Sandra Ng, Born in Hong Kong in 1965: The Past Always Feels Like a Wound | Housing and Our Lives ⑫

A home is the largest commodity a person can buy, and it is also one of the witnesses to how an individual's life changes. QDaily is running a series of reports that use housing as a thread for looking at what happened in the past.

It's time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it; most of the story was written by the generation before us.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a belief in progress and development; the conviction that society will keep making more and better room for the individual; that effort earns its reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

Which is to say, simply, universal values.

When a word like "history" is set in front of us, it tends to disappear under grand narratives. Through more interviews at the small scale, we hope to sort out what we can.

We're starting this record with "housing," the thing people pay the most attention to in their own lives.

"Back then she was so poor she had no shoes. She fled barefoot from the countryside in Guangdong to Hong Kong." Sandra Ng heard the story of her mother's escape only recently; her mother was part of the wave of migrants who left the mainland in the 1950s.

From 1950 on, China launched large-scale political campaigns — the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, land reform — that swept up millions of people. Sandra Ng's mother lost her own father in the chaos: one day she came home to find that Sandra Ng's grandfather had vanished, and he was never seen again. In 1952, Sandra Ng's grandmother and mother walked barefoot for several days from Zhongshan, Guangdong, before reaching Hong Kong. For the three years beginning in 1952, Hong Kong's migration growth rate held at around 3%, with 180,000 mainland migrants entering the city every year.

They finally settled in Shek Tong Tsui, in the western part of Hong Kong Island. Her grandmother made a place for herself in the city by cooking and keeping house for other families.

Sandra Ng was born in Shek Tong Tsui in 1965. In the early 20th century the district was known as "Tong Sai Fung Yuet," Hong Kong's old pleasure quarter, and it still carried the marks of a red-light district: a hub for opium, prostitution and fortune-telling. She, her parents, her grandmother and her two younger brothers — six people — squeezed into a 50-square-meter tong lau, the walk-up tenement subdivided for rent that was common in Hong Kong from the mid-19th century to the 1960s.

A few steps away stood the Tai Ping Theatre, Hong Kong's first and, at the time, largest Cantonese-opera theater. It staged live opera at night and screened black-and-white films during the day. It was also where Sandra Ng first met the movies, and it holds most of her childhood memories.

Sandra Ng's father performed under the stage name Ha Chun-chau and hosted Hong Kong's Mark Six lottery show, which made him well known in the city; her mother was secretary to a property developer. When Sandra Ng was 12 the family moved to the Mid-Levels in North Point — an address Hong Kongers considered luxurious, with a clear view of Victoria Harbour. "I went from a very grassroots district to the Mid-Levels," Ng said. The apartment grew from 50 to 80 square meters: two bedrooms, one for her parents, the other split down the middle by a board, a set of bunk beds on each side — her two brothers on one side, Ng and her grandmother on the other.

Four years later she enrolled in TVB's training class, and after graduating began taking roles at the station, where she made her first real money. In 1989, at 24, Sandra Ng paid more than HK$3 million for an apartment of over 80 square meters on Tin Hau Temple Road. Only three years after that, she paid more than HK$8 million for a 200-square-meter home on Tai Hang Road, three kilometers away.

Her career was going smoothly.

At 29, nursing a breakup and wanting to shed her image as the perpetual comic clown, Sandra Ng sold the apartment and borrowed money to invest in the art film Four Faces of Eve (《四面夏娃》). The film failed to win over the market, and that burst of 29-year-old "naivety" wiped her out.

She had to rent a 50-square-meter room, and everything seemed to be back where it began. By then she was 30, and the only one of her family left in Hong Kong. After her grandmother died, her two brothers went to study in Toronto, and her parents emigrated to Canada before the 1997 handover.

Between 1989, when she bought her first apartment, and 1997, Hong Kong's governor David Wilson launched the Rose Garden Project, a vast infrastructure plan; over those ten years, land prices in Hong Kong rose twentyfold.

When Sandra Ng sold her apartment for more than HK$8 million, she had no idea she would never be able to afford a home in Hong Kong again. She and Peter Chan still rent, a three-story house in Repulse Bay. It isn't that they can't afford to buy — it's that "the home they picture in their minds is the one they can't afford."

