SWEPT ASIDE AND FORGOTTEN

Not too far from where I live lies Hong Kong's Olympic Trail which is a hiking trail that's known to be both short and sweet. This trail is located on Lantau Island, and is also known as the Tung Mui Ancient Trail. Though Hong Kong's trails are famous for their outstanding and phenomenal views, I chose to focus my attention on  something quite different while out hiking for the day. 

As a storyteller, producer and director I tend to stray away from your usual crowd or in this case line of sight, in hopes of finding stories that drive meaningful conversation in one way or another. The short story you just saw sparked my imagination. It is of a remarkable vehicle who at some point in time had been swept aside and forgotten. While her name is unknown, for the purpose of this particular story we'll name her Sunny Bajaj. 

Rejected by society Sunny Bajaj is a scooterette who proudly bears a license plate with the number 0008. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Chinese symbolism the number 8 is considered the luckiest of numbers in China and they believe the more 8's the better. The Cantonese word for eight, which is pronounced “baat”, sounds similar to the word which means “prosper” or “wealth”. In regional dialects the words for “eight” and “fortune” are also similar. Unfortunately for Sunny this doesn't seem to be the case. Clouded from the sunlit sky she is now an outcast who sleeps on the corner of a hiking trail. Sunny wears her heart on her tail feather and proudly boast that she's from Hong Kong. Some may joke that her "Made in HK" tattoo is nothing but a tramp stamp, especially while she lays amongst the autumn leaves with a brittle Chinese broomstick on her side. But Sunny deserves better, because she is one of kind.

To me the concept of beauty and decay go hand in hand, so when I look at her, I'm quickly reminded of the film Made in Hong Kong (香港製造) which is a 1997 Hong Kong drama film written and directed by Fruit Chan, executive produced and produced by Andy Lau and starring Sam Lee, Yim Hui-Chi, Wenders Li, and Tam Ka-Chuen. Much of the film is set in subsidised housing projects, which Chan considered to be 'a very Hong Kong thing' due to the high population density of the region. Though the film is sometimes regarded as a response to the 1997 Hong Kong handover, Chan felt that Made in Hong Kong could also be viewed as a character-driven drama that reflects the lifestyle of many young Hong Kong people at the time, and even more so today. The narrator of Chan's film, Autumn Moon (Sam Lee), is a high school drop-out whose father abandoned his family for his mistress. He had nightmares about a classmate who committed suicide. Moon works with his friend, Sylvester, as a debt collector for a Triad member and falls for Ping, the daughter of a debtor. She has a fatal kidney disease, so the teenager accepts an assassination contract to pay her medical fees. When Ping dies, Moon decides to take revenge on the world. 

Oddly, as I sat there filming I couldn't help but feel that there was more to Sunny's own story. Might the same thing have happen to her? What happened to her partner in crime? If you look closely at her odometer you'll notice that the distance she travelled stopped at 00842 which is 10 miles shy of 00852. This happens to be the country code for Hong Kong, and I can only presume that the promising couple's love story ended quite tragically, leaving Sunny all alone on the corner of this hiking trail. 

Ironically, the Bajaj Sunny was a scooterette produced and sold by Bajaj Auto in India and was targeted at teenagers who were eligible to get a driving license for un-geared two-wheelers at 16 years of age. And though the Bajaj Sunny was a successful scooterette at that time, Bajaj Motors also stopped producing them in 1997, the same year of Hong Kong's handover. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there is a connection between Bajaj Auto, Sunny or the movie, that would be preposterous! What I am saying however, is that Sunny's untold story is the epitome of all voices of Hong Kong forgotten throughout time, regardless of race, gender, age, colour or creed.