Distancing
“Distancing” is part of Ignorances, a collection of six personal essays that each explores a topic important to me. I wrote them throughout my time in college and did an informal release event for close friends and connections before graduation. This is one of several essays I’ve chosen to make public.
For each essay, I asked a friend to write a response by answering three simple questions in whatever way they felt. Terence wrote this one. You can find it after the essay.
Thank you, Terence, for doing this for me. I’m very lucky to be able to call you one of my closest friends.
Like any good love story, no one saw it coming.
None of us—least of all the people I knew—were beach people, and none of us had any veritable connection to Florida either. Still, the story begins the six of us—me, my brother, and a few friends—under the sun in South Beach. I was nineteen. It was spring break, senior year of high school.
Looking back, it was a happy coincidence that we had finally partaken in the grand American tradition of senior spring—that we had jettisoned ourselves from Connecticut humdrum to any of the typical destinations, anywhere with a beach and sunshine. Miami, with its malls, art fairs, grand stretches of sand, was the perfect candidate: It swelled with normalcy, both the city itself and the activities we did within it. We jumped between coffee shops. We went to the Wynwood Walls for photos. We thrifted graphic tees.
We must have known something was coming. We’d been warned in all-school meeting of the “novel” virus, to take precautions like washing our hands and staying alert, and even though we were far from campus, something in the Floridian air oozed quietude—how rice and pasta had been cleared off the shelves, and how, for the first time in memory, hand sanitizer had sold out.
But none of it meant much to us. If there had been headlines, warnings, vague alarm buried in our parents’ texts, we cast them off. We spent those first three days in Florida soaking up the lethargic luxury of a school holiday.
Then it started.
Four days in, H. received a hazmat suit in the mail. Five, and I received Bath and Body Works hand sanitizer from my parents by next-day shipping, because Purell had long sold out everywhere online. Six, early in the morning, the text we never thought we’d actually receive—Come home, now—finally arrived, confronting us with its ugly imperative from our home screens. We were sent tickets back to Korea, to Hong Kong; we tried to cancel the remaining Airbnb nights that would go to waste. We didn’t know how to say goodbye, or whether we should have.
Nor was there time for that. N. left first, getting on the car to the airport without a second glance. She texted us only a few hours later that she had made it on board.
The goal was to get home. But in the limbo of a world entering shutdown, even this simple demand yielded bizarre items: I had never seen an airport as silent as LAX was that evening, and I had never seen people wear hazmat suits onto a passenger flight like lab subjects. When we landed, we couldn’t walk out; instead, we were swabbed and escorted to our quarantine Airbnb with cardboard trackers on our wrists—ensuring, by law, that we would spend the next fourteen days in this last-minute rental home of a retired expat. That we would spend our fortnight of confinement bathed under the meager sunlight that fell through the window's dull, brown tint.
Two weeks would be okay. There was a stove, so we could cook eggs for breakfast in the morning, and there was wi-fi, so we could dial into class at night, newly virtual. “Virtual” was still an unfamiliar word, and it felt strange to describe our classes with the adjective—just as it felt strange to attend them with the giddy expectation that they would revert to in-person soon. I wondered when I would make it back to high school. Three weeks? A month? Until then, there was just my brother and I in that small apartment, just enough space on the wood floor of that small living room for us to exercise to YouTube videos together.
A few days in, we discovered that the flat lent access to a rooftop. In the evenings, with nothing better to do until class, my brother and I went upstairs to look out at the view. Village stretched out far into the distance, dead still. I had never seen Stanley’s main street—the 大排檔, the public library, the tourist market—so curiously empty, so much that the bare, cobblestoned pavement itself seemed to absorb a kind of sadness as it washed over with the day’s last rays of light. It was like the set of an abandoned movie. We played instrumental music on our iPhone speakers as we looked out at the water. It was the flimsy soundtrack to our pandemic storylines that had just begun to unfold.
***
We left the house into a new world, held to distinct rules and ritual. We “distanced.” We wore medical masks, the kind that reminded me of the nurses in Dr. D.’s clinic. We downloaded the “LeaveHomeSafe” app to scan ourselves in and out of restaurants, submitting record of our every action to the authorities for contact tracing. Everything—family life, community life, city life—had taken on the absurd tenor of a fictional world. It felt like we were in a video game. We were helpless avatars, living on codes navigating checkpoints, dodging invisible threats as we awaited our eventual return to normal.
