In an alley

A worker sitting at rest in front of a small table with two orchids, in an alley

Across a small street from the trash collection point in Tai Hang, the workers rest in an alley. It’s their break room. They eat lunches there, sometimes shucking their fluorescent yellow vests for a few moments. Underneath the one small tree, they have water, sit on the curb, or listen to music. These folk, whose job is to collect trash from around the neighborhood and bring it, by cart, to this collection point, are critical to Tai Hang’s survival. These men and women serve as the intermediary between the towers full of apartments and the truck that picks up rubbish from the collection point every day or two. This is Hong Kong’s system, replicated all over the city. It allows for smaller streets, denser buildings, and neighborhood collection points. Many of the collection points, like this one in Tai Hang, also have public bathrooms. Well cleaned and maintained, these bathrooms are frequented by locals, tourists, and taxi drivers. In this one, one of two in the tiny Tai Hang neighborhood, the walls are tiled with mosaics. The men’s side with shades of red, the women’s with shades of blue, mirroring the colored signs. Everyone who’s ever visited us, after using them, has commented on how nice they are, and how they wish wherever they are visiting from had public bathrooms like these.

In the alley, on a weekday morning, I often use this bathroom. After four hours of zoom calls I’m confused and a bit tired, and head out of the house to get noodles on a stool in one of these alleys. I often eat at ten or eleven, in time with many of the taxi drivers and the fruit stand staff, folk who work early mornings and then have a mid-morning lull, like myself though unlike. In these off hours, when there are non of the weekend’s lines, we frequent Tai Hang’s famous cha chaan tengs, enjoying the milk tea that will draw crowds on a Sunday. These weekday mornings are part of my love for this neighborhood, part of why I know so many faces, and they me. Sitting in the shade of an awning, on a small stool, we smile and nod at each other over noodles and coffee. It’s a good life, in the alleys.

And so it is that walking back from bathroom to noodle stand on a Tuesday, I pass the trash collector’s break spot, and see one of the men sitting, having tea from a thermos at a small desk they’ve scavenged from the trash pile. The alley has a couple of items like this, office chairs or small shelves, re-possessed by this team for their bags and belongings, for their lunches and rests. The man is facing the wall, relaxing in a posture that speaks to burdens carried. In front of him, on a chair, is a round white clock, five past eleven. And in front of him, carefully held in tiny pots, are two white orchids, their stems crossed as they lean.

In the small shade of this alley, next to his trash cart and surrounded by a few chairs, someone’s laundry, and the miscellanea of discarded life, his table is a moment of peace that I’m glad to see.

Looking at us

The view from Hong Kong island across Victoria Park to Kowloon as the sun sets.

Standing on the balcony I can see so many of us. Two teams play rugby on the pitch near the library. Next to the field a group does sprints on the 100 meter track. Around them dozens of joggers do slow loops. Across a wall and worlds away six tennis courts are filled with lessons. Behind those another ten are busy with private matches at their club. Behind those in the dark two boys play basketball in the schoolyard.

Across the street the park glistens, soccer courts and basketball courts and walking paths busy. Beyond that the Barbour is full of motion. The pilot boats head in and out to cargo ships on the horizon. The ferries troll back and forth. In between the elevated highway carries busses, taxis and cars, the former two outnumbering the latter. On King’s Road, closer in, the tram trundles in their midst. All these forms of transportation and the occasional airplane overhead.

As the evening settles on the harbor the neon comes on. I think of how many words like that are no longer accurate. Filming. Neon. An album as a disc. Ideas created by technologies that have been themselves turned over. In Hong Kong, where individual bulbs blink, creating the image of rain trickling down the ICC, so many of us live in the intersection of technology and reality. The tram’s rough hum, a sound immediately discernible amid the combustion engines and sports sounds, is of another era. The lit scoreboard in Victoria Park’s central court for a tennis game likewise, not of a different era but of a unique priority compared to the dozens of public courts visible around it, the concrete soccer fields, the basketball courts packed with recreational players. Likewise the Chinese Recreation Club’s fancy pools speak to a priority of wealth, when across the street a huge public pool occupies a chunk of Victoria Park.

