Tradition

The sun sets over Hong Kong

I think we should do socks full of fruit

Her idea is better than any I’ve had, and she prepares, and we do. It’s 5’s second Christmas, too early still for memory, we expect. And yet let’s be too early rather than too late, rather than caught with no traditions of our tiny family.

I think we should talk about what habits we want to make rituals,” reads the email from May. Cooking, exercise, packing and maintenance, are at least some of the answers. Trying new things. Being excited about what’s next. With these conversations, done without urgency over the course of nap times, evenings, and long walks, we are trying to shape the family we become. We are trying to discover, like sculptors, what exists within the form of our relationship already, and bring it forth intentionally into the world. The topic resurfaces in late night chats with friends, in their neighborhoods or our own, and occasionally in third cities that belong to none of us. What is important, what family traditions they have, what they mean when they say the normal American way,” and what, above all else, we hold dear.

In these conversations I so often find myself suddenly, half way through, in someone else’s words or in my own. As with writing, clarity comes from bringing ideas into reality through words. And thus I discover a part of our family that should have been obvious, that is all around us. We value words, and descriptions, and jokes, and shared language. On mornings without work or other expectations 5’s and I walk the block and a half to the coffee store” together. She’s started to help carry the coffee mug, at least until she stops and says up”, uninterested in walking any further on her own. I oblige, grateful for these quiet moments, for the small ritual of this walk and the language that describes it. I’m sure these traditions, like many others, won’t survive forever. Thus writing, and posts like this, to trap them in some transmissible form, for my own memory as much as any others.

And so as she asks for more longan on Christmas morning, having eaten all that came in her own stocking while sitting in a pile of rambutans and tangerines, of tamarinds and apricots that will be eaten once the longan are no more, I lean back and appreciate. I appreciate the more hand sign, the Op!” that means open and follows more as a request to peal the things she can not yet. There are but scant days in all our lives, and it’s better to have put out milk and cookies for the as-yet-unnamed spirits of our family’s holiday already, to have made it a tradition now, so that next year we are prepared, wherever we may be. I look to the friends, here sleeping on our lightly-padded floor to share the holiday, and acknowledge their sacrifice, their priorities. They want to spend holidays abroad, and with old friends. These are priorities we share, having spent the prior holiday on the East Coast, and crashed friend’s New York apartments shortly after.

May we all be able to maintain these traditions, then, of spirits and fruit, of hosting and visiting, of talking and thinking and sharing, for as long as we are able.

Walking thoughts

I walk a mile in the sun near New Braunfels, Texas. It’s not a place I ever expected to be, and so I walk eyes open, taking in the yard signs, the state of things. It’s new country, in some ways. Or I’m new to it. Both can be true. Texas has changed a lot since I lived here in two thousand eight. The world has changed a lot. This man-made lake and the homes along side it probably mostly didn’t exist, or not at the scale they do now. The idea of second homes, of retirement spots, of escapes, took on new meaning in the last few years. Everyone staying in this second home has a second home. Everyone staying here is working, or available to work.

The earlier sentence is one of the most true statements I can make. This is not a place I ever expected to be. True for so much of my life. True for Batam, Indonesia, last week. True for Pune, India, earlier this month. True now and true of our brief stopover in Anchorage, Alaska on Sunday, courtesy of a medical flight diversion. Not that I have a list of places I expect to be, not that I am acting with a plan, but that some excursions come truly out of nowhere, some locations do not fit the narrative.

A hawk sits in a tree fifteen feet from the balcony watching us while we have coffee. Geese fight on the neighbor’s lawn and their kitten comes to visit our daughter, to rub on our furniture and explore new people. We watch the water, we watch 5’s ramble, and we relax. It’s a good break, even punctuated by work calls. We are lucky to have this time, before the weekend’s wedding that is our reason for travel, to be together with family from all over, and to share more stories than one afternoon would hold.

Between Batam and the world

Looking over a Batam street food center at night

For four days I wake to the sun in a hotel in Batam, Indonesia, and put on music. Burial and Sofia Kourtesis soundtrack the sunrise as I stretch, shower, and head downstairs for coffee.

I am back in the world, visiting factories in towns I’d never otherwise have known about. I’m back to getting flown places to learn, to teach, to do. And I am comfortable.

The days are spent in a windowless room. Twenty odd people gather each morning, some familar with this building, some on their first time in this country. We work on a project that will not be finished in this visit, that will take a year. We work as part of a larger vision, one node in a network spanning the globe, spanning my time in Pune last month and San Francisco in June. We work.

In the evenings, after dinner and a team debrief, we have beer on plastic chairs in the open air, surrounded by people doing likewise. We are in the world, in a place. Food stalls surround the tables, sellers push alcohol and spicy snacks, push bread rice noodles. The clientele is local, is at home in Batam but not only from Batam. Chinese, Malay, Muslim, Singaporean, Indian, the occasional westerner. This is the world, and we are in it, diverse noisy welcoming and, for me, comfortable. I am at home, and after a beer I leave the table, walking the surrounding streets, stopping in to check on street stalls and small malls, convenience stores and restaurants. On these walks, intended mostly to provide motion to a body that has sat for far too many hours, I think about this comfort.

