In green land

A lake in Wisconsin

We ride through Minnesota and into Wisconsin in the back seat of a rented Jeep. Two of us are comfy and content with our windows down, glad to have made it this far. One of us is unhappy about her car seat, but we’ll all survive. It’s a wonderful place to be, the back seat of this Jeep with nothing to do but ride. The front two seats are occupied by friends we haven’t seen since their own wedding, four years ago. That sentence sounds insane to me, makes me feel like a terrible friend, until I realize the circumstances. There are many people we are meeting again in the summer of twenty three that we haven’t seen since nineteen.

Minnesota gives way to Wisconsin over a river that looks like the kind of place I’d like to explore. This whole slice of country feels comfortable to me, the boy from upstate New York. Green, wet, and full of small towns. Eventually we reach the single stoplight variety, the two lane roads through cornfields that continue straight until they top whatever hill lies on the horizon. It’s a strange two hours, the first time in this area for all five of us, but happy ones. Well, save for the car seated member, who doth protest. It is two hours filled with the kind of intense debrief of friends who haven’t met in four years. Moves, neighborhoods, jobs, and family updates fly thick. And news of friends. For we are all in this car on our way to a wedding, to an island in a lake that will host many we have never met and many we haven’t seen since at least twenty nineteen.

And so for two days we play lawn games and swim off a dock. We chat, dance, drink, and relax. I spend almost the entire weekend barefoot on grass, and 5’s as well. It’s a beautiful place we’d never expected to be, in the middle of the type of summer we no longer live in. That we haven’t for a long time, given Hong Kong’s sweltering nights and San Francisco’s chill evenings before those. It’s the type of summer we both grew up in, that feels both endless and all too brief.

In the car on the way back, with the same friends, we finally talk about the future. Our lives, after four years, feel entwined enough: we have heard the stories, caught up on life changes, and made new memories together. With the foundation stabilized through time, conversation, and activity, we are ready to share our plans, our hopes, and the challenges that come with each. On the two hour drive the topics range from families, aging, housing, children, and the kind of goals that come after a decade or more of employment. These are the topics we have worked to be more open about, during the covid years. To hide less, to share more, and to acknowledge that so often what we’re missing are examples of the kind of lives we hope for. The conversation is excellent, the type of thinking still hard to reach when we have but twenty hours with our good friends.

Weekends like these are so much of the reason we travel. Feeling this way again, full after time in contact with many humans we enjoy, has been too rare. As I dove from the floating barge into the lake, full of energy and truly awake, I was both grateful and filled with a single hope: May the next time not be so far off.

What reverberates

The view from Toranomon Hospital towards Akasaka as the sun sets

Time with people. Even though they will all be dead soon too, even though the world is on fire, even though our lives are transient and brief. What matters is our time together, regardless of circumstance. Financial capabilities matter only in the service of our friendships, of the time we spend together.

This is to say we’ve spent thousands on plane tickets to weddings.

There’s no where else we would be, nothing else we would really want to do anyway. Our highest ambitions are to spend more time in more places with more people. Sometimes, of course, with just each other. Rarely. Usually with someone we met somewhere else, in a third place that itself contains so many good memories. Be it Houston’s bars and the BMX long board rides to them, be it Denver pick ups in Fits, be it knocks on doors in early San Francisco mornings, or be it odd Hong Kong evenings scouting the server’s pants at a local bar.

They’re all the moments we travel for, the moments we save and work and grind and learn and think and grow for. They’re the moments we live in if not for.

All too often now my photos remind me of friends I can no longer call. Of people I can no longer email. Of humans our daughter will never meet.

I can’t say good things about those moments, other than that I am lucky to have met so many people, here or gone, in the country I was born to or in those I no longer live in. In countries I never have. For each of those memories I am lucky, and for all the memories we’ve already made that I am not yet so poignantly attached to. May I not be for quite a while more.