Sandra Ng and Peter Chan have been together for nearly 20 years and have an 11-year-old daughter, but they have never married. Chan came back from the United States in 1983 and met Ng; not long after came the Hong Kong stock market crash of 1987, and the company he worked for folded a year later. He also lived through two waves of Hong Kong emigration: after the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, and in the years that followed, many Hong Kongers moved to Canada — Richmond, in British Columbia near Vancouver, even earned the nickname "Little Hong Kong."

When Sandra Ng tells these stories she often can't keep the details straight, and Peter Chan corrects the history she cites. While Chan was counting off his own rounds of buying and selling apartments, Ng sat beside him, mouth open, flossing her teeth.

Her picture of the past is blurred — or more exactly, she would rather not call it up, because each time she looks back, "you realize you've already gone through most of a lifetime." What she wants now is to remember what she has to do tomorrow.

Peter Chan is the opposite. He thinks the biggest difference between him and Sandra Ng is that he is a pessimist who is nonetheless the more optimistic of the two. He chooses to remember on purpose, painful memories included, and uses reason to make sense of them — so that when he looks back, "these things don't actually hurt me, because I take them and study them."

But remembering frightens Sandra Ng. Some people need years to close a wound; Ng can scrub one clean in a few hours, and she tries to keep only the happy parts. It can look like optimism, but when a memory surfaces she feels the same sharp pain as the first time. The pain was never really let go of, only forced shut inside a black box. "I don't study it. I think it's just a wound."

We recorded our conversation with them in their own words:

Ng = Sandra Ng, born 1965

Chan = Peter Chan, born 1962

"Very grassroots Shek Tong Tsui"

Ng: Both my parents came through hard years. My mom is from Zhongshan, Guangdong. Back then she was so poor she had no shoes — she fled barefoot from the Guangdong countryside to Hong Kong. She only told me recently how wretched it was. Her father was an official in those days, the son of a rich family, and he smoked opium every day. She used to say, "Three generations of officials never ends well, because misfortune is bound to strike somewhere along the way." One day she came home and found that her father had gone off to smoke and disappeared; nobody knew where. My grandmother brought her to Hong Kong, where she worked as a nanny for other families, washing clothes and cooking.

My dad's parents worked on boats, and he didn't see them twice a year. What he remembers of his father is that every time he came home he didn't want to talk, because the work wore him out. So I understand that they lived through a different era to get where they are today, and that's why their values aren't ours.

Sometimes I tell them, you can earn your own money now, don't be so tight-fisted, so frugal — I don't think you need to count every cent. But they're used to it, and I don't bring it up much anymore, because after the hardship they went through, they don't need to change.

I was born in a neighborhood right next to something like Hong Kong's CBD. There's a film called Rouge (《胭脂扣》), with Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui — there's a district in it called Shek Tong Tsui, and that's exactly where I lived, just like in the movie. Shek Tong Tsui is one of Hong Kong's oldest districts. Because it's close to the docks, it's the most down-to-earth place there is. You know that cities always start growing from a dock, or a railway. This was the docks: coolies and laborers, ships unloading cargo from everywhere, and crowds going off to drink and smoke opium. It was a hub for drinking with hostesses, fortune-telling, prostitution — a bit like our nightclubs today. A very mixed district, very grassroots.

From the day I was born I lived in a tong lau, that very typical, very old kind of Hong Kong building — not the modern housing you see now. Many households to a staircase, nothing fancy, just 50 square meters, and six of us packed in: my grandmother, my father, my mother and my two younger brothers. There was no building manager, so coming home at night was nerve-wracking. When my mom worked late and came home late, my dad had to go meet her. My grandmother walked me to and from school too — it was the kind of neighborhood where you weren't allowed out to play alone, with all sorts of people mixed together. My school was close to home and my family was protective, so I took a school van; one waited downstairs and carried me to primary school, picking up children around the neighborhood, sometimes a big school bus, sometimes an ordinary car. When we were small the MTR hadn't opened yet (Hong Kong's subway only opened in 1979), so there was really no public transit — you took a taxi or a bus.

