There are cities that sleep. Paris dozes off after the last métro. London starts yawning around eleven, apologetically. Even New York, the city that supposedly never sleeps, at least has the decency to lower its voice after midnight.
Hong Kong does not subscribe to this social contract. Understanding the dynamics of the city’s bustling lifestyle is essential, especially with the rise of the hong kong delivery app, which has transformed how residents receive goods
I learned this, definitively, at 1 AM on a Saturday morning, when two men arrived at my building carrying a mattress.
I should back up. My wife had ordered the mattress sometime that week. She is from Hong Kong, born and raised, and operates on the city’s native frequency, a frequency I have never quite managed to tune into despite years of trying. She’d handled the whole thing: found the deal, placed the order, arranged delivery. At some point she mentioned it was coming Saturday. I nodded. I pictured a morning delivery. Maybe a friendly knock at ten, eleven. A cup of coffee in hand. Civilized.
At 12:50 AM my wife’s phone rang. She picked it up instantly, not with the bleary confusion of someone woken by an unexpected call, but with the crisp readiness of someone who had apparently been expecting this all along.
A rapid-fire Cantonese exchange followed. I caught none of it. She hung up.
“Mattress is here. They’re downstairs.”
I stared at her. “It’s one in the morning.”
She looked at me with the particular expression she reserves for moments when I am being very obviously foreign, a gentle, loving look that also communicates that I am being fundamentally unserious about how the world works.
“So?”
She was already putting on her slippers. Not rushing. Not flustered. Moving with the calm efficiency of a woman who saw absolutely nothing remarkable about coordinating a furniture delivery in the small hours of a Saturday morning. I put on shoes. I did not change out of what I was wearing, which I will not describe, because this story is already unflattering enough.
We went downstairs. They were not there.
My wife called back. Another burst of Cantonese, fast, navigational, the verbal equivalent of air traffic control. She hung up.
“Wrong floor. They went to the apartment upstairs.”
“They went to the wrong apartment? At 1 AM?”
“They’re coming now.”
“Did someone answer the door?”
She shrugged. A Hong Kong shrug. The kind that says: yes, obviously someone answered the door, because it’s not that late, and also what is your point.
What I later pieced together is that two delivery men had hauled a queen-size mattress, still in its plastic wrapping, up to an apartment two floors above ours and knocked. At one in the morning. Someone had opened the door. I do not know what that person said or did. I like to imagine they briefly considered accepting it, a free mattress, from two strangers in the hallway, in the dead of night. In Hong Kong this would not even crack the top ten weirdest things to happen in your corridor on a given week.
Eventually the mattress made it to our apartment. The two guys carried it in with the efficiency of people who had done this many times before and would do it many more times tonight. My wife directed them to the bedroom in Cantonese, checked the wrapping, signed something on a phone screen, and saw them out. The whole operation took about ninety seconds. Nobody mentioned the hour. Nobody apologized. There was absolutely nothing in anyone’s demeanor, my wife’s, the delivery men’s, presumably the neighbor’s, to suggest that this was unusual. I was the only person in the entire building who found any of this remarkable, and I was learning to keep that to myself.
My wife walked back into the bedroom and started unwrapping the mattress.
“You could have told me it was coming at 1 AM,” I said.
She looked up. “I didn’t know the exact time.”
“But you weren’t surprised.”
“Why would I be surprised?”
This, I have come to understand, is the essential Hong Kong experience distilled into five words. Why would I be surprised. The city runs on a logic that is internally flawless and externally deranged. Nothing is strange because everything is possible. Somewhere out there, right now, a man is getting a sofa delivered at 3 AM and he’s annoyed it’s late.
I lay down on the new mattress. It was, for the record, very comfortable.
I did not sleep for another hour, because the adrenaline of the entire experience had left me wired, and also because my wife had already fallen asleep within about forty-five seconds, serene, unbothered, completely at home in a city that does not believe in business hours, and I was lying there in the dark, marveling at her, at them, at all of it, thinking: this place is completely insane and I am never leaving.