And yet, some things proceeded exactly in spite of it. All of life could stop, it seemed, except the relentless profit of education, which reinvented itself overnight entirely online. Ubiquitous confusion arose in the days before Zoom literacy, exacerbated by the fact that we were to figure these questions out in our pajamas and childhood bedrooms, at 8 p.m., 11 p.m., 2 a.m. Up until my senior year of high school, I had never once taken a virtual class, and it took several weeks to reconcile with the new, diminished reality of gathering onscreen—the momentary silences microphones faltered, the stilted pauses as we waited for static to pass. As I smiled into my blurred webcam, I realized that we would never step into Latin or Statistics or Journalism with Mr. P again, that these seventy-minute meetings, twice a week, were our drawn-out goodbye.
Of all things, orchestra insisted on continuing. French horn duties, apparently, did not cease in a global shutdown. While the real one gathered odor and oil in my absence, I located a substitute—a neon green plastic horn that I rented across those few months. I didn’t even know they made plastic horns, or what for—apart from, apparently, dislocated high school seniors’ Canvas submissions.
I filmed myself blowing into that flimsy thing, repeating the second horn part continually until I hit the correct notes. The walls of that cramped, windowless rental room watched me in confusion. They must have wondered why I bothered to pipe vibrating wind that would travel, from my screen, across the Pacific, when I should have been playing the music live with fifty others.
It never really became clear to us that we weren’t going back to Connecticut. The weeks continued to pass us by like news updates on the virus, one after the other, up until the end of the semester. Last Hurrah came, then final exams, then Prize Day.
Then graduation itself came around. Someone offered their house to host a celebration to at least attempt that congratulatory spirit, however unsalvageable. It wasn’t what any of us had foreseen, they said, but it was something. In that cloudy backyard, we toasted to four years of high school, lit those cigars, took photos in our suits under the fading evening light.
At 10 p.m., tipsy and numb, we gathered in the living room to watch the livestream. A projection of our headshots and deep music on a screen marked our severance from that school. The screen dimmed to a close, leaving the room in teary darkness. It had taken high school, and our high school selves, with it.
No one knows they are living through Historical Events, let alone where they stand within them—even if it becomes all too clear in retrospect. The novelty of this high school experience thrown off-kilter held something unexplored. Something uncertain, entangled with loss, but also—was it true?—togetherness? It threw an unreadable, unscripted allure onto the stillness and ambiguity that had settled over the world.
Whenever I think of COVID these days, it comes to me in flashes of deep feeling, images of a life it feels I had never lived, even if I know I once had. If life was a series of colors, then I see this period in a muted purple-pink—that dreamy, arresting hue of sunrises and sunsets I have come to associate with my time in Hong Kong. Pastel and melancholy, it hangs over all my memories of that period of my life. I first saw it that morning, after graduation, after the hugs and the tears and the parents going home, when we stayed up for the senior sunrise in determined tradition. We had to do this, at least.
At 5 a.m., we took the 260 to Repulse Bay Beach to usher in the next phase of our lives. We threw ourselves off the sleepy double decker and sprinted down toward the beach, just as the sun began to draw a soft purple line on the South China horizon. Home was beautiful, and we were ignorant. Elated and grieved, we charged out onto the wide, empty beach and into our time in Hong Kong, silhouetted against dawn’s smoky fuchsia.
***
Melancholy hung over that first torporous stretch of summer, saddled with impossible fantasies of what life could have been. To fend off the boredom, we reconnected with the selves we had left in the city when we had taken off for boarding school, the people that yoked us to home, the activities that reminded us of our childhoods. Somehow, there was always something to do. Hikes, boxing courses, plans to swim in the southern marinas—beautiful, hollow ways to pass the time. We picked them up like summer romances, indulging them arduously and intensely. Then we dropped them as abruptly. A friend’s food blog gained traction on Instagram for a few months. A podcast of another friend lasted only several episodes, the cost of his new microphone sunk. As though our attempts at normalcy, desperate and pitiable, could dispel the malaise the pandemic had dropped on the city.
The circles I ran in contained a curious breed—people who had spent their lives elsewhere, only to return. Something of our identities had gotten lost, needed to be rebuilt. Early on, someone I knew moved into an empty apartment, as others elsewhere were doing, for the sake of “independence”—of ascertaining a sense of self in spite of the identity this period seemed to withhold. Even today, I still think about that apartment. It belonged to her father and had recently been emptied, and she was allowed to live in it until a new tenant emerged. That desolate space, emblem of her right to belong in Hong Kong, contained, for many weeks, only what she could carry over in duffel bags: water jugs, 3-in-1 shower gel, cutlery pilfered from her kitchen. Eventually she got around to installing a wi-fi router and a few pieces of furniture—a chair here, a carpet there. Most rooms remained empty.