That neighborhood in Shek Tong Tsui was actually very convenient. You could buy bread on the ground floor, there was a stationery shop — we had no supermarkets then, and each little shop sold one thing: the rice shop sold rice, the oil shop sold oil, and rice and oil together made a general store. There were department stores too. Everything was concentrated in one place. When I was little there was a theater next door called the Tai Ping Theatre, very close to home. Sometimes the grand old masters of Cantonese opera would perform there, stars as famous as Mei Lanfang, but I had no idea what they were singing — I didn't understand a word of it.

These stars performed at night, and in the daytime the theater showed films — that's where I first met the movies. Going to the cinema was a big deal then, it was the only entertainment we had, and I remember thinking, wow, how exciting. I remember they loved showing black-and-white films from the 1960s and '70s — Guangdong had some very famous Cantonese-film stars.

Television programming was just beginning in that era. Our TV showed black-and-white films imported from abroad, from America, and what we'd now call American drama series, but it wasn't as easy back then — only the stations could broadcast, whereas now you can watch anything online whenever you like. One big event every year was the beauty pageant, the Miss Hong Kong Pageant; we'd all sit by the television, waiting eagerly for the variety show. There are too many variety shows now, but in our time you'd wait a long while in anticipation of one TV program, one film, and the whole family watched it together.

I remember when I was small the whole family would watch a certain star — you probably wouldn't know them now — Adam Cheng, Liza Wang. Wow! Adam Cheng in The Legend of Chor Lau-heung (《楚留香传奇》) — we could hardly wait, every day we waited for 8 o'clock, that feeling of a whole family looking forward to the same thing. That was my 12 years of childhood, that moviegoing kind of life.

My dad was in showbiz

When I was little both my parents were busy. My mom was secretary to a big boss in Central — a property developer. Businessmen like that had many lines of business going; we used to say "trading," import-export — they worked as middlemen, shipping Japanese goods into Hong Kong, say.

My dad was in showbiz, running from one gig to the next, hosting. He was quick, he never wasted a word — every line went straight to the point. Sometimes he went out to sing, to perform on stage, and once in a while I tagged along. I thought it was fine, but I never longed for it — I never thought I'd have to act myself, I just saw it as a job. I remember watching him act on stage once, getting cursed and beaten by another character, and I came home furious and asked my mom why Dad was being hit and yelled at. Of course it was just a role he was playing. But as a child you don't understand, you just think, how can this be happening? Children have no concept of acting at all — my daughter once cried when she saw Stephen Chow hit me on television.

I never talked about acting with my parents. Growing up I talked most with my two younger brothers, one a year and a half younger than me, the other five years younger. My dad was well known in Hong Kong; once I started school everyone would say "that's so-and-so's daughter, so-and-so's daughter…," and kids from other schools came to look at me. I got used to it, but I never saw it as an advantage — I still had homework to hand in, exams to sit.

Chan: Her dad hosted the Mark Six show, the weekly lottery the whole of Hong Kong was buying tickets for. Each time, his job was to draw those six numbers, and the winner could take 10 to 20 million Hong Kong dollars, so of course everyone thought her dad was the god of wealth.

Ng: So there was actually a period when my dad got kidnapped for ransom. Mark Six was a perfectly proper lottery run by the Jockey Club, recognized by the government, but people assumed it was run by triads — triads were a big thing in Taiwan for a while.

Chan: Taiwan had a lot of privately run lotteries, and many were fake, but Hong Kong didn't — a lottery run by the Hong Kong Jockey Club amounted to a government lottery.

Ng: My dad hosted Mark Six for 17 years. As a child I just thought of him as a famous host — singing, acting, performing on stage. I met plenty of showbiz stars and thought nothing of it. It's the same for my daughter now: sometimes she sees us shooting on set, sees celebrities, and she also treats it as a job, with no particular sense of privilege, except that people sometimes say "that's so-and-so's daughter" and come over for a look.

I had none of that small vanity, none at all — but I do see a little of it in my daughter. She seems to feel that her parents hold a certain standing in a lot of people's minds, so sometimes it works the other way around: she gets nervous about how we judge the things she's done.

What I regret most is that my parents were so often not there when I was small. They went out to work and we stayed home a lot; that's just how it was then. I hardly knew anything about what happened to them outside. So now I make a point of keeping my daughter close, but she's 11, entering her teens, and sometimes she'd rather be with her friends than run around with us.

