In the steamy teahouse of Central Hong Kong, the 95-year-oldTan MeijinAs he was chewing the shrimp dumplings with his loose gums, his gold-plated dentures made a crisp sound when they collided with the bone china tableware. This mother, jokingly called "KOL in the heritage world" by netizens, still maintains the ritual of eating three cups of tea and two pieces of snacks every day in the human wall built by workers and friends. Three blocks away, next to the tram tracks, his 70-year-old son Mei Qiming was rinsing his teeth with red wine. His bright red hoodie formed a stark contrast with the rusted tram.
This tug-of-war over inheritance, which has been going on for twenty years, has long been watched by Hong Kong citizens as a drama. However, in their daily lives outside the court, the parties have each constructed their own isolated islands of defense mechanisms. Mei Ma uses the dim sum cart as a combat vehicle. Every bite she takes is a resistance to aging. The shopping bags behind the workers are filled with evidence of their survival. Mei Qiming drinks cheap red wine like he drinks Lafite, and practices a nihilistic philosophy of slow living in the swaying tram.
The survival strategies of the two generations form an absurd reflection: the mother maintains her dignity in the crowd, and the son pretends to be cool when he is alone. The silver-haired lady in the teahouse and the red-clad wanderer on the tram are like the two polar metaphors of the city of Hong Kong - trying to maintain traditional decency while losing one's true self in the tide of capital. Their every move in front of the camera becomes the code for the public to interpret the heritage drama: Is Mei Ma’s barbecued pork buns a declaration of vitality? Why did Qiming pick his teeth for three minutes?
The irony is that in this inheritance dispute that has attracted the attention of the whole nation, the parties involved seem to have already been deeply involved in role-playing. Mei's mother turned every court battle into a driving force for survival, while her son regurgitated the pressure of public opinion into performance art. When inheritance lawsuits become a kind of existential theater, those deliberately maintained life rituals are nothing more than survival footnotes that prove to the world "I am still here."
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