When I came over, most often for company across the long night of online class, I slept in the living room, on the couch that was too small. The apartment didn’t have blackout blinds, only mauve, silky curtains that never fully blocked the morning light that spilled into the living room. They threw a dull glimmer on me when I woke, just as they cast the rest of the house in that soft brilliance—the makeshift apartment that symbolized our makeshift adulthood, awkwardly simulated and performed. In the humidity of April and May, I thought that these low-lit mornings bore a certain charm. Some novel quality seemed to emanate from our stuffy, uncomfortable coming-of-age.
I developed a habit of peering out at the dawn still breaking across the city before N. woke up. Through the curtains, the city looked translucent and dusty, as if the stagnant world outside had been reduced to an old photograph—colors drained, edges blurred. Skyscrapers stood like watchful sentinels patrolling the harborfront; the city’s empty streets drifted in and out of mist climbing the mountain, winding across the urban landscape. I didn’t enter my twenties as I had anticipated, on the New York City campus I’d dreamed of, but I had these stolen mornings in Hong Kong—days that I’d come to associate with burnt coffee, with jet-lagged street food for lunch.
Sometimes I watched the people below, imagined myself as one of them—one who had lived their entire life here. This auntie or that uncle, wheeling one of those basket carts for groceries; someone walking a dog; kids jumping off schoolbuses wearing bright green backpacks. Even the most mundane things—especially those mundane things—rippled with meaning, concretizing Hong Kong’s metaphor status in my heart. My two-faced home, both deeply familiar and perpetually alienated. Never that unchanging, absolute entity known to my parents, who have lived there their whole lives, nor my immigrant grandparents, who moved there from elsewhere. They call themselves part of the city’s eight million people. I don’t.
This would have been my life if I hadn’t left so young. If all of the steps leading up to the departure never materialized. If my parents had never walked into my room and asked how I would feel if I would not, as I had once thought, stay in Hong Kong until Year 13.
***
Summer came. Because there was nothing to do, I took a law internship. Some mornings Babi drove me, talking with Mami about so and so, about the weather, about what they were going to do that day. Others, I took the train, transferring at Ocean Park, then again at Admiralty, and finally at West Kowloon. I yawned while I read New Yorker pieces in courtrooms. I was sent out more than a few times to buy the team lunch.
When that ended, I took another internship, in a real estate agency. I enjoyed that one much more. The office was on the 48th floor of an office building in Exchange Square, and I loved it. They gave me a seat by the windows, and every day, as I flipped through the morning paper, pretending to understand what the Cantonese characters said, I looked out the floor-to-ceiling glass, at the skyline of Hong Kong, and I daydreamed. Something struck me about those skyscrapers as grandiose, as sublime. I never got used to waking up early in the morning.
Then summer left. August rolled around, and with it, short notice that school would be canceled that semester, against every announcement that had been made before. At that point, even as I must have already forgotten that easy expectation that I would be back to the US soon, the note hurt, like someone had confirmed an awful secret about the world that I had tried to avoid. I didn’t want to look at my screen after I saw the email, those dense paragraphs sent by the college administration that really meant to say—sorry we got your hopes up. I walked down the slope by my house to Stanley Beach, circling the neighborhood and breezing by the market stalls until the sky darkened. I walked back home, just in time for dinner. Soon, after these meals, I would begin attending college.
Bitterness cut through those online classes in my first semester. Staring at those digital rectangles in that literature class, in the science course that every first year had to take, I recognized that, while I didn’t know these people, I would have, under other circumstances. I came to learn them through the pixels—their mannerisms, how they decorated their bedroom, whether they capitalized their messages in the chatbox. I came to like some of them. I had the sad thought that I would have become friends with at least a few of them, if only I had had the chance to talk to them in real life.
I didn’t, of course. Most mornings, I slept after three, watching my screen dim to black against the gentle peace of Stanley in the nighttime.
Some days, I went to the WeWork. The co-working space was our only reminder that we were, in fact, students—the recompense that one of Columbia’s global offices had given us, in exchange for barring us from campus. That Lan Kwai Fong office floor was no library nor classroom, but at least there was space, much of it—empty coworking rooms, desks replete with swiveling chairs, booths that took on a kind of ghostliness in their corporate uniformity. There was a room for yoga in one of the corners, with a bottle of hand sanitizer and a single mat. There was also a shower. Bare as it was, though, I grew quite fond of the space. It was a nice alternative to my bedroom desk or the Starbucks in Stanley Plaza. More importantly, it was somewhere to be—in those days, a privilege in itself.
I never spoke to most of the people in that office, but I met a few people who would say hi. There was J. first, and then N., and then K. K. and I realized we had both grown up in South Horizons and took a liking to each other. We made plans to work together some afternoons and stepped out, when we got bored, for happy hour, usually in one of the bars lining Hollywood Road. I felt a strange warmth as we retired our iPads and headed downstairs, a sort of ludicrousness in our circumstances—as if to say, behind our medical masks, how did we end up here, but we’re here nonetheless. Over cocktails, swirling translucent liquids holding big blocks of ice, we talked about casual things, like the latest government mandates, like mandatory testing or no indoor dining at dinnertime, and then the deeper ones, like realistic, logical guesses as to when all of this could possibly end.
