What Remains in a City That Forgets So Easily?
Reflections on memory, erasure, and the shuttered umbrella stall on Peel Street.
Central is one of Hong Kong’s most popular tourist destinations, the streets, the escalators, the queue outside Lan Fong Yuen are all packed with visitors. But just across the Mid-Levels escalator, Peel Street feels like a different world — a pocket of stillness amid the chaos.
After the H18 Urban Renewal Project, a few street stalls managed to survive. They now stand between noisy construction sites and newly opened cafés filled with tourists snapping photos. These stall owners continue with their daily business, seemingly unfazed, maintaining a quiet resilience.
Further up Peel Street, just before the pedestrian bridge connecting to Caine Road, there is one particular stall, often silent, its shutter perpetually closed. For years I passed by weekly and never saw it open. But posted across its front are newspaper clippings of past interviews with the man once known as the “King of Umbrellas (街頭遮王).” Under the sign reading “Ho Hei Kee (何希記),” a couplet is pasted:
借問傘工何處好，記得此地有遮神
(If you ask where the finest umbrellas are made, remember this place, home of the Umbrella God.)
One day, I stopped to read those yellowing news articles again. A passer-by noticed my curiosity. “He hasn’t opened for over a decade,” he told me. “But I remember when he did.”
Hong Kong is a city of rapid change, constant demolition, construction, and reinvention. Traces of what once existed are quickly wiped out, not only spatially but also from collective memory. It’s not just forgetting; it’s a form of historical amnesia.
To understand the past, we often rely on fragments, an old photograph, a news clip, or a grainy film. These are often beautiful, but also painfully disconnected from the present. They offer no physical anchor. They drift, untethered in time. When we revisit black-and-white images of Queen’s Road Central or Sheung Wan, we might recall a story or recognise a façade, but the streets themselves have changed beyond recognition. The physical cues that once connected memory to place have been erased.
That’s what makes the umbrella stall on Peel Street so quietly powerful. It is a rare example of something that has disappeared, yet still exists. Though the shutter never lifts, its presence occupies space. It bears witness. It offers proof — he was here; this place mattered. The stall is not simply a remnant. It is a trace of existence, and it reminds us that memory needs more than words, it needs ground to stand on.
This brings us to a deeper question. In a city where everything is so swiftly rebuilt, covered over, or forgotten, where time and space both conspire to erase the past, how do we learn history? How do we remember?
Think of all the old businesses and sites that have announced closures over the years. A frenzy of farewell follows, photo ops, media coverage, nostalgic social media posts. And then… silence. Today, few remember Queen’s Pier, or the State Theatre, or even Sunbeam Theatre, which closed just last month. Even Mong Kok’s Hung Wan Café, whose closure was recently averted by a corporate buyout, barely lingers in public discourse after a brief media flare.
Why does something only seem to gain meaning when it's about to disappear? Does our collective attention span only stretch as far as the urgency of loss? Are we building a larger and larger database while forgetting more deeply than ever before?
It reminds me of the photo-taking-impairment effect, a phenomenon where the act of documenting something makes us less likely to remember it. We’ve stored our past in digital folders, hard drives, and archives that we rarely revisit. If history becomes just data, preserved but untouched, what is its worth?
We live in a time of infinite consumption, not just of goods, but of content, feeds, and fleeting experiences. The more we consume, the less meaning we seem to derive. Engagement is wide, but rarely deep.
I used to wonder how we might preserve the past, not just physically, in the form of buildings or objects, but as a living history. Preservation should be more than freezing time; it should be about connection.
Understanding history gives the present depth. In this postmodern age of constant change and fragmentation, knowledge of the past grounds us. David Lowenthal once wrote in The Past is a Foreign Country that the past is our home. But I believe it's more than home, it’s our foundation. As Robert Penn Warren put it:
"History cannot give us a program for the future but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future."
But how can we connect with history when it's constantly being stripped from our surroundings?
As the city builds upward and forward, the ground beneath us grows quieter.
Somewhere behind shuttered stalls and fading signs, history waits—not to be preserved, but to be felt.