Twice I bring colleagues, only to have to stop and wait for them on the far side of a street crossing. Without realizing it I’ve left them on the curb, stepping out into the traffic with no pause. Just walk across without thinking,” I say. Just step off the curb and keep going.”

I think back to wandering Saitama suburbs at 22, biking around Shanghai at 24, standing on the side of a highway trying to flag down a long distance bus in Changzhou at midnight at 26, crashing a scooter in Shanghai at 27, crashing a motorcycle in Laos at 36, and the comfort, the difference, is no longer as surprising. In some way this traffic, these Indonesian food stalls and dusty roads that I have never seen before are home. In some way, in my mid forties, I am comfortable in many places, if not most. I am happy, out in the world with no ambition save my work goals, no need save my flight home.

We get McFlurries, on our last night, from a McDonalds in a mall basement. My colleague is disappointed that the experience isn’t more local, despite the crowd of people around us eating the same thing. We are the only westerners getting ice cream at 10 pm at McDonalds in the basement of this Batam shopping center. Stepping back out into the heat with the cup half full, I am happy in a way that feels hard to share. My colleague surprises me.

I like it here,” he says. I feel alive.”

And like that, there the words are. After all day on a computer, after all week in a windowless room, after giving up all of the things I would have done with my own time for these shared days and evenings, we are alive here, wandering in the dark of a place we never meant to go.

May it ever be so.

Fall ahead

Ships idling offshore between Singapore and Batam, Indonesia

Finally the pace feels true. After a few years of being unrecognizable, we are again in motion to a degree unfathomable with quarantines, with flight bans. Hong Kong is again a home base that features the world’s best airport train, rather than a home base of remote islands.

In two months we will see Japan twice, much of the US, and I will spend days in India, spend two separate layover nights in Singapore, and a week in Indonesia. And we will train hard for a frisbee team on week nights, lucky to have child care.

It feels as though we are again becoming who we ought to be. There are bumps, there are painful days, hard mornings and evenings. And still with every new opportunity there are moments where I’m shocked at how far we’ve come.

Mostly I am grateful, that 5’s is healthy, that we’re able to play frisbee, that we have help to enable our motion, help to enable our breakfasts together under awnings in Tai Hang’s alleys. It’s a rare gift, to frequently have breakfast together out of the house, while our daughter plays with friends under someone else’s care. Even if breakfast means elevensies after three or four hours on zoom.

We reach out from those folding tables to friends across the world. We check in with those in Japan looking for work, those in South Africa running clinics, those in New York likewise raising children. We message family and colleagues, friends in Australia and friends in Taiwan. It’s a pleasure, to think about all these people, to have the time and mental energy to connect in so many directions. We are lucky.

We are trying. In all directions, at an intense pace. We are making up for lost time, even though we know that time is gone and will never be returned to us. So we are pushing in all directions at once, on our professional lives, on our family, on our physical abilities, on our friendships. We are trying to learn languages, to learn handstands, to learn bouldering, to captain teams, to build communities. We are trying to learn industries, build platforms, implement software, and source hardware. We are trying to take time to watch the sky, to watch the harbor, and to appreciate how lucky we are to be here at all.

It’s a lot. Fall should always feel like this. It’s so nice to be back.

Walking borders once again

A view of Shenzhen from years back

After a few quiet years we are again walking borders, starting with the one closest to home. The high speed train between Hong Kong and the rest of China, which had only opened shortly prior, was stopped for most of the pandemic. Hong Kong’s gradual return as a transit hub has been well-documented and slow. For us, the last border restriction dropped when China once again began honoring visas issued before 2020. After three years, our visas worked and our jobs could send us across the border to the north.

With Wechat pay, electronic train tickets, passport scans, health declarations, and yes, those stupid paper forms, we once more made our way to a place both more foreign and more comfortable. Foreign, in that it’s been years since our last visit. Comfortable because we’ve spent years on that side of the border, and we’re glad to be able to speak Mandarin once more.

It’s easy, to walk borders, with the right passports, with the right reasons. It’s easy also to forget how impermeable these man-made barriers can be. I hope to forget. I hope that walking the border to Shenzhen once again becomes so commonplace that I need more passport pages, that I no longer recall which trip was which. I suspect it will take a while. Partially because our jobs, both gained in the pandemic, don’t require that kind of back and forth. How could they? Partially, though, because our minds are not yet ready for it, not yet quite returned to who we used to be.

No surprise, this. Healing takes a long time. Half as long as the injury, say some. A couple of years.

We travel now almost as much as before.

And yet we are not the same. We move, but each move is greeted with a sigh of surprise when complete, rather than the expectation that this is how things work. We do not yet take the motion for granted. I guess we will, one day. Eventually, we will no longer be shocked to be out and about in the world. I hope.

Eventually.

For now, though, I am happy, walking the Futian high speed rail station, having coffee, checking out bike share programs. I’m happy to have meetings, to be offered Chang soda water instead of Watsons. Costa coffee bottles instead of Nescafe. There has been a lot of change here, in Shenzhen, I think. There’s been a lot of change everywhere. Who did we used to be?