I came to China (mainland for instance) and I found America.
I went to Hong Kong, and I discovered China. China in those forms that once gave life to our imagination on this great empire. These forms - the traditions, medicine, writing, religion, the arts of the mind and body - in this Hong Kong are the geographic space and time, are unexpectedly free veins, found expression in the individual, that individual that - concedetemelo - in mainland not really exist anymore.
Hong Kong seemed to me the proof that a successful union between East and West - with the prevalence of either obsessed - between modernism and tradition, between such different cultures, it is possible. In Hong Kong I understand what must have been to China. Despite, or should I say thanks, to the history of the British colony. And above all escaped the destructive hand of the passage of the Party, the Cultural Revolution of the projects before destruction and then extended to the standardization of a country, multi-color, varied much more that Europe, which now, however - from north to south, from east to west - it looks more and more, with landscapes urban, natural and socio-cultural repeated, replicated, copied and pasted as they are indefinitely, which rarely - if ever - those forms emerge no less grandiose, more imperfect, and then some more human than I have seen in Hong Kong.
The feeling, as well as freedom, is that everything here is more original, more true. From the crowd swarming the chaotic traffic, the shop signs in the streets of Kowloon the yards of megalomaniacs Hong Kong island, from dried fish sold in the street dedicated to the Buddhist temples reservoirs of incense. The fruit, less perfect, it seems more real. I see graffiti - not driven to art - and smile. I generally feel that you do not want to hide or disguise what this city is, even if looks rundown, messy, precarious or poor condition, dirty but undeniable. Yet this is life, and no one can decide to destroy it because it is less presentable.
Hong Kong certainly is also a city of skyscrapers, with its skyline which is said to be the most beautiful in the world, especially at night. View from a sim-city is also drawn to art, but if you haul in his meanderings are found traces of his interesting past - so it seemed - no one is condemned to delete.
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