Letters | A kinder, gentler Hong Kong emerged from shared pain

For most of my life – not just my adult life – I have heard Hong Kong described in blunt, unflattering terms: rushed, rude, transactional, emotionally distant. I felt it myself, which was one of the reasons that, though still identifying as a Hongkonger, I chose to spend so many years away. Most of those years were spent in Japan, a country which, on the politeness scale, is often seen as the antithesis of “rude Hong Kong”.

One particular memory has stayed with me. While visiting Hong Kong from Tokyo and on my way to a meeting, I entered a lift and pressed the button. A man approached as the doors were closing, and at the last moment I held them open for him. He stepped inside, thanked me, then paused and said, almost casually, “You must not be from around here.” I was slightly taken aback, but I understood exactly what he meant. The simple gesture – an everyday courtesy in Japan – seemed incongruent with life in Hong Kong.

This does not magically rewrite Hong Kong’s personality. It remains fast, competitive, unsentimental. It is not Tokyo, where courtesy is ambient and ritualised into daily life. But what this moment revealed is something just as real: compassion here has never been absent – only compressed. The pressures of density, economics and pace do not erase kindness; they ration its expression to moments of true rupture.

I am reminded of New York City in the weeks after September 11 attacks – a city briefly transformed by shared vulnerability, where strangers spoke more softly, helped more readily, and felt more closely bound. That solidarity, powerful as it was, eventually thinned under the return of ordinary life. Perhaps that is the nature of cities shaped by speed and ambition. They surge together in crisis, then slip back into motion.