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Hong Kong, free port returned to China after 99 years.

Welcome to Hong Kong, welcome to future. If there is any place in the planet where you can feel like Blade Runner, that is Hong Kong, a group of islands that the English conquered at the end of the Opium Wars and were returned, not too long ago, to the Chinese. Actually, the leasing agreement between the two countries included only the Kowloon Peninsula, but the main island, Hong Kong’s heart, was also included in the same package.

Hong Kong is Asia’s exit and entrance gate to the rest of the world. It is a free port crammed with dealers, merchants, and carriers where there is no really any kind of production. They are specialists in moving. Products and capital. Capital and products. This way, they have created a city where money moves at a vertiginous speed. The queues in its streets are not to go to the movies or take a bus, but to buy in Prada or Versace. However, not everything is luxury in this weird mixture between New York and Benidorm. Next to the most impressive buildings, squalid apartments pile up like giant trees surrounded by little mushrooms. But there are few people who seem to notice those concrete spots. Here, people march more than walk: walking without looking and looking without seeing. Flocks of lonely brokers and impeccable dressed secretaries rush into a maze of escalators, shopping malls and fast foods. They run to escape from their grief during the day and drink to forget about their misfortune at night. Just like they were slaves living in luxurious swarms, they work, eat and sleep in skyscrapers with dark mirrors. Supposedly, they also die in those skyscrapers, little by little, without noticing. Maybe that’s why they wear mourning.

And maybe that is also why their lives are full of prohibitions. Mind your step, mind your life. From any seat in the ferry, the most common mean of transportation in Hong Kong, you can read up to 8 different warnings. A simple 5 minute trip full of signs, prohibitions, and lifesavers surrounding you till suffocation. If any of you is thinking about suicide, forget about doing it here. In the future there is no worse job than trying to take your own life. Knowing that history repeats once and again, the entire city is ready for a new crack. But this time they will not allow anybody to take the ‘easy’ retirement, like it happened in the Big Apple, where rotten apples were falling form the highest buildings. Here, there is no platform without protective screen, or unsecured bridge. The balconies are locked and they have security windows.

Will the future end up with our freedom to decide how we want to live? In a few decades nobody will be able to smoke and alcohol will be banned. A chip inserted in our cars will not allow us to go over the speed limit and if you commit any infraction, the car will stop. It will be programmed to give us an educational speech, or even worse, it will be connected to our brains and if anything illegal happen, it will segregate a substance that, like melanin, but provoking the opposite effect, will generate a feeling of unhappiness. We will be good people, but not by choice. We will greet everybody and will open the doors for others. A perfect future…; as perfect as boring.

Don’t look for us if that happens. We will be the resistance. Like anomalous replicants, we will search for the last reserve of beer and we will celebrate secret rituals around it. An empty bottle of Heineken will be the Holy Grail of XXII century, until its frothy taste is forgotten and nobody can remember that, under that green glass, there used to be a fantastic liquid that made us laugh and go to the toilet every two seconds.

Nevertheless, that will be the future. In the meantime, Hong Kong is a paradise for any consumer with money in their pockets. We could not help it either: a laptop here, a pair of shoes there. It was like a detoxification after being in India and Tibet. We are still westerners and now we behave as such. Home sweet home! And if this home is as perfect as Hong Kong and the American Express has no limit, even better…