The neighborhood wakes

In the early afternoon of a Thursday I use the public toilet up behind Tai Hang, near the temple. As always I am grateful for the infrastructure, for the cleaning staff, for the rubbish removers, and the maintenance workers. Living in Tai Hang for much of our eight years here, and working mostly from home, I’m familiar with their faces, if not their names, and much of the neighborhood’s rhythm, the bustle of early morning school busses and taxis, the ebb and flow of the coffee shop crowd, the dai pai dong crowd, the grocery shopping folk. I’m comfortable with the other folk that work from coffee shops in the afternoons sometimes, hunting variety and caffeine. So it is that this week I feel the neighborhood come alive. Workers hang lanterns and flags for the upcoming Fire Dragon dance. They erect a large sign proclaiming it with lights that shine in our window all night, an odd outlier in a world where most of the large neon and commercial signage turns off at ten pm or latest eleven.…