Walking towards Toranomon Hospital from a business hotel in Shimbashi at eight am on a Sunday I am grateful. I am finally certain of release, and that this hospital will be just one more story, one more odd memory. I am grateful to be here, then, in the July sunshine, in Tokyo, in the early morning summer not-yet-heat. I am grateful for my partner, for our daughter, for the friends we saw here, for the friends we missed seeing here. For my roommate, more than twenty years ago now, who came down from Tochigi to go for a long walk with each of us, give us a break from our own worries. I’m grateful for the friends who messaged, who looked after our cat, and who share their own worries.

I’m grateful to be human and alive, for however long it lasts. It’s wonderful to know so many people in so many ways. No matter where we may be.

Here and then gone

Nothing is perfect and everything changes.

On my first father’s day, we walk through Tai Hang to a sushi spot we use for celebrations. There’s a specific kind of place we frequent for our own occasions, those moments we want to mark together as a couple. Most people have one, I think. For moments like promotions, birthdays, anniversaries, and just good days of freedom that require something more than the usual, yet still familiar. For these moments our tastes range to the esoteric, to the nice but not fancy. Since our move to Tai Hang in 2018, No. 13 Sushi Bar has hosted quite a few of these moments. With some quiet back alley seats, welcoming staff, and incredible tuna rolls we’ve spent enough evenings there to know exactly what we want before we sit down, and to have the staff remember our faces. Or we had. No. 13 is gone now. A sign on the door offers only a “lease expired, thanks for the good years” note that’s both cute and unsatisfying. I give a silent thank you to the staff as we turn away.

Wandering elsewhere for food we talk about change. Life, in so many ways, is change1. This first father’s day exemplifies that. Clara’s expressions just shy of a year are so much more than six months prior. People, like the places they construct, change over time, and the new can not come without loss. Fineprint, the coffee shop we used to live upstairs from, replaced something I can’t recall our first few months in the neighborhood, and now feels like a fixture.

Of course some of this change, like the loss of 2nd Draft, I’d undo if I could. We all have points of personal concern, and without everyone’s sacrifice nothing would change. And yet it would, because people age. The families that run the car shops will eventually turn over, sad as it is to consider. The dai pai dong’s too, as they have many times before. Neighborhoods will gentrify and fall into disrepute. Will they become inhospitable, or will they simply become home to a different clientele? In Hong Kong the answer is the latter, new housing displacing old walk ups, new restaurants with marble’d bars displacing old worn wood ones. Many of the new ones will fail, too ambitious, too fancy, too niche. And too few of them will be like No. 13, just expensive enough to have great fish, yet playing Eminem a bit too loudly to attract a truly posh set of patrons. Instead it was us and some other folk who liked loud dinners, a few families celebrating graduations, and the occasional casual business dinners over sake and cigarettes in the alley. I wonder where all those moments will happen now, and how long it will take all those other former customers to known of the closing.

To the staff, then, who took care of us for years as just part of the job, thank you. We’ll miss you.

Despite the inevitability, some changes we do morn.

  1. “All that you touch
    You Change.
    All that you Change
    Changes you.
    The only lasting truth
    is Change.
    Olivia Butler, The Parable of the Sower↩︎

You said something

Looking down at Taipei from the top of Taipei 101

“I think it’s Wednesday, the evening, the mess we’re in-
The city sunset over me-

We spend the weekend in Taipei, on bicycles and in playgrounds, in restaurants and a friend’s home. It’s the kind of quick hop short haul weekend we imagined common on moving back to Asia. It’s the kind of weekend that was common in 2018, when we moved to Hong Kong.

It was also our first time in Taiwan since a frisbee tournament in 2019, and our first time seeing these friends since Tokyo in August of the same year. We celebrate their birthdays, remembering the last time we did so, when they lived in Singapore. The intervening years go unmentioned. They will always go unmentioned, in these conversations. Gaps in our lives filled with bouldering and surfing, with ping pong and big decisions.

