This will haunt me for a while. But it’s not about me.

It’s about the pathetic people I have seen the last week or two.

Last night, in particular.

While staying in Mid-Levels, I tend to return from work, about 10:30 p.m., via the Central MTR (subway) station.

And just outside the Pedder Street exit from the station is a pedestrian area, maybe 40 feet across, 100 feet long.

During the day, it tends to be filled with clothes hanging on portable racks, all of it watched over by disheveled street merchants. This is semi-pathetic in and of itself. A rack of leftover stuff … selling it for a few dollars, to survive.

But that isn’t what I have found disturbing.

Rather, it has been some shockingly deformed beggars I have seen on that street over the past week. Two last night, one a bit earlier.

I have written before about the general absence of homeless people, at least on Hong Kong Island. I don’t know if this free-wheeling, laissez-faire government has some sort of basic safety net that keeps the homeless and deformed out of sight, safely (perhaps) warehoused … but it’s a rare thing, even in a blue-collar neighborhood like Wan Chai, to see someone On the Street.

Then, here come these beggars.

So horribly deformed that I literally would not (and did not) look at them square. I could tell, just peripherally, that they were profoundly crippled. Bent and misshapen. And the morning after, I wonder how they got there. I can’t imagine they were capable of movement. Someone must have placed them there. Or maybe they did, somehow, crawl or scrape or roll themselves to this busy but, yet, semi-out-of-the-way spot. A thought which is almost more disturbing than them being dumped out of the back of a van.

We have lots of homeless, in SoCal, but we tend not to see people  this profoundly deformed (and yes, I know there probably is some gentler, politically correct expression that I ought to be using). The crooked limbs projecting at impossible angles, the misshapen faces, the open sores, and the filth of the rags they are wearing.

Since Hong Kong seems to do a decent job of caring for its underclass, I wondered if these two (and the 2-3 I’ve seen earlier) are from mainland China. Rejected and abandoned by family, poorly supported by the massively overpopulated communist state, and somehow able to get to Hong Kong, where the begging might be slightly more lucrative.

Yes, there were two of them, last night. One on each side of the little paved area. I strode right past them because I couldn’t bear to look at them. Both had horribly distorted limbs. The first also had a shockingly misshapen head. Each forming a little lump of wretched humanity, “sitting” in a position a healthy person couldn’t even duplicate.

As I turned the corner and headed up Queen’s Road, I felt guilty. For everything. For having money, yes, and not giving them any … but for being able to walk. For being able to stand. For being able sit on the street without everyone staring at me or averting their eyes. Why did it happen to them and not me? Why were they chosen as nature’s genetic accidents? And what was God thinking when he brought them out of the womb this way?

I have resolved this: If I am not brave enough to deal with them — even to the point of looking at them — and I’m not … I can at least give them a few HK dollars. I suspect some/all of what they collect will be taken by whomever dropped them off at the spot. But I can hope that they get to keep a fraction of it, and perhaps can buy a bowl or rice from some cheap stall and perhaps find some joy in that.

It makes me a lesser person, to not do more. But, I’m sorry, that’s the best I can do.