Freedom at long last

After nearly three years of Covid-related travel restrictions – including weeks-long quarantine requirements and the threat of enforced isolation at remote makeshift camps – Hong Kong finally began opening up its borders late last year, long months after most other cities and countries in the world had come to the realisation that living with the pandemic was the only way forward.

For those of us who stuck it out, especially those painful months in the first half of 2022 when the fifth wave tore through the city, the relaxed travel measures were both a welcome development and a painful reminder of just how much Hong Kong missed out on as it persisted with its so-called zero Covid policies to the bitter end.

Though we avoided the severe lockdowns seen in many mainland Chinese cities, the isolation of Hong Kong throughout the pandemic was its own form of anguish, and I still look back at where the city was just a little over a year ago and I have trouble believing where we were not so long ago.

Singapore, in stark contrast to Hong Kong, had made the decision to live with Covid in early 2022, dropping most of its Covid measures by April and making it known to the global business community that the Southeast Asian city-state was very much back in business. Being pretty much the only major hub in the region to be fully open during that period proved to be supremely advantageous, and the flood of corporates, events, expats, and wealth poured into Singapore – much of it at the expense of Hong Kong.

I didn’t realise just how much Hong Kong had been missing out on until I arrived in Singapore myself in November for a work trip last year, my first time stepping foot outside of Hong Kong since Christmas 2019. Under normal circumstances, Singapore isn’t a terribly exciting place to visit, food and friends notwithstanding, but the contrast between the two rival Asian finance hubs couldn’t have been more apparent, especially during that period.

Tourists crowded the streets and hawker centres, unmasked faces wherever I turned (Hong Kong would not lift its own mask mandate until the following March), and mega conferences in full swing with star-studded lineups filled with global movers and shakers from the worlds of politics, finance, business, and academia – my own city seemed hollowed out and empty by comparison.

And after being confined to a single speck of land for nearly three years, I walked the streets of Singapore with a new appreciation, my twisted sense of normalcy that I had developed in Hong Kong during the pandemic being slowly untwisted as I tasted what it felt like to feel connected to the rest of the world again.

I’m writing this up nearly a year after it happened, and I’ve been fortunate to go on a few more trips abroad since then, but that week in Singapore marked the beginning of the end of so many things about the pandemic that required time to process, even up to now. I spent most of that week shuttling around from office tower to office tower, and one conference venue to another, but in between Grab rides I got some time to walk around the city and breathe a free-er air.