Far from home

Children play on the rocks with sailboats, the ocean, and container ships visible behind.

In Hong Kong’s winter we sit on rocks next to the ocean and talk to our friends. The breeze is brisk, and we wear jackets in between climbs. The months of shorts and tank tops, of sun screen, hats, and seeking AC feel like a distant memory. These spots, on the rocks near the water, are our hideaways. We found them first during covid, when there were no other places to go, and still they feel that way, refuges from the city.

The children are two, three years old now. Children who were not born when we first found these rocks. Children who were carried down to the boulders in slings, in backpacks, in carriers. Children who napped strapped to us, or tucked into shady spots, now rumble around moving snails industriously from one tidal pool to another. They cut their feet, or slip on the rocks, and keep going. We are building the next generation like this, outdoors on the rocks. Unafraid, at least for now. It’s a great break from airplanes and urban spaces, from rooftops and parks, from restaurants and malls. It’s a great break from the years since covid, where we’ve all gone back to our old lives, to our busyness.

Out here on the rocks we look at the ocean, at the tiny sailboats and the huge container ships, and talk about schools, about moving. The conversations aren’t urgent, because it’s Sunday and the sun is shining, because in the winter Hong Kong is a fantastic place to live, and because we all are, underneath, happy and lucky to be here. The questions about moving, about public schools in Canada or private schools here, are for future parents to solve, for our own future selves.

Those are Monday problems for Monday people.

Places I slept, 2024

Looking towards Tsim Sha Tsui from the harbor front near Sheung Wan on one of the last days of the year

As ever this endeavor reminds me of the things we leave behind, or will shortly. Tracking these lists, and reviewing them, points out changes I’d have otherwise ignored. Usually these shifts indicate job changes, such as my frequent crossings of the El Paso / Juarez border, which ended in 2014 when that job did. Sometimes what appears temporary becomes less so: I haven’t spent a night in China since 2019.

Our travel this year has the look of the familiar, which may explain why 2024 felt quite short. As planned, Japan has become a familiar zone. With visits in February, April, June, August, October, and November, we grew more comfortable in our new neighborhood. Watching Clara remember aspects of Tokyo and exploring it through her eyes has been worth every bit of effort. Even better, we were able to share the city with so many, from family to some of our oldest friends, an aspect of this gift we hope to continue.

Outside of Tokyo we traveled more for work and less for pleasure, with San Francisco for me and Vietnam for Tara the dominant features. Family-wise we limited ourselves to one whirlwind multi-stop tour of the United States, which features here as a chunk of familiar friend and family locations, all of which we’re grateful to have seen. We got enough summer eveningsto catch fireflies more than once, which had been a goal.

In this list of twenty seven beds (for me) I see the patterns of a new age, of toddler-hood and short inter-Asia flights, merging successfully with old habits built around long distance friendships and frisbee tournaments. It’s a good view of who we are trying to be, comfortably out here in the world.

Tai Hang, HK
Singapore (three times, three spots)
Otsuka, Tokyo, Japan (five times)
San Francisco, CA (three times, three spots)
Taipei, Taiwan (three times, three spots)
Oakland, CA (once, two spots)
Fort Collins, CO
Walden, CO
Manhattan, NY
Brooklyn, NY
Cherry Hill, NJ
Philadelphia, PA
Rumson, NJ
Fukuoka, Japan
Chennai, India (twice, two spots)
Bangkok, Thailand (once, two spots)
Atami, Japan

Prior lists visible here.

From boxes once again

Looking out of a Chennai hotel window at the city

For the first time in years, I have a day off in a hotel in a country not my own. For the first time in years, I am sick in a foreign country, and hunt familiar cures. My colleagues bring me coconuts and local concoctions, which I appreciate. It’s been a while since that happened, too.

These are not the adventures we seek, though they do seem to be some of the ones I write about. Outside my window in Chennai military jets do barrel rolls and launch flares, celebrating Ghandi’s birthday and preparing for the upcoming air show. The spirals and tight maneuvers are as impressive as ever, a reminder of what humans can build, and what the edge of possible looks like. “They’re basically space” my partner used to say, watching the Blue Angels in California, and I agree. Would that we used them less for war. Still, I am grateful for this view, once gain granted something I have never expected to see. Cities of accident, I called them long ago, and while they are not particularly accidents, this time, they are definitely not places I had on any kind of list.

Below them people play in the pool while birds wheel above, the best part of this view. Chennai feels dense with animals. Small chipmunks scamper across the pool deck when people are absent, and the birds perch on the edge constantly. Pigeons float up to a ledge just beneath my window, and a hawk lingers in the wind. Further off I can see stadiums, towers, and new construction. I can see a half-built and abandoned apartment building and smaller concrete houses that, with their unfinished walls, show marks of aging expected from this humid climate.

After a day of rest in Singapore last weekend, where the surroundings were more commercial and the hotel room far smaller, I am feeling better. Sometimes the breaks we need are enforced rather than planned. The gift of these days, then, is both in my lack of other plans due to the focused nature of work travel, and the weakness of illness that saps my body of it’s normal activity requirements. For the first time since my last illness I take more than one nap a day and feel no regrets for missing something. For the first time in ages I do not mind what the world is doing, instead content to hold my own body and mind together.

