As "Lewis" has pointed out, I've been a bit under the weather of late. This started a few days ago and has slowly escalated into major pains that leave me in the mood to do little moving about the city. Needless to say we've been "meditating" in our apartment (which mostly amounts to me reading while Colin works on his thesis) for most of the last few days.
As to this "Culture of Obliviousness" I find this to be both accurate in some cases and exaggerated in many others. While you do find little old ladies that take up the narrowest part of the sidewalk only to seem to physically widen as the sidewalk does too, these are not the only pedestrians that move about Hong Kong. It seems that with age comes reduced speed in Hong Kong, but there are plenty of younger people trying to move their way through the city streets and sidewalks. Yes, the streets. As many of the sidewalks are too narrow for the sheer mass of people trying to move along them, people move out into the streets.
I find that the majority of people walking along do not completely ignore that you're another living, moving human being, but in their rush to get by and past you, there is a dehumanizing element of becoming an obstacle. I tend to think of it more like a video game in which you have to move through groups of obstacles to get to the finish line. Kinda like Frogger: People wait at the stop lights until there is an "appropriate" break in the traffic (sometimes this is a green light for them to walk and sometimes just a lack of trucks coming fast enough), then they bolt. After they have successfully crossed one set of streets (often jaywalking), they then have to negotiate the crowd that comes next: when to hop on the faster moving lily pads (when to get in the row of people passing the little old lady with a cane) or when to get on the back of a turtle going in the opposite direction in hopes of cutting back and saving time (walking the wrong way up on the street side of the barrier in hopes of crossing at the next break rather than missing it while trying to cross two corners to get to the designated cross walk).
I'm not really one to play this Frogger game: I'm still too distracted by my interest in the people doing the negotiating. As a people watcher, this city is fascinating if not overwhelming. There is an element of truth in what Colin says: there is a level on which individuals ignore the mass in general - the people become traffic barriers, pylons, gateways, etc in the path to your next desired location. On the other hand, I tend to see it more like this: as people move through the city they engage in very specific and chosen social interactions. They talk to the man selling dried sea cucumber and argue with him about the price; they speak to the person that they're traveling with to the grocery store; they ignore completely the woman that they give the money to for their buns (unless she is pulling out hot ones and they want the one she has in her tongs); they make eye contact with the person that is walking around the little old lady with the cane. It is interesting to see someone actively observe you do this, only to see them do it themselves. People choose specific social negotiations and leave the rest as unacknowledged negotiations of movement and space.
I think this, all in all, can be quite understandable. I think that in a city in which the population density is as high as it is here, it can be completely overwhelming to deal with the sheer amount of people that you could/would/do pass on the streets. While some of the people choose to take the time they're going to take and everyone else be damned (Colin's zone-out theory), some seem to acknowledge the large shifting masses of people as individual moving units that they become a part of and jump ship from as it is beneficial to negotiate the actual physical streets of Hong Kong. This isn't socially opportunistic, but practically so.
On a more visual level, it's like watching interacting schools of fish. Fascinating. My only problem is that I'm often distracted by individual faces in the crowd still - seeing the new variations of face that there are to see. The diversity is amazing here.
But that is another post...
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