Possible lives

The youth of tomorrow today stepping through the doorway of a shrine in Fukuoka

On the Shinkansen passing through Hiroshima I think about events of twenty plus years ago and possible other lives.

When I was young I never understood the phrases uttered by my elders.

“I haven’t been to Italy since the ’80’s,” they would say, in ’97 or ’04. “Loved it, but I don’t know, it’s probably changed”.

Why hadn’t they been back, I wondered, in ten years? What had kept them away if they loved that earlier trip? Surely I would not make that mistake, surely I would return more frequently to places I love.

I loved our time in Hiroshima, twenty two years ago.

More shocking than the gap, though, is the distance between what I imagined then and now. That trip was to a place neither of us lived, just friends exploring the world. It was the kind of trip I assumed would be common, would be a regular part of life. After all we were young and had already been so many places.

We are older, now, and have been so, so many more places. The lists grow long enough that we forget trips, forget why we were in one city or another. Some of them we’ve even done together: a weekend in Oakland, two years ago now. A long weekend in Colorado, fifteen years ago. Weddings, ours and others.

It’s still too short a list, for a friendship that’s spanned twenty five years. Life happens, of course. That’s what the younger me didn’t know, or couldn’t understand. Life happens, not in the big moments but in the day to day, in the small commitments to sports teams and jobs, to family and fitness. Life happens whether we do or do not.

On this Sunday, passing through Hiroshima at high speed, we are on our way to see another friend, or to see another friend’s family. His daughter is eleven, his widow grown wise in a way we’d prefer not to. They understand, in ways I still don’t, what it means to live in the present. That’s why we are on this train, why they will meet us at the station. So we can spend one evening together, wandering Fukuoka. One evening, after five years, is not long enough. It’s barely enough to hear all that’s happened, to hear the high points of our plans for the future, of her school, of work, of houses and retirement and parents.

One evening is not long enough for me to feel comfortable remembering, to feel comfortable telling stories. Next time, I tell myself.

And thinking of Hiroshima, of that trip with another old friend, now twenty years passed, I resolve: don’t let them wait. Don’t let the next time be so long. Whatever the cost.

“Come to Japan in the fall,” I tell my friend in LA via text the next morning. “We have to make it happen.”

“November,” he says, and my spirits rise.

Seen things

The sky fades at sunset over the harbor in Hong Kong, with TST in the foreground

For two years, we have the kind of view that I will never be able to capture adequately, never be able to share completely. From our vantage point we watch the rain roll in from the north, pour down on distant islands and sweep over Kowloon until it obscures one of the world’s tallest buildings, until it finally pushes across sports fields and the park to crash against our glass-walled box. As the view disappears I feel lucky to be alive.

Looking left, up the hills of Hong Kong island towards the towers of Leighton Hill, Beverly Summit, and Jardine’s Lookout, I play a game, unfocusing my eyes against the mass of towers. I watch windows, elevators, and stairwell lights flick on and off, looking at the patterns rather than the details, creating my own personal pixel art. A few seconds unfocused like this are enough to see two or three lights turn on, or off. It’s beautiful in the way of Star Wars cities, of Bladerunner. The impossible density of Hong Kong made visible due to my height.

From the twenty seventh floor we can see twenty odd tennis courts, eight soccer pitches, three pools, six basketball courts, and two pickle-ball style short courts. Plus a running track, a school quad, the central library, and a half dozen hotels, office towers, and neon signs, all without considering the apartments, without considering the harbor, without considering Kowloon or the distant islands. The view is all encompassing, and the architects took advantage, constructing our entire tower on an angle so as to maximize it, and filling the walls with nothing but glass.

We will probably never have a view like this again. It’s a product of Covid, of us putting our travel budget into our apartment, of lowered rents, and of good jobs. Two years later it feels absurd, like something we should reconsider. We do.

Tonight, though, watching the rain sweep across the harbor, blotting out the neon temporarily, I know I’ll never forget this, and I’ll struggle to describe it. So I try, sitting on the balcony until the rain passes, eyes wide to memorize. And then returning to the table, to write while looking out at the star ferry, at M+ and the rest of TST, at Langham Place all the way out in Mong Kok, and at the towers of Admiralty, just barely visible behind Times Square and Hysan in Causeway.

This is a lucky view. I can see probably 800 hotel rooms scattered among the towers, and the lightning that strikes the tallest one in front of me is four times its height. The cruise ships that pull past in the mornings are huge, and yet temporary against the mountains behind the city, against the peaks of Lantau visible on clear days.

The fireworks, when they happen, are just in front of the yacht club, which I have watched closely with binoculars, looking for boats bearing friends. The fireworks at Disneyland are visible on a clear day, small plumes on the horizon.

The flight path north out of HKG goes straight overhead, high enough to be beautiful rather than a nuisance, and we watch the varied liveries for fun The tram line runs just in front, far enough away to likewise be picturesque but close enough to hear, sometimes, from the balcony. The elevated highway along the water, the new walkway out towards north point, the walk of stars along the TST waterfront, all these things are visible, and beautiful.

