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Each fortune cookie hides a message. Each message foretells the good or bad fortune that those who eat the cookies will have. As we hold the cookie in our hand, an emotion and fascination mechanism is set off, triggered by the promise of a secret message contained in a small box.
There are men and women in Hong Kong who live as if they were boxes full of cookies, packed and piled up on top one another, waiting to be moved elsewhere. This wait, however, does not have an end. This is the case of people known as “cage-men”: a group of about one hundred one thousand people who live in 1 meter high by 1,8 meter wide rooms made of plaster and wire walls in the Tai Kok Tsui neighbourhood of Hong Kong. These boxes of cookies are split up in order to house up to ten people divided in cages where only a bed fits in. Belongings are placed wherever there might be room for them. The dirtiness and stench of this unhealthy area pervade every corner in the entire building. People live squeezed in between the filthy floor tiling and low ceilings that move along the narrow corridors. It is a place where the sounds and the smells coming out the cages are individual, yet all one and the same.
The first cages emerged in the late 1950's as a solution, supposedly temporary; they were to house the cheap labour force that migrated from mainland China to the coast and worked to build the city that today seeks to be considered the capital of the Asian continent. The wages earned by these workers were so low that they could not even access employment protection policies. These houses were built as part of a measure to receive the newcomers, but their tenants divided their homes into different sections, creating small cages, aiming to take maximum advantage of the space they had. In 1997 China recovered the city's political control and the factories left Hong Kong in search of industrial workers in mainland China. Thus, the cage-men lost their jobs, which made it difficult for them to access the residence permit in a city that has a different political status from the rest of the country.
The men who forty years ago started to inhabit the cages of Tai Kok Tsui hoped to gain access to the state-owned buildings, which were maintained by the local government. However, throughout the years these small rooms have become a shelter for the poorest people and the final stop for men and women who have been rejected by their families. It is a journey that covers the distance from a temporary stop to a final stop.
Prices differ in each individual case, but every cage-man pays between 97 and 130 Euros per month to live in a cage with common bathroom access and no kitchen. Every night, before going to sleep, the men and women who live badly in Tai Kok Tsui go out in search of food that they buy in the nearest bars and restaurants.
The cage-men's accommodation conditions are Hong Kong's unseen face: a city where luxury articles and technology rank as its most profitable businesses, and which boasts one of the world's highest property prices per square metre. Wealth is not a rare occurrence in Hong Kong, pretty much in the same way as cage-men assume the constant arrival of journalists who visit them through the Society for Community Organization (SOCO), a local ONG that works with them, to be normal.
Room is scarce and privacy has no place in the cages. At least, this privacy cannot be compared to the one we feel when we open a fortune cookie and uncurl the message that we read in silence and secretly keep as though it were a treasure.
