On my way back to the States from India, I stopped for five days in Hong Kong. I hadn’t been there since I’d left almost two years ago, and because I sensed I might not be in Asia again any time soon, I decided to visit. I’d lived and worked in Hong Kong for four years and in many ways, going back felt like going home.
I’d flown to Hong Kong overnight, and when I arrived the sky was hazy and bright. I was exhausted. I heard surreal familiar clicks and beeps and electronic voices in the airport and on the train into town; as I passed the big rectangular stacks of yellow, red, orange, brown, and blue shipping containers, I mentally compared Kolkata’s raw color to Hong Kong’s industrial order and commercial polish. And in my fatigued delirium – suspended in the half-consciousness between sleep and waking – I imagined that the time I’d recently spent in India and the States had been a fantasy, and that I’d never left Hong Kong.
But I had, and then I went back.
I arrived on a Friday and met my friend Joe in Tai Tam, a small neighborhood on the green and far-less-populated south side of Hong Kong Island; Tai Tam is home to hundreds of ex-patriates and to Hong Kong International School, where I’d worked as an English and Humanities teacher.
Within minutes of arriving at Joe’s house, I was eating a freshly made artichoke pesto pizza. (Joe had recently started running a small and increasingly popular pizza business from home; at his front door I saw trays of tomato sauce cans stacked next to piles of his children’s shoes, and in his kitchen I saw balls of dough and bags of flour and bowls of chopped vegetables on the counter.)
After eating and talking with Joe, I walked to my friend Janet’s flat and started to settle in. (Janet would be in New York at a creative writing conference until my last day in Hong Kong and had generously offered her spare bedroom to me; Janet is an English teacher at HKIS, my friend Norbyah’s mom, and Joe’s mother-in-law.)
That afternoon I talked with former students and colleagues in the times between their classes, and that night I ate dinner in Stanley – the beachfront neighborhood where I’d once lived – with my friends Joe and Jeremy and Rob. (Rob had recently visited me in India.) We ate at “Spiaggia”, an Italian restaurant run by an eccentric old Belgian chef named Rolf, who greeted me happily perhaps because he recognized my friends, or perhaps because he remembered me from any one of the innumerable nights in the years before when I’d eaten at his other waterfront restaurant, which was two doors down from the Italian place and named “Main Street USA.”
After dinner Jeremy went home, and in familiarly mischievous form, Joe and Rob and I left the brightly-lit and semi-crowded Stanley restaurant strip, approached the undeveloped hills nearby, vaulted a short fence, and walked the dark jungle path to a little bouldery temple overlooking Stanley Bay. The place was deeply nostalgic to me, not because I’d visited that particular temple more than once or twice, but because – from my rooftop and from the waterfront and from the mountains above – I’d many times stood and watched that particular body of water hush and glitter and spray.
That night Joe and Rob and I smoked cigars and drank whiskey; we sat on the big half-submerged rocks beneath the temple; we talked. And although we said a lot of things – serious, hilarious, sincere, and obscene – something Joe said stuck in my mind and has stuck there since: “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, “and I’m glad you’re happy.”
Starting with that night, my visit indeed proved to be a source of deep happiness and also of sustained emotional tilt. I was moved by the convergence of momentous changes: leaving Kolkata and its problematic but meaningful comforts, returning to Hong Kong and the community I’d once sincerely called “my family”, and starting a mysterious next phase of life.
…The following day, Rob picked me up in front of the HKIS high school gate (he is one of the few people I know in Hong Kong who both owns a car and regularly drives it), with his sons Caleb and Eli in the back seat. Caleb, now six years old, greeted me wearing a white Kung Fu uniform and holding a bent black Spiderman figurine in his hands, and was very much as I remembered him: his hair was bright blond, and he was brightly grinning and eager to talk and laugh and squirm; but Eli, now four, had changed tremendously. In the almost two years I’d been gone, he’d transformed from a moderately communicative infant to a sensitive and kind young boy; when we stopped to buy groceries before leaving for Rob’s house, Eli held my hand, chose for himself a fresh cut flower and a fresh baked pretzel, and – for no apparent reason – called to Rob and said “I love you Daddy.”
With groceries in tow, we drove the winding green and not-very-long distance to Big Wave Bay, the small beachside fishing and surfing community where Rob and his family have found the balance between Hong Kong’s infamous fast pace and their own more mellow approach to domestic life.
We walked between little houses and through invisible clouds of incense smoke to get to Rob’s two-story home; Rob’s wife Meg and Rob’s youngest son Bodhi greeted us within. It was the first time I’d seen Bodhi, and I was thrilled to meet him; his eyes were big and blue and shy; he crawled; he laughed; I liked him immediately.
In the late afternoon, I walked to the beach with Rob, Caleb, and Eli. Rob and I carried surfboards in our arms and Eli tottered under the yellow foam “boogie board” he balanced on his head. Caleb and Rob sped ahead while Eli and I meandered; Eli snacked on sui mai – pork dumplings on a bamboo skewer – given to him by one of the local restaurant owners (later that night Eli started his pre-bed prayers with an expression of gratitude for food), and he showed me secret trails to the beach. And although Rob, Caleb, and I were planning to swim, Eli chose to remain on the sandy shore in the company of family friends and a little crowd of doting giggling girls.
Rob and I ventured into the cold waves with Caleb close behind, and we paddled to the buoy-lines that marked the shark nets below the surface of the water; then Rob – more tolerant of the frigid tide – surfed on his big board while Caleb and I hustled back to land. And after drying off, warming up, and walking home, the boys opened a huge tub of Legos and a chest full of board games, and were joined by two other boys who lived nearby. But soon the little tribe abandoned the indoors and were kicking a ball in the house-front courtyard, and laughing and crashing and crying and yelling and laughing again.
