#10 The brown purse
Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition center is an opera looking building on a pimple of the island. You can easily find it and easily get lost inside. The main hall at all times is guarded by uniformed people with devices checking the badges. There’s no way around them. A woman in desperate need of money and things, anything really, is sniffing around trying to find a way in. She waits at the first entrance until the guards are distracted - no luck. The second one is another 15 minutes. The third one the guards are changing shifts just at the same time when a big group comes and she sneaks in undetected. Inside there are huge screens and bright stands, everything is shouting and singing. Everything is inviting to drown into the content. It takes strength to remember her mission. She wanders between the stands pretending to search for someone, many people around, all are busy. She is standing and watching some love series trailer in Mandarin that she understands remotely. Now she often hears it in her native HK though in her school years it was less common than Portuguese. A loud noise interrupts people at the table near to where she is standing. This noise apparently is produced by her stomach. She can’t remember when she ate. Some cold dumplings yesterday or was it the day before. A half eaten croissant is laying on the table, she grabs it. She’s chewing it too fast and it makes the sound even worse. At least now she can focus. She methodologically walks through stands and takes what she can, a gift bag on Taiwan stand, then the sweets from Thailand reception, a big exhibition magazin in hand to cover whatever underneath it. At one stand there’s a coat on the chair and a laptop. She checks the pockets and finds 400 HK dollars - that's more than she made last week. An angry woman at her dorm was right - this place is full of careless foreigners. The laptop she could take, but doesn’t know where to sell it or even how to charge. Walking along the rows of fancy stands and fancy people she starts to be extremely aware of her own clothes: old jeans and an even older sweatshirt that used to be purple and after a thousand washing became dusty lilac. All the nice clothes, shirts and sweaters that she got from her ma’am she had to trade during Covid for food or rent.
