In Sep­tem­ber 2001, I was liv­ing in Hong Kong, work­ing for a local com­pany. I had just grad­u­ated from high school and was enjoy­ing my first glimpse of free­dom in Kowloon.

I had two co-workers : Bidé and Kelín. Both of them were also my room­mates since the com­pany I was work­ing for pro­vided accommodation.

We were liv­ing in Hum Hong, a twenty min­utes walk from Tsimshat­shui where we worked. We shared a small brand new apart­ment (a mil­lion dol­lars condo, really) that my boss had just bought. Tower 1, 33^rd floor. The apart­ment had a bath­room, a small kitchen which we never used (dim-sum to go was the motto) and a liv­ing room with a huge bay-window over­look­ing Hong Kong sky­line and Vic­to­ria Har­bour. Bidé, my male co-worker had taken the only room we had. He was a spoiled brat. Nice but spoiled. Kelín and I were sleep­ing in sleep­ing bag directly on the floor in the living-room/ kitchen. The apart­ment was brand new, so we didn’t have any fur­ni­ture. We were liv­ing like hip­pies in Hong Kong’s most expen­sive condo apart­ments. Go figure.

That day, we had gone shop­ping directly after work and we came home late. My room­mate was to cut my hair and I was to expe­ri­ence a new red­dish color.

Around 10 pm, I was sit­ting on the kitchen counter, admir­ing my new hair­style in a pocket mir­ror when my other co-worker stormed in. Stoned, as usual.

— The World Trade Cen­ter was hit by a plane !

I looked though the win­dow and pointed out Hong Kong’s WTC, right in from of us, its lights shin­ing brightly among the futur­is­tic skyline.

— No it hasn’t. You shouldn’t smoke so much.
— Gee, you’re so narrow-minded Zhu ! Have you ever heard of New York ? Duh, there’s a WTC there, ya know.
— Of course I knew.
I didn’t.
— But what hap­pened exactly ? Hit, like an acci­dent ?
— Well, that’s one hell of an acci­dent. I mean, it’s the WTC !

Of course, we didn’t have a TV in the apart­ment. Nor did we have an inter­net con­nex­ion. Or a com­puter for that matters.

— Let’s find a TV somewhere.

But he had already passed out in his room.

Kelín and I took the ele­va­tor (7 min­utes to get down­stairs) and asked the recep­tion­ist where we could find a TV.
He was strangely overzeal­ous, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing he never quite for­gave us for hang­ing out the laun­dry at the win­dow, thus spoil­ing the condo’s very high standards.

— Of course, poor Amer­i­cans, fol­low me, fol­low me.

He led us through the main floor and sud­denly stopped in front of a huge door.

— A ter­ri­ble thing for you Americans !

No time to con­tra­dict him and go all “Vive la France”. Amer­i­cans we looked like, Amer­i­cans we were.

He opened the door and let us in the gym. Quickly, he turned on one of the ubiq­ui­tous TV above the Stair­mas­ters. CNN.

We took a sit on the bikes and watched. The sec­ond plane had crashed into the 2^nd tower by then and it looked like any­thing but an acci­dent. Our Eng­lish was some­what lim­ited but we grasped most of the news. Not that it was hard to under­stand : voices and faces said it all. Peo­ple just didn’t under­stand what was going on – nei­ther did we.

Unex­pected. Vio­lent. Bar­baric. Peo­ple were so shocked they for­got to be angry. Peo­ple looked like they had been punched in the face.

Who did that ? We tried to guess, nam­ing coun­tries at stake with the US. The list was too long. Almost right away CNN was report­ing that a man named Osama Bin Laden was behind the attacks. I had never heard of him before. Pales­tine is also sug­gested. What else ? It’s ter­ror­ism, it’s clear by now.

An hour later we were back at the apartment.

The three of us sat there in the living-room.

— Think they’re gonna catch him ?
— Who ? The Osama guy ? Even if they do, what good it is gonna come out of that ? Sat­isfy a revenge ?
— There’s a whole ide­ol­ogy behind this guy and even if the head of the move­ment is caught, there’re bound to be fol­low­ers. Cause there’re fanat­ics. And every­one knows the best pools for extrem­ists ide­olo­gies : poverty, lack of edu­ca­tion, lack of per­spec­tives, feel­ing of unfair­ness… The Tal­ibans didn’t come out of the blue.
— Well, if you think the US are gonna turn the other cheek you’re damn wrong. This is war. This ain’t gonna end before the head of the Tal­iban is hanged. Is pos­si­ble, per­son­ally by Bush.
— I don’t know. I really don’t know.

Nobody knew. The giant with feet of clay was cry­ing tonight. The attacks had been unex­pected and ter­ri­bly shock­ing. And peace was a long way down the road.

We slept late that night if at all. We felt Amer­i­cans that day.

(to be con­tin­ued…)

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