The Day of Wrath — Lamma Island, Hong Kong | September 2013
“Typhoon Usagi (Hong Kong) ”
The № 8 Typhoon signal has been hoisted! We’ve been under Signal № 3 all day and everybody’s been preparing for the worst. Roof terraces have been cleared and shopkeepers have boarded up their storefronts. Both the English and Chinese language radio stations have been broadcasting the final departure times for the ferries outbound to the outlying islands and for the past couple of hours a steady stream of students and office workers has been disembarking from those ferries at Lamma’s main pier.
I’m on Lamma Island in Hong Kong. It’s my first “Big Wind”, the word typhoon has always had a magical ring to me. I find it all very exciting, but for most people here it’s just a part of daily life. The typhoon season in Hong Kong runs from May to September and this one, named Usagi (Rabbit), will be the fifth major typhoon this year. Although they may not be sharing my excitement about the upcoming storm, the average office worker is definitely looking forward to an unscheduled day off. As long as the № 8 signal remains in place, all offices and businesses will remain closed.
The bars on Lamma Island are quickly filling up with punters ordering their first rounds. Whereas on an average day the 10pm ferry is the busiest one, today the afternoon ferries are bringing everyone home early. Nobody seems to care much about the typhoon, yet everybody is celebrating its existence.
I still can’t help feeling very excited. On radio and TV, it is reported that Usagi might be the biggest typhoon in 34 years to hit Hong Kong. As the sky gets darker, the winds pick up speed and the rain intensifies, I feel very much alive. It’s been a long time since I felt like this, so alive and really in the moment.
Back in Laos time doesn’t seem to exist. The weather is always the same, it’s either hot, hotter or it’s hot with rain and my daily life is too routine. Days easily turn into weeks which turn into months and into years. If anything worth remembering actually happens, I can never recall when it happened. Was it a few days, months or years ago?
In the hours that follow, the ocean roars and waves start pounding the shores. The wind howls and the windows tremble uncontrollably. Then it goes quiet. Is this the eye of the storm? Throughout the night, there are more wind gusts and rain storms, but not as intense as earlier in the evening.
In the morning I learn that Usagi veered north-west just before reaching Hong Kong, sparing the city the impact of its eye wall. The ferry to Central is now packed with grumpy people. About an hour ago, the Hong Kong Observatory lowered the typhoon warning signal from № 8 to № 3 which means that offices and businesses are open again and people have got a maximum of two hours to get to work. As everybody on this boat is probably seriously hungover, it’s no surprise they all look so grumpy. Oh well, it’s just daily life for them.
I’ve really enjoyed the exciting buzz of the typhoon day. I don’t think I would have felt the same if I had been in the Philippines or mainland China, but in a city as well prepared as Hong Kong a typhoon is just an energising reminder to live your life to the maximum.
It makes you wonder, shouldn’t every day be a typhoon day? Metaphorically speaking, I really think it should. I’ve always believed that we should live every day as if a destructive typhoon might come along and end it all; live now not later! But to be honest, over the past decade I’ve somewhat forgotten how to do that.
P.S. After that exciting 22 September 2013, my life quickly returned to its routine blur, sure things happened, but when? Could have been days, months, years or perhaps just hours ago. The one exception would be my traffic accident of Xmas Eve 2013 (Read: God Only Knows) which has been permanently engraved in my memory, but that’s not the kind of typhoon day I had in mind!
Giuseppe Verdi – Messa da Requiem: Dies Irae on BBC Prom 13 [TV]. London, United Kingdom: BBC. (2011)
This autobiographical sketch comes from my bundle In the Moment: A Disjointed Audiobiography which is available at Amazon.com. (USD 9.50 for a paperback or USD 4.50 for the Kindle version)
