Your friends told you about it and you know your time will come soon. You know when it will happen, but there's nothing you can do to stop it. The phone will ring and those dreaded words will be spoken, telling you how much time you have left.
I'm not talking about the Japanese horror classic The Ring - this is the real-life horror story of renting an apartment in Hong Kong. If your lease ended recently, chances are you received 'the call'. And you were probably given about a month to either find a new place or prepare to see your bank account deplete at an unprecedented rate.
Someone utters the phrase, 'My landlord called' and you know the rest. It's the epilogue of the story that varies - the storyteller either seems lost ('I don't know what to do'), litigious ('Is this legal?') or insulted ('He can go f*** himself').
What inspires such impotent outrage? Thirty per cent rent rise? Been there. Fifty per cent? Keep negotiating. One hundred per cent? Let's be proactive and start looking. And try as you might to fight it, to believe in the kindness and benevolence of landlords, to play their game, to flatter and beg: your rent will be raised, by a lot.
The most frustrating part is the final price usually ends up being just above the threshold of what a sane person would pay in any other modern city, but still just manageable enough that you might suck it up and stay put to avoid the hassle and expense of moving.
Some downgrade to either smaller flats or less-desirable locations out of financial necessity, because while our rents are rising, our salaries remain steady.