A building that blends in with its surroundings can be seen when you go down Lai Chi Kok Road. The doors are blue. A flutter of fluorescent lights. It’s as boring as Monday dim lunch. The Brilliant Storage Limited has a glass door, but once you step inside, it becomes a treasure trove for curious onlookers, storytellers, and packrats.
Immediate impression: complete stillness. Aside than the strange echo your footsteps create on tiled flooring and the buzz of ancient air conditioning. Some 20-year-old footwear seem to be lingering in one hallway. After it rains, the aroma of old paperbacks lingers in another hallway. Some lockers are spotless; they’re neatly arranged and labeled like a surgical glove. Anyone else? Chaos of jumbled graduation dresses and Christmas lights. If you get too near, you could trip over a wedding gift that was never given as a present.
There’s the “man who owns more skateboards than people” section. A few boards from the ’90s have grip tape that has cracked. In the sake of nostalgia, there is a faded Tony Hawk poster pinned inside. Adjacent to that, a plethora of cartoon-adorned bags filled to the brim with infant apparel, shoe sizes enough for a feline, and an excess of stuffed animals that could rival a fete’s prize booth. Secure time capsules. Hidden beneath zipper bags lies joy.
A lot of people treat decluttering as a Zen technique. Every locker here is a struggle between the thoughts “I might need this later” and “Why can’t I let go?”—living proof that this is the case. There’s this one lady who, on Saturdays, brings lunch, opens her locker, and spends an hour poring over old journals. What helps her recall, she says, is the silence. Alternatively, disregard it.
The collection of artifacts is beyond my comprehension. An old man in his retirement years keeps a plethora of Manga books—complete series, pages yellowed, spines cracked—wrapped in faded plastic. It made my grandkids laugh. But they’ll be grateful to me! At one point, a spotless Chewbacca mask protruded from a container labeled “misc.” I will not continue if that mask begins to speak.
Other valuables? A plethora of foreign slogans adorning suitcases, typewriters, broken electric fans, fortunate cat figurines, and boxes full of vinyl albums. One side of the hall on a wet day smells like skunky beer and the other like incense.
Ken, an employee at the business, claims that the strange thing is right there in plain sight. “Once, we came across a refrigerator stocked with rubber ducks.” Ken smiles and shrugs. “People put their secrets in these lockers that they wouldn’t even tell their mothers.”
Perhaps therein lies the secret. You won’t find random possessions on these halls. For those who still can’t let go, they’re burying tales, feelings, and a glimmer of hope. Look under the blue door in Lai Chi Kok’s storage maze if you ever need a key to the past; it’s likely that it has seen it all.