‘Taken for granted’: Hong Kong’s shift workers, from street cleaners to guards to bamboo scaffolders, are having their stories told
- Maxime Vanhollebeke and Cynthia Cheng founded the Hong Kong Shifts platform to share stories of shift workers, which has evolved into a social enterprise
- From January 12 to 14 it will host an exhibition and community event in which the stories collected over the past three years will be displayed
Maxime Vanhollebeke had walked past the security guard in his Hong Kong residential building countless times. But one morning in 2019, the Belgium-born lawyer came to the uncomfortable realisation that he knew nothing about her.
“There was clearly an imbalance because I had walked past her for five years but didn’t know much about her while she knew a lot about me: my name, what time I left my flat and came home, the friends I had over,” says Vanhollebeke.
Together with Cantonese speaker and fellow lawyer Cynthia Cheng, Vanhollebeke asked the security guard to lunch so he could find out more about her life. Mei Fung was born in Shanghai, once worked as a tailor and loved listening to the music of Andy Lau Tak-wah and Anita Mui Yim-fong.
Inspired by the chat, Vanhollebeke and Cheng founded Hong Kong Shifts, a platform to share stories of shift workers that evolved into a social enterprise with a broader mission to promote empathy and inclusiveness in our living and working environments through storytelling.
“From the outset, our idea was to put a spotlight on those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to keep this city ticking but who are often taken for granted and overlooked,” Vanhollebeke says.