The sum of these years has finally arrived. Pandemic babies play together in the play pen, both almost one. I help the older daughter, now six, walk across a high bar at the park, and watch her cartwheel and jump. We race most everywhere we go, on foot and on scooter. Everyone has changed jobs since our last conversations, everyone’s career is in a new phase. Our collective values have changed: the mornings are earlier and the nights likewise, and the restaurants all have high chairs. It’s a phase, and one we are happy to share. Our ability to visit each other while residing in different countries, while all out of the nation of our birth, has been a dream for so long that it feels historical, ancient. At some level the boys who started writing each other letters on paper from China and Japan in 2002 are fully grown, able to say “see you soon maybe in Tokyo” and mean it. In some ways there is always so much more to learn, the people we are woefully incomplete. In some ways the world itself has proven unreliable, and those promises are, we now know, subject to powers mostly invisible. For the next phase we will try to be better partners, better parents, and still our old selves, hard working and athletic, curious and well-read. The conversations reflect these challenges, and discussions of starting consultancies and building a regional client base mingle with conversations about finding pre-schools, about the gift of child care and the pleasure of bike-able neighborhoods. This last is a wonderful gift, something we miss in Hong Kong, and Clara’s first bike rides are happy ones, on Taipei’s bike share and sitting behind one of my oldest friends. Taipei’s combination of density, Mandarin-speakers, and trees gives us a good feeling, and we promise to return soon, to keep making these short loops while we live so near.

At the end of the weekend we say goodbye lightly, having forgotten or chosen not to remember that the last time it was for four years. On the way home we talk about how good it feels, to be out in the world with our daughter, to be able to travel lightly, as we always hoped.

She won’t remember this trip to Taiwan, or probably the next. The lightness of travel, though, and our comfort with it, though, the foundation of a family at home on the go, that we think she’ll remember, one way or another.

Quoted lyrics from PJ Harvey’s ‘This Mess We’re In’, from the 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

Lights go out

From the 27th floor I watch the towers towards Leighton and on the hill above Tai Hang. From this height the city seems organic, a creature all it’s own. Like a good view in any metropolis, zooming out gives a sense of the spectacle possible in big cities, the beauty of the Kowloon skyline and sunsets over the Peak. More often though a good view gives a sense of our place in something bigger, and the patterns common in all our lives. As the light fades the towers in front of me pulse with a slow rhythm. Room lights wink on as their inhabitants come home from work, blink out as those same people move rooms. From this height, from this distance, none of the people are visible, just the shape, the gradual twinkle of a city big enough to have so many apartments in a single view. I imagine bedroom lights turned on, work clothes shed, bedroom lights turned off. Kitchens that fill with cooking, balconies where laundry is reclaimed from the sun’s drying rays. I imagine children home from school, helpers wrapping up their shifts. In some buildings the lights have an automated feel, the elevator lighting each floor as it’s doors set off motion detectors, or a hallway that lights to greet those returning home, switching off to energy once they’ve closed their door.

Watching the city twinkle, my own Hue lights on dim purples and oranges, the Nanoleaf triangles pulsing light blues and pinks, I am at peace. I’ve always dreamed of living with a view like this, of a city so big as to feel organic, a place we could disappear into, inhabitants of one box out of so many. It’s a feeling I love, one of the reasons I adore city pixel animations, the slow pulse of human life with the humans invisible at scale. Watching the container ships pass in the harbor, the whole harbor itself, is similar. So many people living on so many boats, near invisible not just globally but from any view that can take in the boats in number.

Like similar views of Central Park, of Manhattan from Brooklyn, distance brings beauty to the chaos of navigating crowded streets, to the humidity of Hong Kong’s crowded shopping districts or parks on weekends. Finding beauty from an air-conditioned distance is sheer luck. For the first four years here my view was much closer, much more personal, only a few floors up above a busy 7 Eleven. I loved the city then too.

The picturesque pulse, though, exists in a different realm, not just part of my love of density. As PJ Harvey sings, from my memories a lifetime ago in Queens:

“On a rooftop in Brooklyn
At one in the morning
Watching the lights flash
In Manhattan”

Quoted lyrics from PJ Harvey’s ‘You Said Something’, from the 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea