Diamond Dust Novel - Chapter 23 Strange Country

Though it was only early June, the temperature was already reaching nearly 30 degrees Celsius in the midday, so the air conditioning inside the franchise cafe was running strongly, making the interior almost chilly. I rubbed my bare arms, exposed beneath my short sleeves, and pulled my chair closer to the laptop.

A man was sitting on a gray rock, against a backdrop of neglected, withered, and lifeless tangled bushes, his eyes smudged black with makeup, staring intensely at the camera lens.

The photo was in color, not the sharply contrasted black and white common for this kind of mood photography.

Paradoxically, this only emphasized the desolation of the background more. Even with the colors existing in nature, the background in the photo was sufficiently dark, rough, and desolate.

The man in the photo, Juhan Hyung, who was pulling the neckline of his sweater up to his chin and looking, or glaring, straight ahead, looked exactly like the model I first saw in the basement storage room of Phantom.

To a person like me, his pose, expression, and the atmosphere he conveyed seemed no different from a professional model.

Old Future.

Old Future.

The website run by Yuni Noona and Juhan Hyung was not just a simple clothing shopping mall run casually as they had downplayed it.

Updates didn’t seem frequent, likely due to the busy nature of the Phantom work, but in addition to the product sales category, the site also featured photos they had taken, pictures of the two of them, and short essays recording and describing moments of travel and daily life, and the thoughts that arose from them.

The old town in Hong Kong that I particularly love is the area encompassing NOHO, SOHO, and POHO, stretching along the steep uphill road that leads to the tourist destination, Victoria Peak. It is a stylish and hip ‘hot spot,’ yet also a place where the most common, everyday scenes of Hong Kong thrive.

In this district, where butchers in the traditional market hang refrigerated meat on skewers, dai pai dong (Hong Kong street stalls) are crowded with locals having noodles for a meal, and narrow, fifty-year-old buildings supported by bamboo scaffolding for renovation stand back-to-back with Michelin-starred restaurants and cutting-edge galleries handling the most avant-garde artworks, the landscape is both unchanging and perpetually new.

There is always a pleasant stimulation there, like meeting an old friend who retains the pure energy and passion of their essence while never ceasing to strive to become a better person, both personally and socially.

The unexpected harmony created by the clash of diverse, seemingly incompatible colors on the street, the intensely captivating exotic scents, and the languages from around the world interwoven with the Cantonese accent.

The novelty unique to Hong Kong, which shows a different face every day, based on the most international, cutting-edge sensibility and its uniquely indigenous local character, draws curiosity and interest even from travelers who have visited the city multiple times.

Juhan and I are both people who barely smoke a pack of cigarettes a year, making us ambiguous as smokers, but after a drink at a pub in SOHO, one of us inevitably runs to a convenience store to buy cigarettes and a lighter. We want to look at our surroundings, letting go of the tension that normally maintains our everyday selves, a little more wildly or generously.

To be simultaneously the most Hong Kong and the most international.

To be inclusive without losing one’s self.

Hong Kong is a city I want to visit again anytime, simply because it encourages me not to give up on that theme. Even if it’s only a tight, three-night, four-day business trip.

In the photo, Yuni Noona and Juhan Hyung, posing in a narrow alley on a steep hill in Hong Kong, were comfortable as their authentic selves, without exaggeration or concealment, and looked like they were part of the city, not tourists.

Just as the paradise of Morae and Han Hyung is symbolized by Bali, I felt that Hong Kong might be that kind of city for Yuni Noona.

And for the first time while reading that text, I felt a desire to visit a strange city I knew little about. I was the person who, despite hearing about Morae and Han Hyung’s obsession with Bali for years, had never been able to pull that possibility into my own experience…

These desires, to look at a subject with curiosity, to experience it directly with my own eyes and hands, not just through photos or books, were confusing.

Because I thought all my desires had naturally extinguished themselves.

They seemed to have simply dried up and withered away, like plants unwatered, returning to the soil after a specific moment in the past.

I never intentionally tried to kill them. Rather, doing nothing was merely the cause of their death by desiccation.

Therefore, the reactions I’ve been showing to the surrounding stimuli lately were, first and foremost, bewildering, before being either welcome or terrifying.

It felt like opening eyes that I thought had ceased to function, only to realize that they could actually still detect light and darkness…

I couldn’t clearly see the distinct shapes of objects yet, but my eyes were slowly starting to perceive that the world had light and shadow, creating depth and dimension.

I wanted to go to Hong Kong. I also wanted to smoke a cigarette with Noona and Hyung in the street in the picture.

Hong Kong, which I had no interest in, a city that was merely often mentioned as one of the most expensive cities in the world, alongside Singapore and New York, a place that was a British colony for a long time, returned to China at the end of the 20th century, and yet still maintained its own distinct language, culture, and customs separate from mainland China, approached me with a living charm: having an expression, a scent, unique habits, and a particular way of speaking.

I scrolled to the very bottom. In the last photo of the posting, the two of them were standing close, smoking a cigarette against the backdrop of the dazzlingly lit night street. It wasn’t a posed photo; it looked like a moment someone had captured naturally.

The two of them seemed to have spotted some captivating sight, as they were looking at the same place with their eyes slightly wider than usual. It must have been a moment caught by someone who was constantly observing them.

In the bottom right corner of the photo, it said: ‘Photo by Kun.’

Lau WiKun.

Only now, upon becoming a ‘Director-nim’ of the organization I was officially affiliated with, did I finally learn his full name.

I imagined what he must have looked like, capturing the two of them from behind the camera lens. I could easily picture the three people sharing and enjoying the moment, photographing each other on the streets of Hong Kong. People with the strongest individual characters, yet able to coexist without needing to wage a war of attrition to change one another.

Recalling their unique bond, where they coexisted without being divided into alpha and omega, despite differences in age, environment, and position within the organization, I brought the mug to my lips. The coffee was cold. A light sigh escaped me.

The awkwardness I felt that night, socializing in the Spanish-style hideout, wasn’t solely due to my uncheerful personality.

All this time, I had tried to protect myself by ‘choosing nothing.’ I believed that by continuously refusing to move forward to the next place, I could remain in the present and maintain myself.

But doing nothing could not preserve the status quo.

Bricks, plastic cups, and erasers can maintain their state if nothing is done to them. Generally.

But living things were not like that. If you don’t water them, if you don’t supply nutrition, if you don’t open the window for ventilation… they become impoverished. Both spirit, emotion, and even unique character and talent.

Morae and Han Hyung, Yuni Noona, Juhan Hyung, the teacher, and the Director. Even Inwoo Hyung. They were all radiant people. People who filled their lives with their own convictions and passions.

I was surrounded by their rich light, yet I myself was dried-up clay, lacking the nutrients to sprout even a single blade of grass.

That was the result of my ‘choosing nothing.’