Riko Kusumo, a Form Six student at Buddhist Fat Ho Memorial College, has a story of quiet intensity, shaped by the invisible walls of Autism Spectrum Disorder and mental health struggles and slowly remade through animals, discipline, art and endurance.
“On the outside, people perceived me as being fine, but the moment I opened my mouth, they all started to withdraw,” the 17-year-old student said.
That withdrawal, he explained, left him feeling isolated. “I felt trapped from the very beginning.”
Big Ben, the school dog, arrived in Riko’s life as both a mirror and a bridge. Where human interactions felt layered with misunderstanding, Big Ben’s presence was simple and immediate.
“We could connect. I can speak to him with my eyes and emotions, and he can sense that,” Riko said.
The dog demanded no social scripts, no emotional performance – only presence. For Riko, that acceptance was not about hope for a distant future but about relief in the moment.
“It’s not hope, it’s comfort – hope means there’s another side to this dark tunnel, but instead I try to make myself feel better while hiding the monsters in me,” he said. “Big Ben forgives and understands me.”
Riko’s daily life is anchored by a deliberate practice he calls his “recipe”: meditation, mindfulness and relentless willpower. He reframes meditation as active focus, “not the act of closing one’s eyes but to close the senses and then reopen them with a sharp focus,” and pairs it with mindfulness as a form of self‑care.
Willpower, for him, is persistence made visible: “If I do something once a day, I would have done that thing 365 times after a year. Willpower is bigger than sheer power,” he said. These practices reshaped his routines: morning yoga and breathwork, conscious food choices and a steady commitment to small acts that compound into stability.
Hiking became both a literal and symbolic training ground. The discipline of waking in the morning, the steady cadence of steps, and the endurance required for events like the 100 km Gurkha Trust Trailwalker and Oxfam Trailwalker taught Riko how to translate physical persistence into mental stamina.
“When you are on the mountain, you can’t just give up – you have no choice but to keep going,” he said. The mountains taught him to break overwhelming tasks into manageable steps, to outlast those who sprint and to return from each summit with renewed confidence and calm.
On stage at the AIA carnival, Riko performed the Tsugaru samisen, a three-stringed Japanese instrument and genre of music that invites improvisation. For him, it is a vehicle for meditation.
“It is a form of healing, as I find joy in it,” he said. Playing publicly was an act of vulnerability and triumph – melding tradition with his personal narrative.
The stage became a place where art and recovery intersected and his performance meant reclaiming his voice and presence.
Riko’s non‑fiction contribution to the student-edited journal Halfway Home, published by the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong, is an intimate map of his journey, a way to send a pragmatic and fierce message to his fellow “Aspies”: embrace your uniqueness and shape it into strength. “We Aspies will always be different ... it is up to you to make it into a good form of uniqueness and not a bad one.”
In recognition of using his lived experience of grit and mindfulness to uplift others, Riko was named a winner in the Best Improvement category of the 2024/25 Student of the Year Awards – organised by the South China Morning Post and solely sponsored by The Hong Kong Jockey Club.
