Confessions of a Cat-holic (41)

By replicating the Milgram experiment, I discovered something about my new friends, that they were totally ignorant about the geographical history and landscapes of Hong Kong. For some odd reasons, the fact that they saw me cry over their bantering implanted a belief in their minds that Wanchai was a small town and I was a small town girl. Wanchai people must have been cry babies. Yes, they thought that I was a big big infant girl in a big big world, innocent yet ambitious and almost unaware of the undercurrent of the competitiveness in the Central district. Wow, life was but a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Welcome to Wanchai, one of the oldest districts of Hong Kong. Would you be my neighbor?

Wait, if Wanchai was a small town, so what happened to the Hong Kong Police Force Regional Headquarters in No.1 Arsenal Street? What about the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Center? And Marriott, Upper House, Pacific Place, Little Italy, Hong Kong Arts Center, The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, Emperor Group Center? Wanchai had been home to many conglomerates' headquarters and shopping malls that served as an iconic landmark of the region. Were they from outerspace?

Perhaps they didn't bother to check the official channels or wikipedia and they would rather trust the gossips overheard from random people to regard my school as a band 3 certificate shop. Did we sound as easy as a pushover? There was some truth to it, though. It was not completely fake news. We did enroll a few band 3 students, like our teenage single mother Flora for example, to stir up the tension among our students. But having said that, my alma mater was still one of the oldest institution in Hong Kong history. It was established before the Opium War and even the cession of Hong Kong. Native Hong Kongers would know what kind of school St Francis took pride to be. We were backed by the Catholic church and our authenticity sometimes made other Christian schools look like a cult. Sorry, SKH.

Would my new friends be willing to for once open up their eyes and souls to hear what we had to say about reality? They had been blinded for too long and I understood waking up sometimes could be a painful experience that they might rather continue to stay hypnotized forever. I missed my gang. I missed my cohorts. I missed my neighborhood. I missed my alma mater. I missed the times when I talked about wax play, ball bearing penile implants, vibrators, sex with handcuffs, leather whips, dismembering methods, and other sado-masochist tricks with my friends. Apart from BTS, we were also the Kinki Kids, didn't you know?

If these new friends were a snapshot of what urban life was, I would rather stay out of zone 1. If that was what being a Central-minded person was like, would you please send me to a ranch so I could be a chicken feeder? I knew I was running a risk of being labeled as China's most popular KOL, aka Li Ziqi, who was known for her affinity to the nature and agricultural lifestyle. If I had already been tagged as a Alaskan Siberian, I might as well take that honor of a Sichuan country girl from China the Third World. Why not? What could be worse than being called an Arctic Eskimo by an Greenland native?

Without the need to intervene and do anything, I was deeply entertained by their reactions to my acting. The Milgram experiment produced results that were more fruitful than my expectations. I found out more about the mindsets of what "urban dwellers" were like. If they knew nothing about the band 1 circle and the outside world, I decided that maybe I should double down and might as well be someone else whom they knew nothing about.

They had a very small sample of friends, therefore they liked to draw conclusions over a skewed and biased impression. I sometimes wondered if they ever had a life outside of school, based on what they had to say about me, my school, Hong Kong and even the world too. First, they thought that I was a fan of Gigi Leung, just because I had short hair. But hey, Maggie Shiu had short hair too. Obviously, not all girls with short hair aspired to be Gigi Leung. Nevertheless, they still hoped to categorize me as the "short hair pretty girl from a girl's school looking for a rich bachelor".