Then and throughout the day, I was impressed by Meg’s unflagging attention to her sons; she was never overbearing but always vigilant; she set boundaries and enforced them, but also let the boys be free. And even though I’d been gone, and even though Meg was preparing experimental tofu lasagna, and even though we were in a house on the quiet corner of a southeast Asian island, the scene – the boys playing outside, the baby crawling in the living room, Rob and Meg standing in the kitchen, and the yellow-then-orange-then-blue light of the sunset – felt perfectly familiar. It felt like a family.
Once we’d eaten dinner and played chess and read books and said prayers, the boys went to bed. Rob and I moved upstairs and soon we were drinking Weissbier and singing; Rob played guitar and we sang songs we’d sung together before – like “Murder in the City” by the Avett Brothers and “Whole Wide World” by Wreckless Eric and “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas – and songs we’d not yet sung – like “Beat It” by Michael Jackson and “Pretty Voice” by Cloud Cult.
I left Big Wave Bay the next morning and went to Mass at St. Anne’s Church in Stanley; I lingered at the baptismal font next to which Rob had four years before served as stand-in Godfather for my baptism before I could be confirmed as a Catholic, and I remembered how invariably churches seem larger to me in memory.
In the afternoon, I rode the yellow double-decker 260 bus downtown for a massage. The massage was disappointing but the steam and dry sauna that preceded it were much needed; I’d been enjoying myself in the past three days, but I’d been rushing from reunion to reunion, and I was getting tired. That evening I joined my friends Kathryn and Chris for a relaxed dinner – after meeting their seven-month old baby Iris – during which we ate vegan “meatloaf”, drank wine, and discussed classism, religion, and our generation’s compulsion to mask sincerity with sarcasm.
That night I slept hard.
On Monday morning, I visited classes; the first was a senior-level course called “Service, Society, and the Sacred”, and was taught by my mentor Marty. I spoke briefly and then answered a number of students’ questions, which – perhaps as an indication of generational shift – were truly thoughtful and sincere. And following that class, I visited two ninth-grade Humanities classes and continued to be struck by the students’ expression of their earnest moral and philosophical struggles.
As I spoke, I heard myself sounding surprisingly bleak and hopeless; I believed the things I was saying, but nonetheless felt guilty with the knowledge that I was addressing idealistic young people – i.e. people in the increasingly broad group between childhood and adulthood – and not softening my accounts of jarring revelation or sad disillusionment. Granted, I believed my message was ultimately a call to authentic personal interaction and dedicated human compassion, and indeed my intended message was a hopeful one, but it was framed – and maybe blackened – by my indication of the gross dichotomy between humanity and individual human beings: I claimed that humanity fails more than it succeeds, that humanity allows indifference and greed to overwhelm intuition and charity, and that because our most coordinated historical movements have been imperial, martial, and commercial, that humanity is a disaster; but I also claimed that individuals continue to succeed in meaningful ways – at the smallest but most important times – and that despite the paradox of an ugly sum being made of beautiful parts, human beings are genuinely good-natured and infinitely interesting.
I’d already met with most of the students I’d hoped to see, but on that day I stole opportunities to talk with a few more, and found myself especially drawn to and able to connect with those students who’d traveled with HKIS to Kolkata the year before, and with whom I’d talked on the rooftop of the Dee Empresa Hotel during one of their evening meetings. Those students had seen some part of what I’d seen; they understood the context for many of my conclusions; they seemed able to share my anguish and understand my joy, even as I struggled to articulate exactly what I’d learned about myself and what I was starting to believe about the world around me.
That night I reconnected with Joe, Norbyah, and Janet for one last dinner in Hong Kong. Adding to her already generous provision of a place to stay, Janet splurged on a meal at “Lucy’s”, a small and elegant bistro with orange walls and warm light and perfect food and a tree in the middle of the dining room. On the way to the restaurant, which is coyly tucked into a Stanley market alleyway, I finally realized that Hong Kong – and especially my former neighborhood – had remained deeply familiar to me despite my extended absence; it sounds strange and impossible as I admit it now, but I recognized even the edge-lines of flaking paint on buildings, the colors of closed and open gates, and the broken swells of the street; I realized that there may actually be no other place in the world with which I am so consciously well-acquainted.
And likewise at the restaurant I remembered the times I’d been there before, with friends and family and with a girl named Ingrid (she was Chinese) who I dated during my first summer in Hong Kong. But nostalgia wasn’t unique to me that night; between dinner and dessert, Norbyah said – in what I believe was a compliment – “You’re just as I remembered you.” Despite the outward changes in me that she’d rightly expected, she affirmed a belief I was just then starting to grasp: that home is the place – and a place can be in many different places – where certain known and tangible details linger like moods, and where the essential unchanging self continues to be recognized and celebrated, even as the outwardly changing self shifts.
I left Hong Kong early the next day. On the way to the airport, rounding the northeast corner of the island in a taxi, I saw the big crowded buildings on either side of Victoria Harbor obscured by white pollution and the morning’s rising mist, and I remembered a moment some years before: I was being driven the other direction, away from the city’s urban center and toward my home in Stanley; I was wearing a clean grey tailor-made suit, alternately looking down at my fingernails and out at the harbor, and thinking that one day I might remember the life I was then living and be envious or proud or ashamed or pleased or… simply… that one day I might be different.