Those of us who were there in those times shared something invaluable—a strain of peculiar, once-in-a-lifetime meaning. It manifested in the hodgepodge emotions that arose, a good deal of which was negative, like frustration for that course on Roman art I despised—why I had to learn theories about how art circulated across ancient Roman provinces, I had no idea—and sadness at those newspaper team meetings that never seemed to kick off, no matter how many icebreakers we threw in. But some of it was optimistic—pockets of warmth, scattered across that social tundra. We snagged a family dinner to celebrate Christmas at Madame Fù, even if later that night I was to take midterm on the Augustan regime. Only between courses of Chinese New Year lunch some months later did I have to steal away for a psychology quiz, answering multiple questions about Pavlovian conditioning as I chewed on turnip cake.
It crossed my mind once in a while that the me in an alternate universe, the one where the pandemic had not happened, would be taking the 1 downtown, sitting on the lawns between class, maybe even applying to study abroad at that Hadrianic villa I had once wanted nothing more than to work for. He would be in Williamsburg, in Central Park, in a dorm room strung up with fairy lights. He would have loved his John Jay single, looking out from his bed through that rectangular window at Butler, a bright autumn evening settling over the Upper West Side. The thought threw a lull in my days.
But I had found something else in Hong Kong. In some ways, could it even have been better? Between the wash of the seaside, the smell of Mami’s steamed fish and chicken thigh with dates every few nights, between the friendships that arose out of nowhere, like that group of people from HKIS I had met through a friend of a friend—between all of it, a sense of belonging had materialized. I first met that group on an invitation to take photos at Instagram Pier—two hours that became five, then became a new group chat on WhatsApp, then became plans to celebrate R.’s birthday at that rooftop bar, that bar where the five, six of us popped champagne under the Kusama sculpture and fake palm trees.
Eventually, we agreed that we should spend a night at J.’s house. We ate, and after we had cleaned out the takeout sushi, someone put on “’tis the damn season,” and someone else brought out cake for another birthday. We lit candles and sang. Later, we played cards, and King’s Cup, and, when the night moved on, broke into the Jenga set that H. had brought. It had been so long since I had seen one of those, as it had been so long for so many things. Hours melted away as we spilled blocks from the tower with laughter, the first any of us had heard in a while.
***
Depending on who you ask, Hong Kong is a place in which to stay, or to leave. Those years saw numerous departures from the city on British visas, I remember, destined for lives in places called Nottingham, Warwick—as they also revealed those other people who insisted, resolutely, that they would stay.
But what are the stories of people who leave a place only to come back? Those afternoons I had nothing to do, I wandered through those decrepit bookstores lining the margins of Sheung Wan, searching for the words to describe my situation. Maybe there would be stories of the past that we could turn to.
But I found nothing. There was so little that described the undeparted—the person who had left a place for another, just to return.
Writing this, I guess, fills that lack. As the initial months of the pandemic bled into a half-year, and any lingering hope for its temporariness dissipated, it became clear that among the myriad things COVID had displaced was also something of my identity. Of our identities, those of us confronted by a home that had never truly been one, having lived life largely elsewhere. Every moment reminded us that we didn’t belong—disbelief at the constancy of family dinners, surprise at having any reason to employ Cantonese.
As I’ve grown up, the city has rained longing over me, borne of those hazy images my memory has chosen to keep—kindergarten, kid-A, the avenues and promenades and concrete-paved side streets of South Horizons. It has also eluded me. Through life, I have only discussed it elsewhere, provided it as a default response while abroad—even if I don’t have a contiguous, legitimate experience of actually having lived there. For this reason, even simple tasks felt foreign: haircuts, afternoon strolls around the village, those afternoons I spent at home with my brother. Reading, waiting for my parents to get home from work. Those evenings counting down the minutes until family dinner, like we weren’t in our early twenties, but eight or eleven.
Those weekends, because there was nothing else to do, we obediently adhered to the year’s trend of “staycationing”—booking out rooms in hotels across the island, steeply discounted now that tourism had been suspended. How impossible that the seven of us—my busy parents, aunties A. and C., Po Po, and N. and I, who, in normal times, would have been in New England—found ourselves looking out a hotel window to, of all things, Jardine House, where my mom works, and the iconic Central Ferris wheel. We dined in the lobby restaurants, noticeably devoid of tourists, then returned upstairs to the portable mahjong set. That year, I learned not only the game’s rules, but also its lessons of etiquette—the flick of the wrist, how to push my thumbs together to reveal a winning deck—and morality. 海底撈月, to scoop the moon from the bottom of the ocean. 輸家食尾湖, the losing player always wins the final round. Those simple nights, I wanted nothing more than to 食大牌, win on a big hand. I wondered what it would be like to have lived my whole life like this—every Sunday with my family, every moment tinged by simple happiness.
