The Almighty Dollar

Been back in HK for nearly two weeks now. It's always nice to spend time with my parents, but lately, I've been feeling more and more like a fish out of water every time I come back to HK. Sometimes, I even wonder how the heck I managed to live here for 4 years. I guess when you're younger, you don't think about life as much. Your problems are silly, with your thoughts (or my thoughts at least) centred around school, shopping, food, and boys. Now though, I look around and although things are changing, I find that everything has still stayed the same.

Each time I come back, there's another new shopping mall being built. I hear hip-hop blasting from the stores now, whereas before, the only way I could hear it at a club was if my friends & I were the only people there. Coffee shops are springing up all around me, and the stores in the mall near my apartment keep on changing. But underneath all these cosmetic changes, the society stays the same. I feel like everywhere I look, there's a shrine to the only god that people around here worship - the almighty dollar. Everyone wants to get rich quick, have the right husband/wife, the right car, the right house, the right job, the right bag..... There's always a new fad around the corner that's waiting to be pounced on by the local populace. And frankly, all of this just makes me sick.

Not that I don't like shopping. You only need to look at my shoe collection to see evidence to the contrary. It's not that materialism doesn't run rampant in North American either. NY is just as bad, if not worse than HK. And in Toronto, more and more high-end stores are cropping up all over the city.

What I really don't like here is, how blindly people seem to pursue their wealth. Where's the questioning of where all this wealth comes from? Or the exploration of how many parts of society are shut out of this wealth creation. How about whether this wealth even means as much as you think it will? Will it truly make you happy once you have accumulated the 'latest' of everything?

I know Canada has its problems. Witness the abhorrent state of many reserves - it's said that if Canada was measured by the situation of our Aboriginal population, we would be considered a third world country. I wish I could put my finger on what exactly it is that's different here. Maybe it's the ignorance - whether through willful blindness or merely being uninformed, of where all this money comes from. The harm that the mere pursuit of profit causes. The lack of realization that maybe, just maybe, we should open our eyes and look around at all the other people who are less fortunate than we are. That we should try to help them. That we should strive to make the world a better place through our actions, no matter how small or big they might be.

I can partially understand this obsession with money. China's gone through many upheavals in its past, and there is no guarantee that the wealth you make now may stick around in the future. In the past century alone, the Japanese invasion, the cultural revolution, the 1997 handover, and the Asian financial crisis lead many people to lose their accumulated stores of wealth. So people become obsessed with hoarding as much money as they can now, because you never know what's going to happen in the future.

Maybe that is a good reason to make as much as you can. I worry though, what we're teaching our younger generation if all they ever learn is you have to work hard, so that you can make a lot of money.