For me, 2023 felt like a long, dull year. The main reason could be summed up as "regressing with the times": I got caught in Hong Kong's fifth wave of COVID-19 and was rewarded with nearly a year of long COVID. Fatigue and forgetfulness, disordered sleep, an erratic heart rate, inflammation flaring up all over... Add the knee injury from overdoing it in '21, and all I could do was gaze at the mountains and sigh. So the theme of the whole year was, pretty much, "hunkering down". That is reflected directly in this year's photo memories: there doesn't seem to be much to remember.

Still, picked over carefully, the beautiful moments I caught in daily life are worth a ladleful. And as you are about to see, everyday as they are, they are also ever-changing.

Victoria Harbour

Taken on my way to swim every Wednesday. Come out of Exhibition Centre station, don't rush to turn left, take a few steps to the right, and you reach this spot. A friend complained about that rather unsightly lamp post. I suppose AI could probably remove it these days, but as long as the mind's eye is unobstructed, this little obstruction is nothing.

Victoria Harbour from outside Exhibition Centre station: evening clouds over the International Commerce Centre and the Kowloon skyline across the water, with a lamp post and buses in front The same spot on an overcast evening, dark clouds over the lit towers across the harbour The same spot at dusk, a band of gold along the horizon and the towers across the water in silhouette The same spot, a single cloud turned pink by the setting sun resting above the towers in a pale blue sky

Ma On Shan

At the end of '22 I changed jobs and came to the Science Park. I put up with a long commute for a year, and at the start of '24 I finally moved here. The waters of Tolo Harbour, with Ma On Shan and the Pat Sin Leng range in the distance, are sights that can console the heart. At lunchtime or in the evening, when I have a moment, I look out into the distance and my heart settles.

Ma On Shan on a clear day across Tolo Harbour, a row of tower blocks at its foot and white clouds piled up behind

Cloud wrapped around the peaks of Ma On Shan, with tower blocks and still water below

A great mass of cloud sitting on top of Ma On Shan, sunlight bringing out the green of its slopes Ma On Shan and the tower blocks in morning haze, three small boats crossing the water Blue hour: a full moon sitting right on the peak of Ma On Shan, the tower blocks at its foot lit up

Dusk

Dusk is my favourite time of day. The daily cycle and the yearly cycle correspond astonishingly well. Why? The sun, and rotation. Dusk must correspond to autumn: the border between yin and yang, half of the circle of the terminator. The sun sinks toward the horizon, faster and faster; its light shifts from white toward the yellow and red end, and grows dimmer and dimmer. But if the weather allows, for a while the sun is more striking than in the daytime, so striking that we are willing to call it "glorious". The setting sun is infinitely fine, as the Tang poet said, but only for an instant.

From high above, the setting sun turns the International Commerce Centre gold, with the West Kowloon waterfront and a typhoon shelter in front

The booms and masts of crane barges in silhouette against the setting sun

Railway station canopies and tracks leading into the distance, the sun setting between half-built towers

On a wooded hillside, the sun setting into a valley between bare branches Silvergrass and shrubs backlit on a hilltop, the orange sun hanging over layered mountain silhouettes

Then day hands over to night, abundance to stillness, life to death. In The Three-Body Problem, Ye Wenjie sighs, "This is the sunset of humankind", while an unfeeling physicist would scoff, "The sunset of half of humankind is also the sunrise of the other half." So at a sunset some time later, I simply rewrote it as "This is the sunset of humankind in UTC+8." Imagine that semicircle, twenty thousand kilometres long, sweeping across the Earth, across the face of everyone who looks up at the sunset. On one side of the line are bright azure, emerald green, ice white and earthy yellow; on the other, a darkness perhaps dotted with stars. And at the far end, feet to our feet, the show runs exactly the other way: from death to life, from sleep to waking, lights going out one after another as the colours come back.

Miss a sunset? It doesn't matter at all. As long as the sun has not gone out and low entropy can be kept up, this cycle, which has already run for billions of years, will not stop; you can watch it over and over until you are sick of it. But you should also remember Eason Chan's song "Sunset Is Infinitely Fine" (夕陽無限好, words by Lin Xi), on how ordinary a fine sunset is, and how the ones we see are never alike from one day to the next. And the sun will go out in the end. After that, and after the after that, until the end of space and time, will death still turn toward life?

This contradiction between the eternal and the momentary, the everyday and the extraordinary, is a romance in itself.

Kowloon from a hill at dusk, the city in haze with its first lights on and a pylon close by The city in haze under an orange sky, a floodlit football pitch below and a pylon in the lower left City lights from a hill after dark, with a brightly lit football pitch close by

Life

Romance on too large a scale can't help but make you dizzy. The connection between one low-entropy body and another, between one pattern and another, within a finite stretch of space and time, is tiny and ordinary. But perhaps it is the greatest meaning life can give us, even if every connection will be broken in the end and every meaning lost. Like these blades of silvergrass shining in the light: next to the winding ridge, they are so fragile.

Sunlit slopes covered in silvergrass, a stone hut on the rise and a winding ridge beyond

Fireworks bursting over the sea at night, boats full of spectators below

With this last photo I remember one such small connection that I have already lost, and the countless connections lost before it. I hope I can cherish every connection in the Martian way of Stranger in a Strange Land. To cherish is to dissolve into one, like water. Perhaps I am nearly there.

A fluffy fledgling nestled in the palm of a hand