And yet I talk to people. The world is changing, they tell me. “My plane from Delhi to Singapore was full of VC’s heading home,” says a colleague, “All the money in one place all the opportunity in the other.” We live in these small capsules of learning, of shared experience, aggregating our conversations and readings into a world view. “Delhi is a great food city now,” another colleague says. From Chennai I can not say, but there is a sense of an entire section of the world becoming visible. This is my second time in India, both for this job. Neither has given me a deep view, nor covered the kinds of things I would on my own initiative. That is work travel. It breaks us from our patterns, puts us into situations we would never otherwise approach, and shows us people in their normal context, working hard. In most contexts we are all working hard.

I’m grateful for the window into Indian office life, into Singaporean and Indonesian factories. I’m grateful for the time on ferries between countries not my own, on domestic flights in other nations, and on windowsills like this one, looking out at the world.

Even if the cost is high.

A really good moment

Looking out from the Kesei Skyliner on the way into Tokyo at the evening sky

We wave goodbye in front of the station.

They turn right, under the Yamanote line and towards their hotel. We turn left, towards home. We walk slowly, at toddler speed, through streets we know. Past the temple, re-opened at last. Past restaurants and the sento. It’s a perfect fall evening, cold enough to reward jackets yet not cold enough to stop us waiting for our table at dinner outside.

There are only a few nights in life where we feel as though we’ve done everything right. A bit later, looking out from our balcony at Sunshine 60 after my partner has taken the child to the sento, I know that this was one. Like Anthony Bourdain would say about his nights in the back of a truck after a long day filming, great moments are often only clear long after the fact, and one of the great ways to grow is to recognize them sooner.

We spent more than an hour waiting for a table at a kaiten sushi chain near the station. I’ve never waited an hour and a half for a table for anything in my whole life. That’s the first sign everything’s alright. An extra hour and a half with my best friend since 17. An hour plus with his kid and my kid, with his partner and my partner. Time spent talking, with no other requirement, with no other place to be. And then enough sushi to fill all six of us, to satisfy everyone’s desires. The whole way home I thought how good it felt, to have both families just a few blocks apart, to be able to wave goodbye knowing we can get coffee together in the morning.

We showed them our neighborhood. They walked home from the station, everyone full and happy, no place they’d rather be. In a life where we are lucky to have 20 hours, where we are lucky to see each other once a year, this extra couple hours, this long evening and short walks home through Tokyo feels like the luckiest thing.

There’s no more. That’s enough for this life.

In the wind

A container ship pulling into San Francisco bay past Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge

I stand on one of the docks stretching into the harbor in San Francisco and watch the sea lions. Twice I try to take a video of their playful noise, and they, used to this tourist game, go silent immediately. The wind is brisk. All non-runners wear jackets. My companion remarks that San Francisco looks beautiful, and it’s true. Alcatraz is much closer than I remember. That may be because this is not my San Francisco. In the ten years we lived here I ventured to the Marina / North Beach / Chrissy field area no more than a couple dozen times. Over or around the hill, it was a long way to go, and after our friends moved, we had no need, save the climbing gym in the Presidio, which is itself a different world.

On this morning, the clouds hang just low enough to be felt, and just far enough, on the other side of the bay, to have no impact. It’s picturesque in a way I do remember. The air is crisp in a way that feels good for the body.

Later, work complete, I drift down and around Embarcadero, stopping for a coffee briefly. It’s another section of the city I know but don’t own, something visited after work or while playing Pokemon Go all those years back. The ferry building feels nice, in a way more alive and welcoming than I remember.

“Larkspur, to your left, Larkspur, to your left,” calls a woman out front. She’s middle aged and white, which stands out in service workers here. She helps some German tourists who hustle off for their boat. Near the shared bike parking spot a three pedicab riders wait and chat. An interesting job, I think. Good tourist places support such a variety of jobs. In North Beach, near the hotel I’d spent the week at, there are nightly comedy clubs and a variety of performance spaces. SF does still feel full of artists and visitors. After a year of running our work gatherings in the Union Square / Tenderloin area, the fresh air and tourist attractions are calming.

At the Embarcadero, post coffee, I message friends and get back on the e bike. Cheap rental e-bikes are transformative for a city scape, and I drift slowly south and west through streets that grow ever more familiar. Like Shanghai, I am never lost, though, like Shanghai, I sometimes have forgotten specifics. A couple of visits a year for work have kept things fresh despite the six year gap. I wonder, post pandemic, how my memories of Shanghai would hold up. Street grids take a long time to change.

Finally, in the Mission, I meet friends in a place where I still know an owner, in streets where I know which buildings were built when, and remember the turnover in dozens of shops. Some things are newly gone, or changed, but the area feels more alive than it has. These swings, Friday afternoons that turn intense weeks of work into, eventually, Sunday mornings at home in Hong Kong via slow e-bike rides, drinks or meals with old friends, and eventually a car to an airport and a long, bumpy flight, are how I connect our new life to my memories.

It still works, I think, jet lagged in the Hong Kong humidity.

The world still works.

Sometimes that’s enough.