Over 10,000 people turned up in pink at Pink Dot Hong Kong, the city’s LGBTI festival and largest diversity event, to celebrate diversity and love equality on Sunday.
Co-organized by BigLove Alliance and Pink Alliance, and supported by Covenant of the Rainbow, the third edition of the annual event was held this year at Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Nursery Park. Organisers chose a different venue this year, as compared to the first two years at the city’s Tamar Park, in order to ‘accommodate more activities for everyone, young and old’.
This year’s event was also largely supported by various entertainers, celebrities, corporate sponsors and diplomats – and was officiated by the Equal Opportunities Commission, an independent statutory body which commissioned a study last year to look into the need for anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status.
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The sun is setting…I think. I’ve arrived in Shanghai after a 15-hour flight, and I’m not sure what day it is, let alone what time of day: the permanent haze that hovers over much of China’s 3.7 million square miles masks any clues. Shanghai Pudong International Airport offers a harsh juxtaposition of the familiar and the unknown, a theme that will reappear throughout my journey to two of China’s major east coast cities.
I hop on a shuttle bus that takes me southwest from Shanghai’s city center to Hangzhou. The cities blur together along the two-hour journey (or 45 minutes by bullet train), where endless clusters of high-rise complexes blend into one another. Imagine the Vegas Strip held up to a mirror, an endless stream of towering residential buildings, outlined in neon and saturated floodlights. But as I peer out the window amid the slowly chugging traffic, closer inspection reveals a kind of post-apocalyptic urban planning to accommodate the country’s 1.3 billion inhabitants. Construction cranes pierce the skyline and it’s hard to tell whether certain projects are underway or have been abandoned midstream. China, I am soon to find out, is a country and a people of contradiction.