Hong Kong, a highly age-integrated society

I never realized how highly age-integrated Hong Kong is until I visited Singapore. Singapore, a garden city, is very pretty and highly organized. If you walk around downtown and along Raffles Place, you will not run into older people, no matter what time of the day it is. It is entirely a young peoples' world. Even as I visited beach areas famous for seafood, I found hardly any families bringing seniors along to dinner. The only exception is probably Singapore's Chinatown, where I may have met more people who were older.

This is in stark contrast to Hong Kong. Here, you run into seniors anywhere who are going about their business. In the Central District—the business core of Hong Kong—you brush shoulders with young and old alike. You find rich seniors having high tea in the Mandarin Hotel—you know they're rich by the way they dress and how they carry themselves—and you run into seniors picking up cardboard boxes to sell to recycling merchants. Hong Kong seniors may shop at the famous Lane Crawford emporium, or they may be selling small items (scarves, imitation jewelry, scissors, fans, all sorts) in their stalls on a side or back street in Central. Both the young and the old fight with you for use of the pavement, and we all jaywalk.

I once asked a Singaporean friend why I so rarely find seniors in downtown Singapore. She told me it was because they did not need to go downtown. All their needs could be met in the housing estate in which they lived. Housing communities are designed to be self-sufficient in Singapore, with clinics, shopping malls and community centers. But I still do not get it. Because their needs can be met entirely within their neighborhood, they have no business visiting downtown at all?

I have tried hard to think of the reasons that may account for the differences between the two cities. I can't put my finger on it. I think back to other cities I have visited—Stockholm, London, Taipei, Chicago. Now that I am trying to make sense out of an observation, I am no longer sure of what the other cities are like. But I am certain that they are unlike Singapore, which has made a deep impression on me in this regard.

I strongly object to retirement communities. I would not move into one myself. Why do we need age-segregated communities when, in the real world, people of all ages live together?

Yes, young people can be cruel sometimes, mocking those who have grown old and frail. But not all young people are so. Yes, the amenities of a retirement community may be quite attractive, but meeting with people from all walks of life is much more interesting. We can only promote understanding and acceptance between generations if we live together, not separate from one another.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.