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Warning: Hong Kong’s unnaturally bright night sky could scupper your mojo.

I have a beef with Sham Shui Po’s Chong Hing Chiu Chow Choi. During the time I was away on an extended break (you didn’t even notice I was gone, did you?), the restaurant set up shop across the road from my apartment and erected a colossal neon sign that juts out over the street and turns up at a right angle, lifting a ludicrously bright middle finger to all residents within a 30km radius.

Now, I can handle a little street noise, and I’m not fussy when it comes to the grime of the city – but ain’t no-one gonna fuck with my circadian rhythms. That sign lights up my bedroom like a nuclear explosion. When it’s on, I can’t sleep – and that’s a problem, because it’s on all through the night. I might be stupid, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why such a brutally bright beacon of regionally specific cookery is necessary at 4am.

Light pollution. That has to be the biggest misnomer since ‘military intelligence’. This pollution is as heavy as an American after four rounds at the buffet, a totally intolerable intrusion from the restaurant that’s forcing me to breaking point. It’s the electromagnetic equivalent of busting into my room and taking a giant shit on my duvet.

I’ve researched this stuff. The good folks from Hong Kong University’s Physics department have a website (nightsky.physics.hku.hk) that tells me Sham Shui Po is among the most light-polluted parts of the city – and this in one of the most light-polluted cities in the world. According to those physicists, the Hong Kong night sky is more than 500 times brighter than a pristine night sky. On an average night in my hood, the Night Sky Brightness sits at a mere 15 mag/arcsec². Now, being a normal person, you have no idea what that figure means. But this is all you need to know: in such a night sky, you’d be lucky to count seven stars (yes, that’s a scientific estimate). Pretty pathetic, considering there are about 300ish billion in our galaxy.

Still, even though this is the International Year of Astronomy, I can handle not seeing the stars so much. What concerns me is the potential effect on my health. Various studies, real ones, apparently, have linked over-illumination to increased stress and anxiety, aggravation of heart problems, disruption of melatonin, increased risk of breast cancer, and, goddamit, sexual dysfunction. Just you wait – four more nights in my nuclear-reactor room and I’ll be too depressed to move from my bed, sweating profusely from brow while fretting about my uncooperative member and a mysterious lump that’s appeared in my chest.

Well, either that or I would have installed proper curtains.

Hamish McKenzie

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