In search of happy gods in Repulse Bay

I was feeling disgruntled with my new life in Hong Kong and blaming it on the lack of open skies and feeling closed in by the spectacular view across Victoria Harbour through some gaps between 'big things', also called skyscrapers, that dwarf one's every step, being and breath. The special thing about this city is the continually changing perspectives as you walk the streets of buildings, vistas and slopes, a moving diorama. However, despite this visual pleasure and the welcome relief of shadows cast by tall buildings in the heat, it is as if they 'hang in space' and have a presence of just 'being there', displacing space.

The southern part of Hong Kong Island, facing the south china seas, has a different sensibility. It is more relaxed, a shangri-la or permanently happy land isolated from the outside world as James Hilton wrote of in The lost horizon (1933). At the end of the Repulse Bay seaside walkway, I found a happy god on whose plinth is written in gilded letters, the following inscription:

The old man from the moon is
a happy god in charge of
love and matrimony.
He ties the couple's legs with red
string, and their hearts with a crimson belt, and puts their names in the celestial register so that they will live happily ever after after.

This god is surrounded by many other mosaic gods and deities at the Tin Hau temple. Gaun Yin, the goddess of sympathy, compassion and mercy and Tin Hau, the goddess of the sea, or literally the queen of heaven, tower over the temple precinct. The story of Tin Hau goes that as a 13-year old, she met a Toaist priest who taught her how to predict the future, and help the sick and the weak. She supposedly traveled the seas on a reed mattress and saved people from drowning and thereby gathered the attribute as the goddess for safety on the seas. And it is here that I found peace and reason to be in Hong Kong - to collect stories from old men, happy gods, red strings and crimson belts.

The TIn Hau temple is also, appropriately, home to the Hong Kong Life Guard Club Training Headquarters. Behind Guan Yin and the temple, oddly filled with cold drink fridges, stands The Lily, the residential development designed by Norman Forster and Partners where a 3-bedroomed apartment costs HK$165,000 per month to rent. One is never far away from the West/East dichotomy in Hong Kong.