I can see so many of us. The Pullman, in Causeway Bay along the park, is almost full. On Saturday I think it was, or close. A shock to see so many of the rectangles lit after years of the pandemic when the building was mostly dark. A shock to realize in that earlier surprise how comfortable I’d become with no tourists, without people in hotels, without travel. How awkward, in some way, it feels to have everything busy, to have Mandarin dominate Tai Hang’s coffee shops on the weekends instead of Cantonese or Australian, French or Singapore’s more British English.

I look at the office towers, still mostly lit, and the dozens of apartment buildings, where lights flicker on every minute as someone returns home, and am glad. So many boxes for humans. There’s both no space, and so many options. A paradox of density and the need for more, driven by the kind of services, the kind of life, available when so many of us are in sight.

Through America

SF bay from above with container ships in motion

On the back end of a good set of days I look at the Pacific from the wrong side and breathe. The air is clean here, a bit north of Los Angeles proper, still connected to its urban sphere. The airport we’ll head home from on this loop is just visible in the distance, a string of planes approaching. The weather, wet for southern California, feels welcoming. After a week on the east coast I am comfortable again in this country, operating by car and with poor cell signal.

Visiting America is an emotional journey. We have to prepare, to set aside the way things could work for the way things do work. We set aside walking to restaurants and to work, set aside trains from the airports and clean public bathrooms. In exchange we are hosted by friends we miss dearly in houses with kitchens nicer than any we’ve ever inhabited. Their children are larger, are two, four, five, eight almost nine. We watch these small people grow in leaps between visits, thrilled each time at their new abilities. So too will they be soon by YT, I realize.

Visiting America is a mishmash of meeting friends for dinner, meeting colleagues in co-working spaces, meeting potential customers in unfamiliar offices, meeting family in houses from our childhood. It’s a mishmash of memories and new experiences. On an e-bike one morning I swing by Four Barrel, my favorite SF coffee shop. For years it was two blocks from home. In line I find some fellow ultimate players and say hello, that it’s been too long. San Francisco is a city dense with our history, and I’m happy to revisit it, even momentarily. Yet half the time there is utterly new, meeting colleagues in buildings I’ve never seen before to work on companies that didn’t exist when I lived here. The variation is confusing, often within half an hour, from debating a hiring plan in a hotel conference room to biking to my host’s house on streets I’ve ridden dozens of times.

In many ways America is peaceful now, for us. We come on vacation, or half-work half-play, lingering a bit to see old friends. We re-kindle our commonalities with twenty odd hours of chat, of intense sharing. We go to the batting cages, to gyms, to bars and restaurants, for long walks, and to ultimate tournaments. We laugh, and we check in on our memories. It’s a good break from the stress of our lives, even if it brings stress of a different kind.

Places I slept, 2022

View from the shore of Lake Biwa looking north east

In retrospect 2022 was the hardest year. The best summary is that it ends much better than it began.

Hong Kong spent the first half of the year in the kind of pointlessly strict lockdowns we’d thought finished. Despite having the highest death rate per capita, proving the futility, the government kept the economy and borders largely shut until April. It was a hard time to be once again unemployed. The optimism that had risen with vaccines and the prior year’s travel faded as we were ever more cut off from the world’s re-opening.

The spring did offer a few specific joys, highlighted by Tara’s success at work and my own ability to freelance for US companies. Being able to recommend and hire friends and former colleagues in China has been a wonderful side effect of the closed borders.

The pandemic ended suddenly for me in April, on boarding a flight to Ireland for a new job. Getting paid once again to go to new countries and learn proved that the world I missed so much was not truly dead. Until it happened, I hadn’t realized how doubtful I’d been. Kinsale was beautiful, and Dublin likewise. Meeting new colleagues in the US afterwards was a pleasure. Being able to see my folks in Ithaca and friends in Brooklyn on the layover from Ireland to SF was exactly the kind of gift that used to be so commonplace. I’d forgotten how good that kind of surprise opportunity felt.

Most importantly, I made it back and then through quarantine (1 week) and Covid (caught in Hong Kong despite the quarantine) before Tara gave birth. Clara is healthy and napping as I write this. It’s cliche to say she’s changed our lives, and yet.

