In my daily commute, I rarely have the breathing space or inclination to pull a book from my bag, so my mind has nothing to contemplate but its own workings and the activities around me. Though many of the people around me have headphones on, my only soundtrack is the sounds of the KCR and MTR. I hear the digital music of my Octopus (a card for frequent public transit riders) as it beeps into the KCR and out of it again, chimes into the MTR and out of it again. I hear the quiet footsteps of thousands of my companions going up and down the stairs. I hear the Cantonese, Mandarin, and English announcements of the station stops, the door-closings, the mind-the-gaps. (I always think the woman who speaks Mandarin has a funny baby voice, although the intonations of the language probably don't help her cause.) But my favorite commuting noise is a song that they play in the MTR between announcements. I assume it’s piped through some official channel, although it’s far from the soothing classical music that one would expect them to choose for a commute in one of Asia’s most stressed-out cities. No, this tune is a happy, bopping melody that could easily be the background music for a television shot of little kids dancing energetically with their new puppy in a grassy field, or a group of friends whooshing down a water slide with huge smiles. When I hear it, the cameras turn on me and I become a sitcom star: the happy Hong Kong intern, walking happily and confidently towards a day full of adventure in the city above.
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