I picked up all those artifacts of my childhood, those I thought had long disappeared, just as easily as though I had dropped them on the street. The string of coffee shops nestled high up by Elgin and Gough streets. The Pepper Lunch beef-rice meal that was once the treat of Friday afternoons after 3:20PM class had let out. I reached out to Ms. L, whom I hadn’t seen since second-level Chinese in Year 9, and arranged to meet her again at the GSIS cafeteria. Over lukewarm pasta, the lunch option that day, I was surprised to learn that she had not only gotten married, but was expecting a child.
As I was surprised to visit South Horizons again, the village where I had lived until ten, and see how much had changed. I walked along the path Babi used to bike with me on, where fishermen came out at night, smoking cigarettes while waiting for their lines to jump. It was the same place, but it was a new one entirely. Everything was different. smaller. Time had shrunk the locales of my past the way dreams disfigure memories—subtly and curiously. Later, over the fragrant aromas of my grandmother’s sweet and sour pork on Sunday dinners, I picked my parents’ and grandparents’ brains about the years we lived in Blocks 8 and 23, filling in the gaps of my childhood that I had let go of.
When was it, I wonder, that the novelty of the return began to fade? It happened so imperceptibly, and so thoroughly, that quixotic New York City had fallen away to the comforts of Stanley Market, Causeway Bay. The milestones I had thought would coincide with American college piled up in my backyard: graduation, turning nineteen that first year back, turning twenty the second.
On a humid summer night, D. and I threw a birthday party to celebrate each of our two decades with friends, new friends and those we had known since Year 1. We set out picnic blankets under the open air, passed drinks and pizza around, and wove bracelets for one another. We recorded the night on film—grainy, imperfect exposures lit up against the trenchant blue of dusk falling.
***
Looking back, it makes sense that COVID coincided with the announcement about the renovations. It was about time, my parents said. Restrictions had eased, and everyone, including my family, craved any reprieve of the pandemic, of which there’d been a paucity for so long. This infectious spirit invigorated the move, palpable in every measurement made, every box of furniture shipped off to storage as construction in the backyard began, that brilliant spectacle of scaffolding and tarpaulin. I saw it, too, in the absence of the house’s familiar decor—empty corners that had once stood the toy giraffe and the upright Steinway, the walls, newly stripped of their paintings and posters. The symbolism of it all—that old pictures had to be removed, old cracks painted over, to make way for the new—struck me as so blatantly metaphorical as to be cliched. I felt a similar impulse for newness as I wandered through IKEA’s winding walkway with my parents, pointing out this light and that drawer, for which the house, freshly rearranged, now had space.
By then, most restrictions had lifted, and we took our chance to see all of it: the sequestered gardens on the Peak; the tram station leading down into Central, abandoned and damp with condensation at night; the floating deck deep into Sai Kung we got to by sampan. The day of what came to be known as the “shed,” we got dinner once we had returned to land in spite of our exhaustion, and even agreed, after parting for an hour to refresh, that we would go out that night.
Which we did—to Chocolate, where we got chocolate shots, then to Shuffle.
Those golden weeks, I felt like I could do anything. Someone asked me why I hadn’t written in many months, I remember. I responded, with certainty, that I was living through those very magical moments I would one day want to write about.
I hoped the day would never come. Writing is the enactment of retrospect, and I registered that if I should reach a point of reflection, it would mean that these days—and the joy that marked them—would have passed.
There were so many days, but there were so many more nights—so, so many spent talking wildly of the preoccupations that belong to twenty, twenty-one year olds. Whom so-and-so was dating, what we gleaned from our classes, which fanciful careers we aspired toward—and which none of us ended up pursuing, in hindsight. So long as we were together—on the rolling fields in Tamar Park, in the backseat of T.’s car, driving up Kowloon Peak to reach the viewpoint at the hilltop, orange lights scattered across the broad landscape of our home, stretching out in wonder—so long as that was the case, we talked, filling the hours with uncomplicated conversation. I like to think of us cross-legged on park benches, throwing words laden with intention, and meaning, and utter certainty to the wind, the stuff of dreamers.
