The clock widget on my Mac displays four timezones. GMT +8 (Hong Kong), GMT (London), GMT -5 (Boston), and GMT -8 (San Fran).
In October, I wrote about the Presi Traverse. It felt like home, something more to do with a feeling than a place. Home carries this immutable status as a self-justifying fact, a boulder that just is. Staring at the blank desktop on my Mac, I realised I've found home in each of these timezones.
I haven't been home home for almost a year. Hong Kong was different this Christmas. More lively, kind, and full of the delicateness of oriental life that I missed, or perhaps took for granted, as a child. I liked the mountains, the waves, and appreciated for the first time the orderly chaos of the city. Two civilisations clashed here, in the Victorian verandas and glazed terracotta roofs, in the bustling local markets and opulent malls, in the caloric shorefront and lantern-lit sailboats. I missed the catch of a fleeting breeze as I ran along the harbour. I traced the shelves of our apartment for another year's share of new furnishings. I smiled at how the sun illuminated my little room in slivers, igniting little particles of dust as they floated, into and out of focus, in front of my turquoise bed. Hong Kong has its way about life.
I'm not sure whether the city had changed or whether I had grown up. It had often felt insular, diluted, but things are thicker now, and I feel free. It probably boils down to this. I have certainly become more convinced of who I ought to be. I am less afraid of difference. So life becomes lighter, and a curious impartiality arises through which a warmer affection covets for the human parts of a place, covets for truth, and sieves away the noise.
My old memories of Hong Kong were laden with harbour and floodlights, hazy skies and camphor trees, the shuffling of feet on bricked pavements and rush of passengers in the MTR, crisp winds of fall that whisked away summer, the khaki-hued dirt trails of Lantau and golden orb-weaver spiders, and intertwined with all of that the dark slippery alleyways and run-down apartments, concrete paths scything past half-domesticated wilderness, the constant whirring of construction, a quiet solitude that emanates from the night lights, and an unmistakable longing for more.
In my young mind, which learnt to yearn for nature and beauty before anything else, I was troubled by the carefully manicured islets of nature and cantankerous human presence that seemed to seep through everything. I wished we had the tallest mountains or the most pristine waters, and for the woods to be outside our front door. The stories of Hong Kong I encountered were either too close to life to be romanticised or worshipped, or so far removed in time that it felt more a shared cultural memory than something I was part of. So I lived and breathed her air, but I was unaware of her stories. I invented them.
As I grew older, it became all the more bland to live in between concoctions, even if my own. Real beings are more interesting. You only uncover the true face of a place after you've let go of the tales you hoped had been. I have come to rediscover home, that immutable, self-justifying fact. The hills and rocks and people that freed my imaginations are a part of me; the muck and noise and narrow spaces, they are too.
I think Hong Kong has yet to find her great writer. I hope she will one day.