me a microphone with the solemnity of a knight bestowing a sword. “Come on, Bauhinia! Let’s do this!”
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And so we began. The song was a relentless assault on the upper registers, a cheerful, mindless climb up a musical ladder that was missing most of its rungs. Darcy, bless him, was terrible. As the notes climbed, his voice would tighten, strain, and then break into a kind of strangled yodel. He didn't have a high pitch; he had a crisis.
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And I was no better. Fueled by a sudden, reckless abandon and the desire to not let him suffer alone, I joined in. I pushed my own voice, trying to hit notes that existed only in the composer's most sadistic dreams. What came out was not music. It was a noise. A shared, desperate squeaking. We sounded like two dying ducks having a heated argument over the last piece of bread.
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Bensimon’s ghost in my head was probably appalled. This was the absolute antithesis of everything he valued—the unique register, the effortless emotion. This was pure, unadulterated, vocal carnage.
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But a strange thing happened somewhere in the second chorus. As I watched Darcy, his eyes squeezed shut in concentration, his face contorted in the effort of chasing a note that was forever fleeing from him, and as I heard my own voice crack in perfect, disastrous harmony with his, I started to laugh. It began as a snort that disrupted my already-feeble airflow, and then erupted into full-bodied, helpless guffaws.
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Darcy, startled, opened his eyes. He saw me doubled over, tears starting to form, and he started laughing too. We completely abandoned the song. The backing track continued its relentlessly cheerful journey without us, the synthetic strings and drums providing a bizarre soundtrack to our collapse on the plush, sticky karaoke sofa.
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We were a mess. A glorious, gasping, aching mess. The dying ducks had succumbed, and it was the most fun I’d had in weeks.
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“We were… awful,” I finally managed to wheeze, clutching my stomach.
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“We were magnificent!” Darcy corrected, wiping his own eyes. “That was a performance of pure, unfiltered feeling! No technique, just… spirit!”
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He scrambled back to the remote. “Right, my turn for a solo. I’m feeling inspired.”
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He selected another song, something equally cheesy and high-energy, and launched into it with the same blissful, tone-deaf enthusiasm. I sat back, catching my breath, the sound of his joyful shouting washing over me. The karaoke buffet was something I hadn’t done in a long time—those marathon sessions where you just rent a room for hours and sing until your voice gives out, a feast of noise and camaraderie. It felt… authentic. Unpretentious. It was the absolute opposite of the refined, soul-starved artist Bensimon and I had once debated.
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In this soundproofed box, high above the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui, surrounded by the ghost of cigarettes and the overwhelming scent of fake peaches, I felt a knot inside me loosen. Darcy, with his toothpaste-stained jacket and his terrible singing, wasn’t trying to be a great artist. He was just trying to be happy. And in his clumsy, unvanilla way, he was creating a moment of pure, shared joy. It wasn't art that would move a critic, but it moved me. It moved me from my own entrenched cynicism, from my Stockholm syndrome acceptance of the city, into a moment of genuine, uncomplicated affection for it, and for him.
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This was his Hong Kong. Not the skyline of beverage containers, but these hidden, insulated rooms where you could scream-sing your heart out with a friend. It was crowded, it was convenient, it was rationalizing the absurd effort of singing “Let’s Sing High Pitch Together” as a spiritual triumph. It was, as he’d said, a place where he could show off himself best. And in that moment, he was showing me a part of myself, too—the part that didn’t need to have refined taste or a unique register to feel alive. The part that could just be, gloriously, awfully, and happily, a dying duck in a karaoke room, finally feeling at home.
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and then Add to home screen.