Have you ever stood in a place where you grew up, only to suddenly feel it has become unfamiliar? Not because the streets have been renovated or the cityscape has changed, but because you suddenly realize: everything that was once familiar may never have been truly understood. That feeling is like losing the ability to speak, or as if the vocabulary to explain the world has been taken away from you.

Half a century ago, British anthropologist Barbara E. Ward lived and conducted research in Hong Kong for an extended period, leaving behind a series of field observations on social structures, cultural behaviors, and religious consciousness. Her posthumous work, compiled in 2010, titled "Through Other Eyes: Essays in Understanding 'Conscious Models' — Mostly in Hong Kong," is not only a record of colonial society but also a profound reflection on "how to view the way others see the world."

Today's Hong Kong is in a fractured era that is difficult to summarize with a single political language: the space for freedom is narrowing, community divisions are intensifying, national narratives are dominating, and the ways individuals explain themselves are being compressed. Looking back at Ward's Hong Kong at this time, perhaps we should learn from her method—temporarily setting aside our habitual explanatory frameworks and re-viewing through the "eyes of the other."