The name they gave me was Yoghurt. It was meant to be an insult, something sour and clinging, but I decided to own it. A yoghurt could be smooth, desirable, contained in its own perfect little pot. A yoghurt was something someone chose, paid for, and consumed with pleasure. It was, in its own way, a luxury. And I, Yvonne, was a luxury the world had forgotten to order.
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This was the cornerstone of my princess syndrome: not that I was inherently royal, but that I was entitled. The world owed me a crown for the sheer effort of being me, for getting out of a bed that felt like a tomb in a flat that smelled of my neighbour’s frying fish and damp concrete. The universe had reneged on a contract I was sure I’d signed at birth, one that promised a prince, a palace, and a plotline free of the soul-crushing indignity of being nearly forty and alone in a city that valued women like expired coupons.
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My castle was a 400-square-foot flat in a Hung Hom public housing estate, a beige rectangular block slapped together with crumbling concrete and hopelessness. Its saving grace was its location: perched above a perpetually wet market that exhaled a fog of fish guts and overripe fruit, and a five-minute shuffle to the MTR station. This proximity to transit was my lifeline, the drawbridge to my otherwise moated kingdom. It was also the reason I couldn’t refuse them. The leftover men.
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The men with futures as narrow as the alleyways between our housing blocks. The men whose five-year plans extended to the next bottle of cheap whisky and the next race meeting. The men who could no more afford a baby than they could a private apartment with a view that wasn’t of another identical, stained block of despair. We were the end of the line, the genetic runoff of a city that had priced out procreation and priced in perpetual adolescence.
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And so, I built my harem.
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It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was an ecosystem that grew from the fertile mulch of our shared loneliness. My kingdom was not a contiguous land but a scattered archipelago of neglected public spaces, each one the designated courtyard for a consort who ruled his tiny, pathetic domain.
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There was Frog, in the Choi Wan estate, so named for the way his eyes bulged when he talked about his ex-wife. His courtyard was a cracked concrete chessboard under a broken awning, where he held court with a flask of tea and a bottomless well of grievances. He offered me his body once, a sad, paunchy thing in the half-light of his one-room flat, and I accepted it not with desire, but with the weary gratitude of a queen accepting a tribute of slightly spoiled fruit. It was something. His love was a tight, desperate grip, a fear of being alone that mirrored my own.
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In the Shek Kip Mei estate, there was Octopus, a melancholy bus driver with long, delicate fingers that danced when he spoke of the jazz music he’d loved in another life. His courtyard was a concrete bench overlooking a children’s playground that was always empty. He never tried to touch me. Instead, he offered me his love, or what he called love—a constant, draining river of poetry texts and maudlin voice messages sent after his late shift. He believed in a thing called fate and thought I was his. I let him believe it. His devotion was a blanket I could sometimes wrap around myself when the chill of my own reality set in.
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There was Turtle, in Wah Fu, a shy, slow-moving IT technician who lived with his mother. His courtyard was the 24-hour McDonald's, where he would buy me a vanilla cone and explain, in intricate detail, the lore of whatever mobile game he was obsessed with. He offered his friendship, a pure, sexless thing built on shared complaints about work and the comfort of silence. He had a spreadsheet where he ranked his flaws. He showed it to me once. “Lack of assertiveness” was number one. I wanted to cry for him. Instead, I ate my ice cream.
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I floated between them, Yoghurt the Queen, a carefree cloud drifting across the Kowloon skyline. From my MTR carriage, I’d look up at those towering, shabby blocks, each one a vertical filing cabinet for failed dreams and aborted romances. Each window, lit or dark, told a story. A man watching horse racing on a tiny TV. A woman staring at a wall. A family of four living in space meant for two. The paint was peeling in great scabs, revealing the sickness beneath the surface. These estates weren’t communities; they were warehouses for people whose lives had been designated surplus to requirements.
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And my consorts, my beautiful, virgin-hearted men. They were not princes. They were casualties. They offered their bodies, their time, their fractured adoration, because it was the only currency they had left. What was love, anyway, but a momentary relief from the crushing pressure of the future? A temporary loan of warmth against the cold certainty of dying alone in one of these little boxes.
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The lyrics would loop in my head, a ghost in the machine of my mind, as I walked to my dead-end admin job: “I am not a beautiful person but I can be beautiful online.” It was the anthem of our age. Online was where I was still Yvonne, with a profile picture from a decade ago, where my life could be curated into a highlight reel of meals I couldn’t afford and friendships that had long since withered. Online, I could pretend my harem was a choice, a fabulous, bohemian rebellion against bourgeois coupledom. I could be a goddess, a free spirit.
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In reality, I was a beggar king, ruling over a kingdom of dust. My floating was not carefree; it was unmoored. My cloud was a fog of delusion.
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It all crystallised one Tuesday evening with Octopus. He’d had a bad day. A passenger had vomited on his bus. He was waiting for me on his bench in Shek Kip Mei, his shoulders hunched, the very picture of a tragic hero in a nylon uniform.
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“Yvonne,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “You are the only beautiful thing in my life. You are my muse. My reason for getting through the day.”
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He meant it. Every word. And as I looked at him—his thinning hair, his eyes full of a desperate, hungry light—the fantasy shattered. This wasn’t a courtly romance. This was a mutual suicide pact, dressed up in cheap poetry. I wasn’t a muse; I was a life-raft he was pulling under with him. And he was one of mine.
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I stood up. The concrete beast of the housing estate loomed over us, a million lives of quiet desperation stacked one on top of the other.
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“I have to go,” I said.
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His face crumpled. “But… why? Did I say something wrong?”
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“No,” I said, the truth dawning on me with terrifying clarity. “You said something right. That’s the problem.”
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I walked away from his courtyard, and I didn’t look back. I took the MTR home to Hung Hom, but I didn’t go inside. I stood in the forecourt of my estate, looking up at the grid of windows, the flickering blue lights of televisions, the sad, limp laundry hanging on bamboo poles. I thought of Frog’s bitter grip, Turtle’s spreadsheet of flaws, Octopus’s draining devotion.
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I wasn’t a queen. I was a collector. And they weren’t my consorts. They were my mirrors. Each one reflected a different shard of my own brokenness, my own terror of the future, my own desperate, princess-level entitlement to be saved from the life I had.
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The adventure wasn’t lost or delirious. It was a sad, circular pilgrimage through the ruins of our collective prospects. We were all Yoghurt, in our way. Slightly sour, past our best-by date, clinging to the hope that someone would still find us nourishing.
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I took out my phone. I opened the chat with Frog. Then Octopus. Then Turtle. I didn’t type a grand proclamation. I just typed the same three words to each of them.
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“I’m sorry. Goodbye.”
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Then I blocked their numbers. The silence that followed was immense. It was the silence of a harem dismissed, a court dissolved. It was the sound of just me, alone, in the humming, fish-scented night, with no prince, no palace, and no plan. For the first time, the delusion had lifted. The cloud had evaporated. And all that was left was the hard, unyielding ground of a reality I could no longer afford to escape.
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and then Add to home screen.