My parents had no real expectations of me and didn't discipline me strictly — they knew they couldn't, because from childhood my character was such that if you said one, I'd say two. It was just that my mom thought my character suited acting, that I had some talent for it, so she encouraged me to sign up for the training class.

When I was born there were a lot of fortune-tellers around Shek Tong Tsui. When my mom and grandmother first came to Hong Kong they went to stay with my aunt, my grandfather's younger sister. My aunt had my fortune read once, and they said, "this little girl is something else" — really, my birth chart suited show business, so at 16 they let me try my luck in the industry. It really was that simple, nothing complicated: the times made certain people, that's how it was then.

What is fortune-telling? It's what you do when you don't know which way your life is going. Sometimes fortune-telling has statistics behind it — over thousands of years some people left a kind of statistics.

"Hong Kong's most nouveau-riche era"

I lived in Shek Tong Tsui until I was 12, then moved somewhere smarter, a Mid-Levels spot in North Point with a view of Victoria Harbour. In Hong Kong any smart building or tower is in the Mid-Levels, so we'd joke that I lived in "the Mid-Levels" — Mid-Levels just meant upscale.

But the Mid-Levels has its tiers, and mine wasn't especially smart, just on the edge of Causeway Bay. My family's circumstances had improved by then. It was the first time I saw a building with its own swimming pool — no gym, but a pool. After school every day I happily played in the pool with the other children; it was such fun, so many good memories.

So I went from a very grassroots district to the Mid-Levels, from 50 square meters up to 80, with two big rooms — one for my parents, and the other split down the middle, my two brothers on bunk beds on one side, my grandmother and me on the other. As a child I thought this was already wonderful, a real treat.

At the foot of the hill there was also a Tin Hau temple. Hong Kongers used to be very superstitious, and there were temples everywhere. This was a fishing port — like Shanghai, with many harbors — and a lot of people came here and put down roots. In Hong Kong films, for instance, people worship Guan Gong, who stands for both the police and the triads; Tin Hau protects fishermen and anyone going out to sea, and many people come to pray for a safe year on the water. Lots of places have a Tin Hau temple — Hung Hom and Clear Water Bay both do. This is our culture and our background.

I lived there four years, until at 16 I entered the training class; I graduated in 1983. When I was 19 my grandmother died, and both my brothers went to study in Toronto, leaving my parents and me. My parents felt boys still needed schooling; I was a girl, and I didn't like studying anyway, didn't want to go abroad for it. They thought it made more sense to keep the money for the boys — there was definitely some favoring of sons in that. But if they had sent me abroad to study back then, I probably wouldn't have ended up in show business.

After that I put in a few years at TVB and gradually began making my first money in the industry, enough to stand on my own. At 24 I bought my own first apartment, 80 square meters, for over HK$3 million. I lived there two years, and in '92 I bought an apartment for over HK$8 million, more than 200 square meters.

Chan: Now that's nouveau riche — that was Hong Kong's most nouveau-riche era.

Ng: In 1995, at 29, I felt that if I didn't do something I'd regret it. For all sorts of reasons then, including a breakup and wanting to change direction — my image in front of audiences had always been the funny one, the comedienne, and I didn't want to play the clown anymore — I put my own money into a film, Four Faces of Eve (《四面夏娃》). I sold my apartment, the one worth over HK$8 million, gave half the money to my mom so my parents could settle in Canada, and put the rest into the film. I even borrowed from a brokerage, and I lost a lot — I was wiped out.

I thought, wow, so life really can be this naive — turns out that at 29 you just badly want to go a little crazy.

Chan: That film of hers really was naive, because there was no thought of returns, no thought of the market — investing in someone else's art film. If you're making your own art film, fine. But that was pure willfulness: using money that belonged in a commercial film to make a purely artistic one.

Ng: I sold my own apartment, and afterward I had no money to buy another, because Hong Kong property prices kept climbing. So I rented a very small place, 50 square meters, with maybe half of that as usable floor area.

By then my actress friends who'd already made it had mansions, had plenty of properties to collect rent on, and there I was still living in that flat — but I still felt free, still thought it was romantic, thinking to myself, "wow, I'm something." I figured that's just how life is: you start over again.

But by then I was already 30, with no apartment left, my parents had already emigrated to Canada, and I was the only one left in Hong Kong. I had nowhere to put the furniture from my old mansion, so I shipped it to Canada and stored it in my mom's basement.