One night, after drinks, after everyone else had gone home, T. and I wandered into the empty departures hall of the Airport Express—that majestic, gray hall in the IFC lobby. In a few hours, trains would start to ferry early-morning passengers to the airport. The vastness of the room, masked usually by the bustle of commerce, struck me in its silence. I had never seen the place so quiet. It seemed, in its early-morning silence, to amplify the hopes we whispered between ourselves: We were soon to be sophomores in college, old enough to imagine goals for life thereafter, but not yet confronted by the pressure of achieving them. What fantastical stages could lie ahead. What glamorous jobs, what new countries.
How would we get there, though? As August rolled around, it occurred to me that I would soon be separated from Hong Kong—from my family, my friends, from the marketplace stalls and roadside corners and gentle humidity I had fallen in love with over the months. I had never felt as intensely as I did in this period of my life. I wanted, unequivocally, to stay there forever—even though I knew I loved it only because it wasn’t mine. As always, with Hong Kong, the question lingered: To stay or to leave?
As the days chilled and college resurfaced as a material concern—no longer that anonymous place to which we each disappeared every night—we faced the incumbent reality of the other lives, the real lives, to which we were running late. The end began. At a farewell party in a friend’s empty Repulse Bay apartment, just before his family moved back to Paris, we played music, mixed drinks for the last time, exchanged the deceitful promise everyone made as pandemic Hong Kong faded: We will see each other again.
That night, I walked my friends to the bus stop and sent them home. I watched the austere cabins of the double-deckers ferry them away one by one, taking their stories with them.
I thought the affair would last two weeks. It was two years. I left Hong Kong on as sunny a day as when I had landed, the glare on the South China Sea searing white and offensive. Crossing Tsing Ma Bridge to the airport, I began to cry. I realized that, in a period I thought I had nothing, I had, in fact, gained something distinctly possible to lose.
***
In the months that followed, I attempted the life for which I had once yearned. Finally, New York City.
But all I found in Manhattan was Hong Kong. I adorned my new shelves with the mementos that I had brought with me, turned to them for distraction when the days grew cold—hotel room cards, sepia-toned photographs, what remained of the small bottle of rose-magnolia cologne Mami had given me some time ago. Some nights, I sprayed a little in the air to throw me from that room, that lightless, Carlton double. In darkness, I recalled the aroma as I first encountered it, blended with the salt of charred meat from the evening we grilled dinner on that Tai O inn’s rooftop. Stars dotted the sky that hung over the sleepy fisherman’s village. Life dripped with emotion. Sometimes, I felt I was almost halfway back.
Memory of Hong Kong was like that, so overpowering that anywhere in New York, the dorms or classrooms or downtown, could just as easily leave me unmoored. I went to lectures in person, met the friends I once wanted to meet, carved out so much of a new life that it sometimes felt like I had redeemed some of that missing time. But on those mopey jogs along Riverside Drive, facing the Edgewater shoreline, I could do nothing but wish myself elsewhere, unable to shake off the emergent certainty that any emotion I’d experience here would be only fractional. Even when my friends, those I spent every other moment with in 2021, visited me from Ann Arbor and Chicago and upstate New York, even when we spent all of a Thanksgiving weekend in the Brooklyn apartment we rented together, catching up in that dim living room, the conversation felt forced, and I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that something wasn’t the same. As though our friendships had, like the magic of the place that had united us out of necessity just a few months ago, expired.
When I did make it back to Hong Kong the following summer, and then again for the winter break after that, I realized that returning didn’t help either. If anything, coming back reinforced what I had suspected—that the attrition on our memories, now that the pandemic was over, had already begun. That, with “back-to-normal,” people no longer felt as willing to be together. Very quickly, the people of the pandemic had become unreachable, because they had gotten a job or left to school in Sydney, and it seemed to me that they wanted to keep it that way. I was especially surprised at the coldness of a friend with whom I once talked for hours on end. Our lunchtime conversation, conducted briefly during our corporate lunch breaks, confined itself to the most superficial of topics.
What unsettled me most was the backyard after the renovation. Half a year, and the salmon terracotta of my childhood had been paved over with glossy, gray marble. It was unbearably different—the hollow echo of footsteps on stone where there used to be softness, to be heat underfoot. I was disturbed at the willingness at which everything had changed in my absence, as if those meaningful pandemic months had been swept away with the debris of the renovation. Even my brother, who enjoyed, more than I did, the soccer and tag we played on what was once red brick, who had shared my resistance to the idea of paving the garden over, said that he liked the changes.
For a while, I waged my rebellion against the collective amnesia of everyone around me, repeating visits to those COVID places to relive sweeter memories. It felt personal. The racecourse; the walkway by the Apple Store in IFC; and above all, Loplus. Peering inside the lobby of the rental apartment my family had lived in during the renovation, I pictured to myself what it looked when we moved in, wheeling our bags in on the hotel cart, boxes jangling because Mami had insisted on bringing our cutlery with us for the two-month stay.
