Privacy in Hong Kong

Sunday 16th March

Internet down at City Lofts, or at least, I can’t connect using the passwords they gave me.

I call Arman, the enthsiastically friendly Filipino who works for City Lofts and he says he will bring over their tech guy and check out the connection for me. I have to go out, so I will not be there.

He asks if I will leave my computer switched on.

I tell him no, and he is not to touch my computer. He can check the connection, and there is nothing wrong with my computer, it has worked with wireless connections all over the world.

He says sometimes there is a problem between their system and Macs.

I tell him not to touch my computer.

I turn off my computer and put it in my briefcase next to the glass desk which has the TV on so you can’t use it to write on.

I go out, take the underground, then a ferry, and walk across Lamma, the small island I used to live on. It is Sunday, and the sun has come out. I find myself walking a large concrete road that is all but deserted, apart from an occasional unfriendly village house with a collection of violent, unfriendly dogs which come out to bark at me.

The grass is scorched brown from the winter. There is a fecund smell of earth and leaf. The wind moves through trees. I find myself strangely aroused, and realise that growing up in the country in England, my earliest sexual encounters are forever associated with the smells of earth, of cut grass, of the cold chill of air moving over hot limbs coiled in long grass.

I drift in and out of thoughts, and whilst wondering whatever happened to one of my ex-girlfriends, the one who became a heroin addict, find myself on the brow of a hill, looking down over the island from a new vantage point. The hideously ugly power station dwarfs the tiny village below.

My phone rings. It is Arman. He wants to know if he can go into my room. I tell him he can, and I told him before that he can, to check the internet.

I stand on the hill and look down again at the village. I remember that the power station was built here because it was not safe to build it close to the city. So they built it right on top of one of the oldest fishing villages in Hong Kong, and destroyed the long, softly sweeping curve and white sand of Hung Shing Yeh Beach to do so.

The phone rings again. It is Arman. He wants to know where my computer is. I tell him that he cannot touch my computer. He says the tech guy would like to check that my computer is okay. I tell him my computer is fine, thank you, and hang up.

I remember that there was a pig farm next to Hung Shing Yeh Beach. When I first came to live here, 18 years ago, each morning as the sun rose I would awaken to the screams of a pig being slaughtered. It became a ritual of sun worship: the sun rose, the pig died. The pig had to die for the village to thrive. True enough, on my way to the ferry I would pass the butcher’s, a small shop in a narrow street, and see the steaming entrails and limbs of the fresh carcass surrounded by hordes of old men and women, prodding the parts and calling for cuts of this and that.

My phone rings again. Arman wants to know the password to my computer. So, he has gone into my briefcase, found the computer, and opened it, and now can’t get into the computer because it is password protected. My reverie is broken. I demand to talk to the tech guy. I tell him to leave my computer alone. It is private. It has work documents on there that are confidential. This is true. I do not bother with an argument about privacy. Clearly that is an abstract concept that cannot be dealt with from the brow of a hill, over the phone, looking down on the beach that housed the pig farm and is now dominated by a power station.

I tell him again not to touch my computer, that it works perfectly. I am coming back now, I say.

I find my way back into the village, onto a ferry, into the subway, up the ciggie strewn stairwell, and two hours later I am in my room.

My computer is back in my briefcase. I take it out and turn it on. It connects to the internet.

Two days later, I realise that my log files have been deleted.

By this time I have found that all the techie who hacked into my computer needed to do was to tell me to use a different wireless protocol.

So it goes.