But it was exactly that naivety that gave me lines like "went bankrupt, invented a peerless treasure, had the patent stolen from me…" Every line of dialogue in Goldbuster (《妖铃铃》) is something I actually lived through. It also earned me some respect from people in the industry, because I was willing to put everything on the line, to invest my own money. After that I changed direction, changed my image, and made Portland Street Blues (《洪兴十三妹》), that kind of film with real artistic weight.

From then on the Hong Kong film industry began to slide, but property kept rising — housing in Hong Kong is simply too expensive. I still can't afford to buy a home even now.

Chan: We rent even now — we rent better and better places, but we rent. You have to understand that in Hong Kong, the moment you want something you actually like, something you could actually live in, you can't afford it. It's not that I can't afford a home at all — I probably can — it's that the one I can afford isn't the one I'd want to live in; it isn't big enough. Honestly, housing in Hong Kong has been bid up past the point where Hong Kongers can buy it: for a person of your standing, the home that fits that standing is out of reach. The gap is enormous. Housing in Hong Kong is all investment — a lot of mainlanders buy it as investment, not to live in. Locals have basically no chance of buying the home they'd actually want to live in.

I can't even remember what I'm doing tomorrow — why remember the past?

Chan: Hong Kong's economy actually started falling in 1984. It rose all the way through 1983 and 1984, hit the top, and then dropped a long way. I came back to Hong Kong from the US in 1983 and bought my first apartment in 1986, very cheap: 40 square meters, two bedrooms, though of course I knocked all the walls out and opened it up, which I thought worked fine. HK$200,000, with a down payment of just HK$20,000. My salary then was HK$8,000 a month, and I'd worked six months in Yugoslavia shooting Armour of God (《龙兄虎弟》) — Yugoslavia was a socialist country too, and there was nowhere to spend money, so the whole HK$8,000 got saved every month, because housing was provided and the crew fed you every day. Six months came to HK$50,000 and I hadn't spent a cent of it. Of that HK$50,000 I put HK$20,000 into the down payment and used the rest for renovation.

Of course I was still doing odd jobs then — HK$8,000 a month coming in and a HK$2,000 mortgage payment going out was manageable, like paying HK$2,000 a month in rent.

The apartment was in Sha Tin, a newly developed area at the time — a bit like Tong County out on Beijing's edge, though it isn't really that far. Ng lived on Hong Kong Island; I never did. I grew up in Kowloon, in Tsim Sha Tsui, left Hong Kong at 12 and went to the US for college.

After I'd lived there two-plus years, the apartment had risen to over HK$400,000 — it doubled in two years. I bought in early '86 and sold in mid-'88 for HK$420,000, meaning my HK$20,000 made me HK$220,000, HK$200,000 becoming HK$440,000, but my own stake was only HK$20,000.

So now I had HK$220,000, and I put HK$100,000 into a 65-square-meter place on the top floor with a roof terrace, in Sai Kung. Sai Kung was a bit of a hassle — no public transit, you had to drive — but it was a good area. It was an apartment worth over HK$800,000; I put down over HK$200,000, still owed over HK$600,000, and the monthly payment was HK$8,000.

At first I wasn't a director yet — assistant director work, production work, all kinds of odd jobs. But by 1988 I had a real job, doing administration at a film company, HK$18,000 a month, and I was paying HK$8,000 on the mortgage. That was more pressure than a HK$2,000 payment on an HK$8,000 salary, of course, but I felt HK$10,000 was plenty to live on. Looking back now, I think my money went furthest when I was earning HK$8,000 and HK$18,000; later, earning tens of thousands, it was harder to make it stretch, because everything had got expensive.

Buying that apartment was the start of the UFO years — the company where I later made Alan and Eric: Between Hello and Goodbye (《双城故事》), Comrades: Almost a Love Story (《甜蜜蜜》) and He's a Woman, She's a Man (《金枝玉叶》). When that company started out my finances actually got less steady; my standing had risen, but it was not at all stable, and the company could lose money too. Back then I was paying HK$8,000 a month, and there was one year that was genuinely hard: the company had almost no income, and several of the directors went essentially unpaid. But we got through it, and by the time He's a Woman, She's a Man made money it was 1994. That HK$880,000 apartment — when I decided to sell it in 1996, it went for HK$4.5 million. From HK$880,000 to HK$4.5 million in a few years; suddenly I had more than HK$3 million in cash. Back then, however many films you made, you wouldn't have HK$3 million in cash. That was Hong Kong in the '80s and '90s.