It is the kind of view filled with too much to write about, too much to describe. On Saturdays we watch the junk boats pull out from Central, carrying their party crews to bays out around the corners of Hong Kong. At sunset we watch the clouds, the sky, and the water change colors from bright to oranges and pinks, until at last the sun falls behind the mountains and everything fades into purples.

I don’t expect to have this view for long, and I will try to remember how much I’ve seen while sitting here, these past two years.

I’ve seen things, indeed.

Seeking examples

Playing on grass with New York behind

My cousin and I sit at an outdoor bar off of a highway in south Jersey. It’s a decent spot for a July evening. The humidity is much lower than earlier in the week, or than New York last week. The two of us having an hour or two together like this, as adults, is rare, the last time five years or more ago. We’ve covered the general updates on life, kids, and activities earlier in the week, in settings with the rest of the family. This hour is for other topics, for things we like, things we think about when we at last have time to think.

“It’s about examples,” he says, “of picking what to do or not do from all the examples we have. I see my folks, my friends, and just try and say ‘yes this’ and ‘no not that’.”

We are talking about working less, about feeling better. I know what he means, of looking for people to model, or at least bits of people to model. It’s one of my favorite talking points: needing examples more than opportunities, and how bad humans are at coming up with ideas independently.

We talk about people that have shaped us, of families that inspire us, and discuss strategies for keeping our kids grounded while giving them experiences so far outside of our own upbringing. It’s wonderful, the kind of unexpected conversation that makes our swings through the US both rewarding and overwhelming.

“They’re living my dream, at least for a while,” he says of his kids. “Eventually they’ll go live their own.”

Eight months prior I walked around Austin Community College’s campus in a light rain and thought about examples much the same. We were again bouncing around the US, from a wedding to family to friends. As I wrote a while back, we spend our time in the US with people now, ever more focused on each conversation. We have no time to spare on these trips, brief attempts to capture so much of our prior lives. We take fewer photos, respond to fewer emails, read less, watch nothing. Our decisions, our attempts to be present, are built on our appreciation for the people we see. It’s an appreciation made sharper by distance.

In Austin I was filled with the echoes of the day before’s conversations, of all of the moments since flying in from Hong Kong the weekend prior. These moments, with time, have distilled into memories, into parts of the people we love. On that walk though they were simply a mishmash of things I’d heard, things I’d said, people I’d met or re-met.

So many of them were examples, or reminders of such. And so I was thinking about the parts of people that shape us, where we find them, and whether we are paying enough attention in the moment to recognize them when we do.

For us lucky few born without risk of starvation, with the opportunity to both study for and finance an education, and the freedom to select our own path, our need is for examples. For ideas on what to do with this life, what to do with our opportunities.

So often I hear of children following in their parents footsteps, in their hometown industries, in their family businesses. I hear these stories not because of the company I keep but because it is the world. A study, some years ago, said that the average American lives 17 miles from their mother. Distance, clearly, does correspond to life choices, or to a career. It does serve as a proxy for the variety of examples. Growing up in a small town on the east coast I didn’t meet anyone from Seattle until college, let alone from China, from Florida, or from Texas. These places were not inaccessible to me, I had family in California and college educated parents. Nor were distant places utterly unknown: we hosted exchange students and made friends with visitors from other countries. Yet much of the world remained foreign because of my personal sphere of activity. My view of what was possible was limited to my immediate examples, my peers: people who’d left home to be an electrician, who’d lived in Massachusetts and worked at theater festivals. Of those who had gone to college, moved to New York, and studied art. Of those who’d gone to college in my home town, or spent summers at home, and were still seeking other options.

In my teens my examples constrained what I thought possible. Going to college changed me. And yet, in my twenties, I struggled to come up with careers that would occupy me, that would take advantage of my abilities. I still had poor examples, even after two years in Tokyo. Even after the first two in Shanghai I still knew but a few people living the kind of life I thought by then might be possible.

I met them, eventually, in Shanghai and all over. Or I realized the parts of people I was already relying on. In some ways this is how I learned to talk to everyone, every where we go. Not because they might become good friends, which puts a pressure of expectations on the conversations, but because they might have new stories. Each new face might provide mental fodder for my internal option list. All new people have almost certainly done something I’ve never considered.

Driving to the airport at the end of our July hustle across the US, I think of my cousin, and how lucky that evening was. I think of all the people we know in the US now, the people we see on these hectic swings. They are all good examples. I wonder if that defines our friendships now, in some way. The people we spend hours traveling to see, the people who host us on short notice, who pick us up at airports, all are examples in some way. They have spent years traveling, or lived abroad. They have children and high pressure jobs, or complicated responsibilities. They make art, or music, or food, or hardware, or play competitive sports. They are our families, our high school friends, college friends, or ultimate friends. They are past colleagues, Houston friends, San Francisco friends, Shanghai friends, Tokyo friends, or Hong Kong friends. They are our people, scattered across the globe and seen but briefly, if at all, each year.

It’s wonderful, now, in my forties, to realize how many examples we have. It’s wonderful to hear that my friends are likewise seeking them, and hopefully to be an example as well, in odd ways.

