Today was a sunny day, so this afternoon I decided to visit a couple of Hong Kong’s urban parks. I headed off from my home in Sheung Wan soon after lunch and boarded a tram for the first stage of my journey. Alighting at Admiralty I quickly made my way up through the Pacific Place mall to Hong Kong Park.
As always there was a wonderful array of flowers in bloom, and plenty of birds were also to be seen. As regards plants perhaps the most unusual sight on this occasion was not a flower but a tree. One tall tree had a big sign in front of it (and another on the tree itself) warning passers-by to “beware of dropping seeds”. A second sign of a more permanent nature attached to the tree identified as a Mango (Mangifera indica), but even without reading that sign I think most people would have had little trouble identifying the supposed “seeds” that had fallen to the ground nearby as mango fruits. Indeed to be hit by one of those as it fell would have been unpleasant.
Although I am responsive to all aspects of nature, I have in the last few years developed a particular interest in butterflies. Hong Kong is extraordinarily rich when it comes to this creature, having something like 270 different species. That compares with a total of around 60 in Britain (which is obviously much larger in size than Hong Kong), and 270 is even more than a third as many as can be found in the United States, a massive country. Today I spotted (and photographed) around 15 different butterflies in Hong Kong Park. These included such species as the Plains Cupid (Luthrodes pandava) and the Common Rose Swallowtail (Pachliopta aristolochiae). Of greatest interest, however, was my first ever sighting of a Chestnut Banded Angle (Odontoptilum angulata). Unlike the other butterflies I saw today, this one was just sitting with its wings open right in front of me.
Travelling on by MTR to the second public park I visited, Victoria Park in Causeway Bay, I encountered a very different environment. From previous Sunday visits I knew I would see many Indonesian domestic helpers enjoying their day off there, but unlike on previous occasions there were also a great many police both in and around Victoria Park. There was even a Sabertooth armoured vehicle parked on Gloucester Road just opposite the park. Although for around three decades after 4 June 1989 it was customary for Hong Kong people to gather in Victoria Park to conduct a memorial rally for those who died in Beijing on that day, this year it seemed to be the authorities themselves who were determined to make that place a point of particular focus. Although Hong Kong certainly changes over time in the human realm, the wider natural world operates differently and remains one of the great attractions the city has to offer.
How to cite: Clarke, David. “Just Another Day: David Clarke.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/david-another-day.
David Clarke is a writer and visual artist. He is Honorary Professor in the Department of Art History of the University of Hong Kong. Much of his writing takes the form of academic books and articles, but his fictional writing was included in the anthology Fifty-Fifty: New Hong Kong Writing (ed. Xu Xi, Haven Books, 2008) and a poem was set to music in Hong Kong Odyssey, presented in the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Festival. A free-to-access website, Hong Kong in Transition, which features more than 40,000 of his photographs of Hong Kong taken between 1995 and 2020 is now available. [See all contributions by David Clarke.]
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