Hong Kong emigration actually came in two waves. The first was 1984: the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed and Hong Kong's economy fell with it, a trough — though the trough came back quickly. Everyone was running, running, and stocks fell too.

Ng: A lot of people were frightened, and my parents emigrated to Canada as well. Many people set up home in Canada. In those years we all talked about "astronauts" — the wife stayed in Canada while the husband flew back to Hong Kong to earn the money.

Chan: But it was short-lived. After the East China floods in 1991 and Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour in 1992, people felt nothing was going to change — the central government's decision was perfectly clear, so everyone might as well look ahead.

After the Southern Tour a wave of business opened up, trade was good, and Hong Kongers came back to make money. All of Hong Kong went back to doing business with the mainland. Hong Kong has always been the mainland's middleman — the stock market, the oil market, whatever; even making money in stocks depended on the mainland economy. Whether or not you were in mainland trade yourself, the benefit you ended up with came from the mainland.

I remember in '87 I joined a company Eric Tsang set up, called Good Friends, a joint venture with Alan Tam and Teddy Robin. They brought me in to do administration, and I went overnight from freelance assistant director and production manager to the company's executive director of administration — what you'd now call a producer. Tsang called me in and told me the company's backer was a listed company, funded with stock-market money. Very few people then used stock money for films — unlike on the mainland today — because film was a sideline, with little to do with stocks or formal investment.

As it turned out, six months after I joined that company — six months after it opened — the stock market crashed, the great crash of October 1987. I still remember phoning Eric Tsang that morning and saying, "Chi-wai, did you see the crash?"

He'd just got up, and said, "Yeah."

I said, "Didn't you say the company was backed by stocks?"

He said, "Yeah."

I said, "So with the crash, aren't we finished?"

And he said, "Oh. Right."

I said, "You hadn't even thought of it!"

Honestly, everyone was naive, nobody knew, and sure enough that company folded a year later. My HK$18,000 salary was gone — so what was I going to do about the HK$8,000 mortgage every month? I started taking on projects, doing my first job as producer on News Attack (《神行太保》), through another small company of Tsang's, which later became UFO — the company we set up that went on to make money.

Chan: I find years easy to remember. First, I'm someone who moves around, so remembering where I was tells me roughly what year it was — my life comes in stages. On top of that I mark time by the films I made. I'm also alert to what was happening in society. Put those together and I basically never get the dates wrong.

Ng: I find it hard to remember. I've made more than a hundred films, but actors and directors are different. Honestly, if you asked me I'd surely remember, but I'm scared to — thinking back too far brings on a kind of dread, because life holds so much pain, so much that I've been through: family gone, friends' misfortunes, discord at home, breakups, brutal setbacks at work… Someone else might need eight years to wash that off. I might take eight days, or eight hours. If an experience was painful I want it washed off fast; I don't want it sitting inside my body.

So when you asked me about my childhood just now, it actually touched a nerve. I felt — oh, it hurts… I remember my grandmother, and thinking of her, I really do want that state back, but there's no way to return to that era, no way to get back the feeling of life then. I hold on to the happy things and wash away the unhappy ones as much as I can.

Next to that, Peter Chan is the more optimistic one.

Chan: I'm very optimistic. My films seem to talk about a lot of pessimistic things, the dark side of human nature, but underneath I'm very optimistic. I'm a pessimist, but I'm a very optimistic person, so I keep everything. I don't think of any of it as bad — even though some of it may really be bad, I'm glad to hold on to it.

My pessimism is all intellectualized. I intellectualize it, so it doesn't hurt me. I take it and study it.

Ng: I don't intellectualize it and study it like that. I just think it's a wound, the same as the dialogue in my films: I don't want to go on and on repeating it — some things should just blow away with the wind.

Where my head is now: whenever I think about the past, I feel I've been through too much; you realize you've already gone through most of a lifetime, and now I have to look ahead. I can't even remember what I'm doing tomorrow — why remember the past?

Cover image: Unsplash

Illustration: Lin Yuyao