But after some time—and I’m not sure when—I began to lose track of the details, the minutiae I had so recently structured my life around. I couldn’t remember if we lived on the seventeenth or eighteenth floor, the exact shade of sunlight in the morning. Was it cream, or was it gray? It bothered me that I had forgotten—and even more so that no one else had cared to, either. I was a solitary soldier, the last of an anonymous battalion whose comrades had long retreated.
What was the purpose of keeping these memories? Was there one? Maybe, it occurred to me, everyone else had been right. Maybe I had overstayed.
***
So I’ve left as well, in a way. Whether it was seeing photos of my friends in their graduation gowns at the end of my junior year, or when my friend confirmed that he would move to Chicago for work, or when I hesitated about the name of the guy I met playing frisbee, T. or W., and decided not to reach out after all—I think that something in me has shifted. I told one of my friends, during one of those hot summer nights, that my career in the future must involve writing, and that it must be brilliantly nomadic, like those travel journalists I admired, those who explored uncharted ground every day, extracted poetry from their globetrotting escapades. Instead, I worked tirelessly to secure a corporate internship. I spent hours preparing to interview into a life of neutral-toned lighting, of pantry breaks.
Why, I don’t know. I’m still figuring it out. Now, as it did then, it feels like surrender. Just like how I stopped writing in the diary I kept every day during COVID, and like how I let my passion for film photography fall away. Early on in 2020, my dad took me to explore Sham Shui Po, and, seeing the camera store he had walked by so many times as a kid, he walked in and bought me one secondhand. It will be your pandemic passion, he told me. And it was, for a while, as I documented the beauty of the Hong Kong to which I was witness—those sunrises on the south side, those walks into the greenery of a city under lockdown, luxuriant and desolate.
When did all of these passions fall away? Life after COVID feels, at times, like nothing more than a series of concessions—of the routines and activities that anchored me to my personhood during those happy months. Is this a part of growing up? Of leaving a place? I look at who I am today and recognize only distant familiarity to the person I was then, in the Hong Kong of 2021. I no longer have unending time to spend with family. I can’t predict when my friends and I will gather next.
And even if we could, we wouldn’t be the same people.
Even more difficult for me to accept is that none of this was meant to happen. That the togetherness I felt, with the people and places around me, was the product of overwhelming coincidence. Unmistakable chance and temporariness underpin what I’ve realized are my deepest happinesses.
I am constantly asked where I plan to go after graduation, and I answer honestly: I won’t be going back to Hong Kong. Not yet, at least, and not soon. There are real reasons behind this choice. They stem from an entirely different life.
But, in the end, now that I’ve said it all, I still feel like I’ve given something up. Without a fight. I can’t describe exactly what it is, but I know it relates to my home city and to the pandemic months I spent there.
Here is what I do know. I’ve lived in several places, but I belong to only one.
I belong to only one.
I know—with a certainty so cemented it has never once crossed my mind to doubt it—where I stand. Somewhere in the haze of those weathered mountains we hiked, vast and consuming in their silence, and those trails and side streets we drifted aimlessly about, like ghosts, and the peninsula we biked out onto, inhaling that fresh, salt-crusted air, and across those Tsim Sha Tsui pavements by the flat C. stayed at for a while, where we met for the first time, the two of us, and then J., over that buffet of Indian food, and by the corner where we first tried ChaTraMue, and those belt-shaped churros, and those mustard-glazed sausages, straight from the grills of the street food stalls, every bite so hot we struggled not to spit it out, and loved it still, and in the 3/F lounge, where we studied together for class, where we looked out at the Hong Kong Island skyline, elegant and regal under the afternoon’s deep blue, and, later when night came, how we watched, in silent awe, the last of the city’s street signs spill their neon gauze onto the street, watery and incandescent, stuck in time—somewhere in these images, a part of me takes root. A part of me has never left, will never.
***
Hi Derek,
Hope you are well. Thank you for allowing me to be part of this awesome project of yours. Writing this response/critique has allowed me to reflect on an important period of growth and an important place. I’ve been able to put so many thoughts I’ve had for a while on paper and that’s helped me grow and understand what’s important to me. Can’t wait to see this all come together.
How did we meet?
I believe we met in Year 7, around twelve years ago. I was new to German Swiss International School, and you were one of the loud characters that stood out. Though we weren’t in the same class, I distinctly remember you being a trouble-maker at school. Always poking the bear. Classic Derek. We got a little closer in Year 8, when we shared a dorm on a school trip to Munich. I remember you having this sort of charm that oozed confidence and you had an ability to laugh at yourself. You were always willing to make a fool out of yourself in the hopes that it will be a funny story for everyone else. You were that kid. You weren’t caught up in all the politics of middle school, and as long as the stories kept coming, people loved being around you.
