It was on Thursday January 5, 2023 at 6:30 p.m. I was sitting in the living room with my laptop, iPad, iPhone and Nintendo switch (merely for moral support) in front of me. At that time my computer had been lagging for half an hour, yet I was still frantically inserting my brother’s HKID number and spamming the submit key on my smartphone, while ensuring that my iPad was ready to function as a backup in case my other devices failed. My fingers were in a constant tapping motion, and my eyes were darting from one monitor to another. I was not alone in this fight. My father, who was sitting across from me, had been looking at the same loading “you are the first in line” page for 15 minutes, while my brother had been clicking the reload button for 20 minutes. I, the youngest of the family, was the closest to the finish line, as I had just received a verification message. Three of us. Seven monitors. Eyes locked on the same webpage – Registration for Hong Kong Residents to Enter the Mainland.
It was at 4:36 p.m. that day, when my father barged into my bedroom announcing that at 6 p.m. there would be a new website for Hong Kong residents to reserve a spot to cross the border on Sunday. The goal of the mission was crystal clear – secure a spot for my brother to return to the mainland on Sunday, so he could see his wife for the first time in two years on Friday, while still having time to be at work by Monday.
It was not an easy task. The Wi-Fi at my place was hacked by some genius who made our internet as slow as a snail, so I had to resort to my three-number-one-sim-card-possibly-5G mobile data to remain competitive in this game. The abruptness of the announcement also caught us off guard as we were confused as to where the battlefield, also known as the registration page, was located. Most importantly, I was racing with a million other Hong Kong residents who had been eagerly trying to cross that line between Hong Kong and the mainland since 2020.
After 45 minutes of constant clicking, refreshing, typing and cursing, finally I was on the page where I could select a date. I picked Sunday and chose whichever border that had space for my brother and pressed enter. The battle was over.
Or so I thought.
There were a few Chinese words in bold red across the page insisting that I had either already registered a place for my brother, or entered the wrong details, or have invalid characters. I knew I had faced the final boss of the quest. I double checked, triple checked, and slowly but surely, I typed in all my brother’s information. Confidently, I pressed insert again.
I failed again.
I was frustrated but determined as I knew the reward would far outweigh the sweat and tears from that day. I looked at the screen, carefully read every single word on the page. I found the weakness of my nemesis. I pressed the delete button on my keyboard and pressed submit again. For the three seconds, my hands were getting slippery, my heart was pounding because I knew if this couldn’t beat the system, I wouldn’t know another way to complete the quest.
In a blink of an eye, a neon green QR code appeared on the screen, along with a text box that congratulated me on my successful registration. I screamed, my dad jumped up from the sofa, my brother calling using WeChat was still confused on what just happened and, my mother, who caught COVID-19 during the massive outbreak in Macau during Christmas, was overjoyed. I knew it. I knew it was the hyphen in his middle name that had caused the unnecessary chaos.
I DID IT.
Without moving my body in the past hour, I created history. I reunited a pair of star-crossed lovers. My brother and my sister-in-law remind me of the Chinese fable The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl who only meet on the seventh day of the seventh month every year because they violated the law of the Sky Palace. In the folklore, the lovers meet on a bridge made of magpies, and in modern times the bridge became the green QR code that allows them to cross the border that divided them.
With the easing of travel restrictions between Hong Kong, Macau, the mainland and other countries, my family members who suffer from lengthy separations could finally be in Hong Kong together to celebrate Chinese New Year. For the past three years, I have quarantined a total of 36 days, my mother 48 days and my father has stayed at least at five different quarantine hotels in Macau, and my brother had quarantined in over five cities.
Two weeks after the incident, we were all at home in Hong Kong. My mother choked on her tears when she was praying at the annual family reunion dinner on the day before the first day of Chinese New Year because it was the first time in 15 years that all my immediate family members, including my sister-in-law, were able to have this meal together, around the same round table.
We have yet to smell the sweetness of fresh air without our masks, but finally we can feel the warmth of having people you love next to you without the cold walls of 14-day quarantine between us.
Photos courtesy of Unsplash