After eight months of struggling with our plan for the future, in September we resolved to stay in Hong Kong and live like we wanted the world to be. We moved (one block) and went to Thailand in the three weeks before Tara’s maternity leave ended. It was wonderful, both walking on the beach in a foreign country and having Hanna join us from Colorado. We may have eaten breakfast at the same well-loved French cafe in Bangkok every day of our visit. Seeing that places we miss had survived the pandemic was a truly wonderful feeling. And Hong Kong, in what would prove to be a turning point, dropped inbound quarantine while we were on the road. Clara has never done a hotel quarantine. I hope I can say the same for her next year.

After Tara’s promotion and the ensuing grind of October, made more difficult by my work trip to the Bay Area, we needed another vacation. Japan, finally re-opened, was a perfect finale to our year. We saw old friends and new while doing plenty of wandering with a baby attached. Clara loved the onsen and tatami floors, so now she has her own. Tatami, not an onsen. Feeling comfortable on the road these last two trips has reminded us of who we used to be, and still are: people who aim to be comfortable anywhere. They also made keeping this list again a pleasure.

The places below then are a mishmash of memories, some hard, some joyful. Spending a weekend in Oakland with Kevin was a wonderful gift, as were the two visits, not reflected, by Tara’s folks to Hong Kong.

As always, here’s to the next year. May we be less scared to try and may our bravery be rewarded.

Tai Hang, HK
Central, HK (staycation)
Kinsale, Ireland
Brooklyn, NY
Ithaca, NY
SF, CA (three spots, one twice)
Oakland, CA
Tsim Sha Tsui, HK (quarantine)
Lumphini, Bangkok, Thailand
Ao Nang, Krabi, Thailand
Walnut Creek, CA
Oakland, CA
Haneda, Tokyo, Japan
Osaka, Japan
Nagoya, Japan
Gero, Japan
Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan (two spots)

Prior lists visible here.

With new eyes wide

A view of Hong Kong island as the sun sets, with orange and blues streaked together over the peak.

In the last light of one of the year’s last days, we lie on her futon and stare at the peaks of Hong Kong Island. They are capped in pinks and golds, wreathed by the light of the sun that has itself sunk from sight. It’s a beautiful view, one of the world’s best, as far as cities go. The lights are coming on across the city, and the sky up top is starting to settle into the truly dark blue of space. The air, blown back in from the ocean all day, is soupy, the petrochemical mass perfect for refraction. Like LA, sometimes Hong Kong has the most beautiful smog-driven sunsets.

For five whole minutes she lies on top of me utterly still. On my back, my view is of the sky down to the building tops. Her weight, held upright by my right arm, is scant enough that I do not grow stiff. Her view is perpendicular to the ground, facing the island. She can not see the scrolling lights of the ICC. It’s not dark enough for them to dominate the skyline anyway. The purples slowly drip down into the golds, until the hilltops are ringed mostly in a deep rose. It’s subtle, the matter of a few minutes. Perfect for a post-nap six-month-old’s attention span. I’ve never held her this still and not asleep.

I watch the shadows of the hills against the skyline, reflected in her eyes. It’s a strange feeling, seeing someone so clearly a blend of our families take shape. The square jaw and face shape is so familiar; I’ve been waking beside it for fifteen years.

Her room smells perfect. It smells like vacation, and memory. The tatami is brand new, and the scent of fresh straw permeates everything. The room smells like our onsen in Gero. It smells like the hotel in Osaka where she laughed and rolled for hours. On top of the tatami, the single futon folds perfectly in thirds exactly as mine did twenty years ago in Saitama. Though a single, it is big enough for two or three of us, at least for a while yet. I’m still trying to introduce the cat to it. He loves the one in our room, which is thicker, a solid mass of cotton. This one, softer and more malleable, will take him time. Or maybe that’s the occupant, who he’s fascinated by and annoyed with in alternating measures.

Either way, lying here in the afternoon light looking out over the harbor and peaks feels like a new phase. She has her own room with it’s own scents and objects, a new person and a new story being written. At the end of the year, that’s the biggest change, the thing I’ll remember most.