I don’t remember how we really started being close friends. Probably some party or hangout when we were both home from boarding school. Through I. or D., I reckon? It was like I met a new person. The troublemaker that I knew in middle school turned out to be a tote-bag-wielding, Birkenstock-wearing, poetry-reading softie who is able to be vulnerable and have deep conversations about life? Classic Derek. Don’t get me wrong, we still had our fair share of degeneracy over the years, but deep down I knew there was a big unlock for you somewhere along the way.
Why do you think I asked you to critique it?
Over those two years, we spent a lot of time together in Hong Kong. You were one of the few restless people during the pandemic who were willing to be spontaneous, whether it was going for a night drive, Halfway Coffee, or even camping on a beach. Through getting to know you more, I realized that we are actually more similar than I had initially expected. Our experiences of living abroad from a young age is one, but we also hold similar views on family and life in general. Most importantly, I think that we both possess the same deep and unfaltering love for Hong Kong, no matter what.
Beyond that, I think we’ve developed a friendship where we’re able to challenge and critique each other’s point of view. By doing this, we’ve not only grown to understand each other more, but also learned a fair thing or two from each other’s experiences. I think ultimately that is why you asked me to critique this piece: it’s another opportunity for us to connect more deeply, another opportunity to grow together.
What is your honest response to this essay?
The first time I read this piece, I was overwhelmed by the concepts and ideas that were discussed. The idea of home. The evolution of a place. Finding parts of Hong Kong abroad. The decision to stay or to leave (or to come back). All these are things that have been passing thoughts throughout my years abroad. Three ideas stood out in particular: two that I’d like to push back on and one that I want to acknowledge as the most important element of your piece.
One idea that troubled me after reading it is your suggestion that this period was a blissful period in time. I agree that it was a time of personal growth, a time when I got close to home, a time when I grew into the man I am today. However, we must not forget to acknowledge that those in our bubble suffered only inconvenience throughout COVID, while those less fortunate suffered real consequences. Our magical moments are uniquely privileged, as we were able to navigate through the period with only our schedules derailed.
Another idea that was interesting to me was the idea of change, in people and in place. In your piece you mentioned the changed feeling towards your childhood friends post-COVID, where conversations had “grown outdated in the contexts of each of our own lives,” and the altered feelings you had when you revisited Hong Kong, making you consider if you had “maybe…overstayed.” I have two thoughts here.
I think that change itself is not inherently a bad thing, nor a sign that things will turn bad. We tend to worship the “good old days” only because they are unreachable, unattainable to the people we are today and the circumstances we find ourselves in. I think it’s important to remember that change is in the natural course of life. As you said, this period was a time of immense growth and with that growth, it is only natural that change comes with. People, and places, grow close but they also grow apart, and that’s okay. Heck, if you were still constantly that troublemaker in middle school, would we still be friends today?
I also propose that people and places don’t change as much as you think. I’m sure you relate to me when I recall moments coming back for summer break at boarding school to find new restaurants pop up in Sheung Wan, new bars that have made it to the Asia Top 50, and new spots to explore. But ultimately, the fundamental smell in the air is the same. Hong Kong is not different just because the Tsui Wah got replaced by a McDonald’s, nor is it different because they revamped the Peak Tram. That’s the same with people. Yes, friends might be in different cities, pursuing different careers, and making decisions you might not agree with. But when you dig deeper into the fundamentals, their values and beliefs, I think that there’s more that remains the same than otherwise.
Now onto the idea that I wanted to highlight: Hong Kong. The place to leave or the place to stay. Your final paragraph talks about Hong Kong being the only place you belong to. I agree wholeheartedly: there is no city in the world that comes close. Logic brings you to Hong Kong, but emotion makes you stay. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the unique culture, the stellar public transportation system, the convenience of hikes and beaches, the brilliance of the Octopus card, and the ability to live in a multicultural financial center of the world. But these alone don’t compare to the feeling you get biting into a freshly baked pineapple bun from a 茶餐廳 you’ve been going to as a kid, the pride you get from 自摸-ing a 大牌 in mahjong in front of your grandparents, the warm feeling you get when devouring shake-shake fries on the pier after a night out in Lan Kwai Fong, the humbleness you experience when taking in the views of sunrise atop Tai Mo Shan. These feelings are impossible to recreate abroad, unreachable unless you are home. As Hong Kongers, we are bound by the effects of these emotions, forever tied to a place and its people, doomed to reflect on ourselves and our places within the city. And that’s the greatest curse I could have ever asked for.
Best,
Terence