TWO hundred and fifty thousand Filipinos live and work in Hong Kong, including a fictional group of OFWs featured in the movie Hello, Love, Goodbye. It’s a film – timely! – starring Kathryn Bernardo, Alden Richards and a cast of quirky characters eking out a living in the city named after a harbor and nine dragons. In the opening sequence, Kathryn as Joy describes HK as a place where no one stays for long. She’s talking about herself and the end of her contract, upon which she will be heading for another OFW destination, Canada.
Just watching Joy at work in her employer’s apartment, I felt more exhausted than she was – taking care of a special child and her nonverbal grandmother, running away from cops, finding time to squeeze in a bit of “me” time to breathe, have fun with friends and a suitor (Alden) with a checkered career. The HK pictured here is cramped, tiring, joyless, especially when the calls come from the family back home asking for new rubber shoes, for financial and emotional support.
I watched the movie to see how the two actors measured up as co-stars from the two rival TV networks, not realizing there would be more at stake. For one, how are the 88 former NPA rebels processing their all-expenses-paid trip to capitalist, materialistic HK? Two, how is the nine-week protest movement without a leader about to affect our domestic helpers and white-collar professionals? Now that the movement is being joined by HK’s government workers, teachers and aviation crews, and HK police have started to throw tear-gas bombs at the occupiers, how long before Carrie Lam’s security forces lose their cool? The crowds are yelling “police brutality!” while the Chinese People’s Liberation Army sits and waits meters away in their headquarters in the occupied Admiralty district.
Not all of HK is under siege, but with thousands of flights cancelled, trade and tourism cannot be unaffected. Nine weeks is nine weeks. The ferry service and the new long bridge connecting Macau and HK are working, but MTR coaches are being blocked by the umbrella carriers. It’s going to be a long wait but longer, lonelier for Ms. Lam.
