The First View from the Peak

The air that hit Mia’s face the second the plane door slid open didn’t smell like the pine and rain she was used to back in Seattle. It was thick, warm, laced with the faint salt of the sea and the sharp, sweet tang of overripe mangoes from a cart idling near the jet bridge. Fourteen years old, with a frayed tote bag slung over one shoulder holding her sketchbook, a half-empty pack of sour candy, and the beat-up paperback she’d been rereading for three months, Mia stepped onto the tarmac at Hong Kong International Airport and blinked. The sun was brighter here, sharper, cutting through the haze that hung over the runway like a veil, and when she looked up, all she could see were the sharp, green peaks of Lantau Island jutting up behind the terminal, their slopes dusted with clouds that looked like they’d been stuck there on purpose.

Her mom was waiting at the exit, holding a crudely drawn sign with Mia’s Chinese name scrawled in glitter pen: 米娅. She’d moved to Hong Kong three weeks earlier for a curatorial job at the M+ museum, and Mia had spent the past month arguing with her about leaving Seattle, about leaving her friends and her weekly soccer games and the big oak tree in her backyard where she used to read. Now, standing in the humid airport air, watching her mom wave with a bag of her favorite matcha cookies in her other hand, Mia felt a weird mix of dread and excitement, like she was standing on the edge of a diving board she hadn’t chosen to climb.

The ride into the city on the Airport Express was a blur of new sights: the airport itself, built on a massive artificial island reclaimed from the sea, giving way to the rolling green hills of Lantau, then the dense, sprawling apartment blocks of the New Territories, their windows glinting in the sun. When they transferred to the MTR at Kowloon Tong, the train dove underground, then burst back above ground as they crossed Victoria Harbour, and Mia gasped. The water was so blue it looked fake, dotted with tiny white boats, and the skyline on either side was so dense it looked like someone had stacked a million Lego blocks along the shore. By the time they got off at Central, Mia’s head was spinning.

“We’re going straight to the Peak,” her mom said, hauling her suitcase toward the Peak Tram terminal. “You have to see the view first.”

Mia had heard of the Peak Tram, of course—every travel blog she’d read about Hong Kong had a photo of the steep, rattling cable car climbing the hillside. But nothing had prepared her for the actual ride. The tram lurched forward with a jolt, and Mia’s seat slid backward as the car tilted upward at a sharp angle, the tracks below them almost vertical. The old woman sitting across from her cackled when Mia’s eyes went wide, and pressed a piece of mango candy into her hand, chattering in rapid Cantonese. Mia smiled and nodded, popping the candy into her mouth, sweet and chewy, as the city fell away below them. Trees rushed past the windows, then the rooftops of Mid-Levels apartment buildings, then the skyline opened up again as they crested the peak.

When the doors slid open, the wind hit Mia first—cool, sharp, carrying the faint scent of eucalyptus from the trees clinging to the peak’s slopes. She stepped out onto the viewing platform, and for a long second, she couldn’t breathe. Below her, Victoria Harbour unfurled like a crumpled silk scarf dotted with tiny white sails, the water a deep, glittering blue under the midday sun. To her left, the skyline of Hong Kong Island shot up in a jagged row of glass and steel: the sharp, angular Bank of China Tower, the curved sail of the International Finance Centre, the tiny, needle-like spike of the Central Plaza, all of them packed so close together they looked like a stack of matchboxes dropped haphazardly on the edge of the water. To her right, the neon-lit sprawl of Kowloon spilled down to the waterfront, its dense clusters of apartment blocks so tightly packed that Mia could barely make out the streets between them, only the flash of red minibus signs and the glow of convenience store signs peeking out between the gaps. Behind the city, the mountains rose in steep, green layers, their slopes covered in dense forest that looked almost untouched by the urban sprawl crowding the shore. Out on the water, the green-and-white Star Ferry chugged from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui, looking no bigger than a bath toy, and far in the distance, the Tsing Ma Bridge stretched across the Ma Wan Channel like a silver thread stitched between two pieces of land.

“Whoa,” Mia breathed, fumbling for her camera. She took a dozen photos, but none of them captured the way the city looked like it was squeezed between the sea and the peaks, like it was holding its breath, crammed into every inch of flat land it could find.

“Pretty crazy, right?” A voice came from behind her, and Mia turned to see a boy about her age, wearing a black hoodie and round glasses, holding two paper cups of milk tea. “I’m Alvin. Your mom asked my mom to bring me along to show you around. I brought you milk tea. My mom says if you don’t drink it within an hour of landing, you’ll get heatstroke.”

Mia took the cup, her fingers brushing his. The milk tea was sweet, strong, with a faint smoky aftertaste she’d never had before. “Thanks. It’s… a lot to take in.”

Alvin laughed, leaning against the railing next to her. “Yeah, most people say that the first time. You’re probably wondering why all the buildings are squished together, right?”

Mia nodded. “I mean, why don’t they spread out? There’s so much mountain behind the city.”

“That’s the thing,” Alvin said, pulling up a map on his phone and tapping it to show her the outline of Hong Kong. “Only about 25% of Hong Kong’s land is flat enough to build on. The rest is mountains, all granite, super hard to dig through or build on. The whole territory is only like, 1,100 square kilometers, smaller than Los Angeles, and we have 7.5 million people living here. So everyone has to cram into that little bit of flat land, plus whatever we can reclaim from the sea.” He tapped the map again, pointing to the strips of new land along the harbour. “All that

The air that hit Mia’s face the second the plane door slid open didn’t smell like the pine and rain she was used to back in Seattle. It was thick, warm, laced with the faint salt of the sea and the sharp, sweet tang of overripe mangoes from a cart idling near the jet bridge. Fourteen years old, with a frayed tote bag slung over one shoulder holding her sketchbook, a half-empty pack of sour candy, and the beat-up paperback she’d been rereading for three months, Mia stepped onto the tarmac at Hong Kong International Airport and blinked. The sun was brighter here, sharper, cutting through the haze that hung over the runway like a veil, and when she looked up, all she could see were the sharp, green peaks of Lantau Island jutting up behind the terminal, their slopes dusted with clouds that looked like they’d been stuck there on purpose.

Her mom was waiting at the exit, holding a crudely drawn sign with Mia’s Chinese name scrawled in glitter pen: 米娅. She’d moved to Hong Kong three weeks earlier for a curatorial job at the M+ museum, and Mia had spent the past month arguing with her about leaving Seattle, about leaving her friends and her weekly soccer games and the big oak tree in her backyard where she used to read. Now, standing in the humid airport air, watching her mom wave with a bag of her favorite matcha cookies in her other hand, Mia felt a weird mix of dread and excitement, like she was standing on the edge of a diving board she hadn’t chosen to climb.

The ride into the city on the Airport Express was a blur of new sights: the airport itself, built on a massive artificial island reclaimed from the sea, giving way to the rolling green hills of Lantau, then the dense, sprawling apartment blocks of the New Territories, their windows glinting in the sun. When they transferred to the