I moved to Hong Kong for my PhD in 2018. When people asked why I chose it, the answer was boring — it was close to my hometown, and that made my family happy.
I didn’t know it would become the most formative four years of my life.
The food
You can’t talk about Hong Kong without the food. You just can’t.
Cantonese dim sum, roast meats hanging in shop windows with that specific amber glaze, Southeast Asian curries from the little Thai and Malaysian joints wedged between towers in Tsim Sha Tsui. Western food that’s actually good, not the sad imitation you get in most mainland cities. And the range — you could grab a bowl of wonton noodles from a street vendor for a few dollars, the kind where the broth is so clean it makes you wonder why anyone complicates soup. Or you could walk into a Michelin-starred place and blow a week’s stipend on a single meal.
That range mattered. It meant a broke PhD student could still eat incredibly well. It meant trying something new was never a financial risk. Every week was a different corner of the city, a different cuisine, a different price point. Hong Kong trains you to be adventurous with food because the cost of being adventurous is so low.
I think about those wonton noodles more than I’d like to admit.
The city that never sleeps
Hong Kong is deeply Chinese and unmistakably not-quite-China. That’s the tension that makes it interesting.
You’d celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival — mooncakes, lanterns, the whole thing — and a few weeks later the same streets would be draped in Christmas lights. Not because anyone was confused about identity, but because Hong Kong just… absorbed things. Western influence layered on top of Cantonese tradition, and instead of clashing, they fused into something specific to that place.
Walk through Mong Kok at midnight. Streets still packed. People shopping, eating, arguing with street vendors over the price of phone cases. Neon signs stacked five stories high in traditional Chinese characters. A temple next to a McDonald’s next to a dried seafood shop that’s been there for forty years. Nothing about it is curated or intentional — it’s just what happens when seven million people live on a handful of islands and nobody ever goes to sleep.
The people mirror the city. Some are deeply traditional, reserved in a way I recognized from home. Others are cosmopolitan in a way I’d never encountered — multilingual, globally connected, casual about things that would be a big deal where I grew up. You’d meet both types in the same lab, the same dinner table, sometimes the same person depending on the day.
2019
My second year, the protests started.
I’m not going to pretend I understood everything that was happening politically. I was a mainland PhD student — my perspective was limited and I knew it. But what I can tell you is what it felt like on the ground.
One night, there were rumors that students were planning to destroy a bridge near our dorm. I don’t know if it was true. It didn’t matter — at midnight, we were told to evacuate. The student association organized it. We packed bags in the dark, not really knowing what we were packing for or how long we’d be gone. Then a military convoy to Shenzhen Bay.
That’s a strange sentence to write. A military convoy. In the middle of the night. Because I was a graduate student.
I remember the fear being very specific. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies — more like a low hum. The realization that the ground you’re standing on isn’t as stable as you assumed. That the city you’d been eating wonton noodles in and walking through at midnight could shift underneath you, and you’d have no say in it.
We were lucky. Nobody got hurt — at least not in our group. But that night changed something in me. Not politically. Just… the understanding that safety is a thing you can lose. That certainty is borrowed.
What stayed
Four years is long enough to form you. It’s long enough for relationships — the kind that start and end and teach you something either way. Friendships that survived distance and ones that didn’t. Habits, good and bad, that I’m still carrying.
Hong Kong was where I learned to suffer and call it growth. That sounds dramatic, and maybe it is. But a PhD is already a machine for producing suffering, and doing it in a city that was itself going through something — that compressed the experience. Everything was more intense. The highs were higher. The lows were lower. The food was better.
I left in 2022. I’m in the Bay Area now, debugging CI pipelines and writing about Bazel. A different life. But sometimes I’ll walk past a Cantonese restaurant and smell roast goose and I’m right back in Sham Shui Po, twenty-three years old, standing at a dai pai dong with no idea what’s coming next.
Those four years didn’t prepare me for what came after. They just made me the kind of person who could handle it.