The City I Never Reached

We nearly made it to Hong Kong once. Deep into a China trip, already running on compressed schedules and tourist visas that didn’t quite stretch far enough, it was the city that kept getting pushed to the bottom of the list. A woman traveling with us was from there—really from there, grew up there—and she talked about it the way people talk about somewhere they’ve been missing for years even while they’re still inside it. That did nothing to help with the regret.

Jas Davis, artist and photographer, managed what I didn’t. His short film Fear & Loading in Hong Kong is less travel document than portrait—the kind that earns its comparison to the namesake through sheer kinetic strangeness. Real people, extraordinary architecture, and effects that feel less like production choices and more like the city’s own visual grammar translated into moving image.

The history underneath that imagery is dense. Britain seized Hong Kong during the First Opium War in 1841, formalized it as a crown colony through the Treaty of Nanking two years later. For generations of mainland Chinese, including waves who fled the civil war between 1927 and 1949, the city functioned as a pressure valve—somewhere that wasn’t quite China, operating by different rules. In 1997, sovereignty transferred back to Beijing. The residents have been negotiating that inheritance ever since, sometimes in the streets, sometimes in the encrypted corners of the internet in something close enough to cyberwar to warrant the name.

There’s something about that civic stubbornness—a city that absorbed British rule, survived Japanese occupation, got handed back to a power it doesn’t fully trust, and has been arguing about it for thirty years—that makes Hong Kong feel like a place where the present tense is always slightly contested. Davis catches that. The city as something alive and unresolved. I still want to go.