Mapopo Community farm sits unassumingly beside a busy road in Fan Ling, a town in the New Territories of Hong Kong. At the entrance to the farm is a small stand selling fresh vegetables, locally made body products, a number of imported organic dry goods, and a few varieties of craft beer.
If you follow the blue line on the paved path, it will take you through the village, called Ma Shi Po, to a wide cloudy river where young men fish from a 100 meter bridge. The village is comprised of small farms where elderly women hoe new roes in the dirt and elderly men ride past on bicycles stocked with seeding flats. I met a number of friendly dogs and goats beside the path who roamed together in a grassy field. At the end of the blue line I watched two young men catch fish in a net beside a sign that stated “no fishing” then headed back the way I came to buy some Choi Sum and Bak Choi at the Farmstand. There are a number of farms like this in Fan Ling that I intend to stop at next time I have a day to spend in the ‘countryside’ where there are still 14 story in plain sight.
Mapopo is engaged in a fight with Hong developers who have forcefully removed villagers in the past, and intend to do so again. The plots where forced evictions occurred are overgrown and vacant. Mapopo hopes to preserve the 3rd generation farming village of Ma Shi Po despite developers plans to build more standard housing on the ground they have made rich with years of composting and sustainable farming practices. Only 7 square kilometers of land in Hong Kong are made up of actively farmed land, Mapopo says they simply want to keep their small part of that to preserve the lifestyle they have worked hard to keep.
“Contrast” this was what Chris and I dubbed our attempts to do things differently and not simply stick to the things we knew and liked while we were in Hong Kong. We spent 25 days in Sheung Wan then decided to mix up our HK experience by moving to another neighborhood four subway stops away. At the bottom of Happy Valley, Wan Chai is a very wet neighborhood steeped in liveliness. In the past it was nick-named Hong Kong’s red light district. I wouldn’t have guessed from my experiences there, but I was not out and about late into the night. Not every image in this post was taken in Wan Chai, some are from nearby places like Aberdeen and Central that we walked to during our contrast stint in Wan Chai. 
Mui Wo is a small village on the less developed Eastern side of Lantau Island. You take a 40 minute ferry from Central Hong Kong, and debark in a small windy fishing town. We stopped at a seaside market where we chose our own fish to be fried and 10 minutes later we were eating fish, prawns, and fried eggplant, and washing it down with cold Tsingtao. We hiked up in to the mountains, passing a rather unusual graveyard, multiple racks of fire beating sticks, and many tropical plants that reminded me of Hawaii.
If you take a bus towards Shek-O, the semi-fancy beach town on the South East side of Hong Kong Island, you will pass numerous signs for small villages dotting the windy coastal road. These signs ignited my curiosity, so I jumped off the bus a few stops before Shek-O and made my way down a steep incline to the tiny village of Lan Nai Wan Tsuen.
Last week I caught the MTR into Sham Shui Po on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong to take pictures of a rather unique neighborhood. I focused on photographing people at work in their tiny spaces that appear unsystematic to the untrained eye, however I have no doubt that there is a highly organized map in the minds of the shopkeepers and handymen that affords them their efficiency. Though I speak no Cantonese, the men and women in the Sham Shui Po neighborhood did not shy away from my camera. They often waved or offered a simple smile, as did I, then I was on my way. I plan to return to this neighborhood with a method of communication that allows me to ask them the questions that arose in my mind as I watched them work. 
Until a few months ago I had been a vegetarian for about 14 years. Upon coming to Hong Kong I have eaten things like steamed pork buns, Yakatori chicken, and various dumplings I was sometimes unsure of the content of.. Being in a place where these things are a part of the culture, the way of life pulsing around me, I feel more okay with consuming it than I have before. Every street I walk down here has flesh hanging in some window, maybe an entire goose, maybe fish swimming in a tiny tank. People live in tiny apartments here. They eat out. They eat in parks, they eat together. These are the markets, as vibrant and social a step as any. The wet markets are loud and colorful, and they go well into the night as the city does. 
Right now I am living in a part of Hong Kong called Sheung Wan. It is very international, semi-dense, and highly multicultural. In the past week I have explored Central and Kowloon quite a bit and I have been happily inundated with the sights, scents, and sounds of the city. The people have been kind, the streets shockingly clean, and the air warm and humid. It is a place of activity. No one stands still. Interrupting the flow in a public place by being on your phone is called “phubbing” or “phubbering”. Still, people move politely despite the denseness that everyone talks about when referring to Hong Kong. I still feel that I have my space. 
1,223 skyscrapers Thirty-six of the world’s 100 tallest residential buildings More buildings taller than 500 feet [150 m] than any other city More people in Hong Kong live or work above the 14th floor than anywhere else on Earth, making it the world’s most vertical city. HK from my eyes November 2 – 7.
Viola Jean Photography 