Landing

Looking south along Lower Cheung Sha beach on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, in the early afternoon of a warm February day, with a surfer walking along the water’s edge

I return from Singapore on Friday morning slightly sick, the last of our family to pass through this particular wave. The two early-morning late-night days on the road did not help, though they were useful in other ways.

My phone, reactivated, brings good news: partner and friends are at the beach on the other side of Lantau, celebrating a friend’s birthday. Come take your afternoon calls from the beach, they say.

In the arrival area I get coffee and am surprised by two other friends. They are just back from skiing in Korea, and still on holiday, only laying over here at home. They are headed to Thailand to meet a parent on vacation for the weekend. Chance encounters like these remind me of the number of friends we’ve made in Hong Kong, and how every one is on the go. It’s a good feeling, being part of this region, of Asia, of Southeast Asia, where everyone is back and forth constantly. Another Hong Kong friend is in Thailand this weekend, I say, for a frisbee tournament. They know, more than one actually. It is a coincidence of timing, of our collective pace.

Hong Kong’s airport is on the far side of Lantau, and normally I take the train back to Central, to my own island, and am home in an hour after landing. It’s a ride I know well, and have loved since long before we relocated. Today though I walk out into the cool humidity of the taxi stand and hunt the line of blue ones specific to this island. Red for urban areas, green for the New Territories, and blue for Lantau. Hong Kong’s system seemed weird, years ago. Now it’s just home, familiar. As the taxi grinds its way up the tall pass, over some of the highest parts of Hong Kong, I think about how lucky this is, to know the beach I’m going to well, to have spent so many afternoons there when the world was closed. We got a lot out of exploring Hong Kong, despite the sacrifices that left us with no where else to go. And now, with everyone bouncing around again we are able to do both, to bring people to the beach and see friends in foreign countries. It’s a good life.

After my calls, we walk along the sand together, looking up at the mountain. It’s top is shrouded in clouds, facing the sea. It’s wonderful to breathe the salt air, to rest a bit, and to heal. It’s wonderful to be able to celebrate the friends we love with little planning.

The joys we treasure

A view of the cherry blossoms draped over the edges of the the Meguro river in Tokyo

I stand on the balcony and watch the cherry blossoms. The world is beautiful and oddly calm. My partner is correct in her explanation: “everyone is in a park getting drunk because of sakura”. The weather is perfect, just barely chill, and restaurants are indeed empty for a Saturday night. We are happy. Having simply bought cheap tickets we lucked into both friends from out of town (Nagoya, Taipei) and sakura in Tokyo. This is exactly the kind of luck we’d hoped to manufacture for ourselves, and our smiles to each other, when 5’s is momentarily doing something on her own, reflect our inner joy at this success.

As I write often, we are working hard to remember who we meant to be, and to allow ourselves the individual space to bring joy back to our family. It’s a good practice that takes work. More regularly now we go on trips solo, for work or out of curiosity. We come back refreshed, more interested in our shared reality, more aware of the brevity and luck in our shared existence.

The next day we too are in the park, four and then five adults keeping tabs on three children. They collect acorns and wander between families on tarps, waving at other children. The oldest does the two story slide, but the younger two are afraid and beg off, eventually being carried down the climbing walls that serve as castle entrances. Every slide has a line of four or six polite children, the local style our foreign kids have to be told to notice. They simply cut straight to the front, not seeing the quietly perturbed children waiting patiently to the side. We remind them and they adapt, for our children are children of Asia, the three of them born in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. We are the diaspora, this group of us in this park in Tokyo for hanami. We are all seeking refuge from the collapse of the American empire. The friend without children explains it as clearly as I’ve ever heard:

“It’s like I died and this is a new life, so different from my old and yet so much the same. Here, all my worries are gone.”

My partner and I will talk about this feeling all the way home. In some way it is what I’ve been trying to explain to myself since I was eighteen, or more accurately since I moved abroad at twenty two.

What my friend means, I think, is that if everyone is ok everyone can have less fear, because no one has to take from someone else. By raising the floor for us all, by providing parks and bathrooms and trains and housing and food, we remove the need to threaten, to scare, to rush, to honk, to run over, to crash into, to fight, to flip off. We suddenly have so many fewer enemies.

“it’s ok to be anyone here, to be whomever you want, as long as you’re not hurting anyone else it’s ok,” my friend says.

He’s right. Why is that such a rare feeling? Why did we not feel like that in SF, where we each lived for at least a decade? I can’t quite be sure, though I have a host of ideas. Usually I start with bathrooms, with trains, and with the selfish individuality of car culture.

On this day though I just listen to him. I lie back on the cardboard we’ve spread on the dirt and watch the kids run. I watch my other friends, in town from Taipei, enjoy Tokyo, enjoy their vacation. I watch our daughter follow the big girl around collecting acorns. I watch the sakura, so grateful to be here for this week. I watch the other people, likewise sprawled on tarps or blankets on the dirt, likewise chatting with friends and likewise happy to be out doors in the spring, at home in Tokyo for one of the best moments of the year.

There are so many reasons why we feel good here.

Sometimes it’s enough to feel.