gifts

Music, in physical form

“Tracey’s voice is so lovely,” a friend writes. He’s hearing Amplified Heart for the first time, on vinyl. I’m celebrating the ability to share something with someone. I’m celebrating the ability to truly physically give things, in the way share used to be meant. In the modern world it’s a gift to the sender, the physical goods nearly demanding a response, nearly demanding a listen.

Mentioned a half dozen times on this site already, the nineteen ninety four album remains in my top five records. First given to me in Kawaguchi in two thousand two, in the era of ripping minidiscs of friends’ CD’s, Everything But the Girl’s perfect album has soundtracked much of the intervening twenty years. It’s still something I reach for on waking with space and time, on Saturdays or public holidays. Hearing “Troubled Mind” this morning matched my own brain so well, befuddled after working till two am. I remember that song from nights spent watching the Saikyo line pass from my Yonohonmachi balcony. It was the first train line I’d ever lived near enough to see out the window, and my vision of a “goods train” was built on the sound of that line blended with the coal trains that ran up the shore of Cayuga to the power plant in my youth, on whose path we would flatten pennies.

Two weeks ago we played Joan Armatrading in our tiny Tokyo apartment, the central lyric ringing out through open screens.

“You called all the way from America, and said I’ll soon be home girl.”

The record, well loved, is a gift carried from that country to this, from one home to another. The joy of music in physical form demanding a spin, demanding entrance into the space we share. And the words, long a Saturday morning favorite in our Hong Kong homes, feel both familiar and brand new.

The soundtracks of our lives are intentional, self-created structures of repetition that anchor elements of the people we once were to our current selves. My dozens and dozens of plays of Jai Wolf’s remix of Kiiara’s “Feels” are tied so specifically to the weekend in Shanghai I first discovered it, to the metro out to Waigaoqiao for ultimate, to the type of long commutes made better with obsessions.

And yet our soundtracks are the product too of our friends, of their music overheard or shared. Our soundtracks are built in partnership during relationships, and as a response to them when they end. So often old songs long forgotten become the anchor for something new out of the coincidence of shuffle, the ease of access. Our vinyl collection in Tokyo is a strange reminder of the physical space those songs now occupy, the cardboard box that houses music that can not be listened to in Hong Kong.

Save that it can, and that our dalliance with such items is a way to anchor our listening, rather than necessary to enable it. We are working to build a new world, and that world has specific songs engraved into mornings and evenings, into the family moments and the late night ones. It’s a world of the Sound of Music, an old copy dug out of record bins near Ikebukuro, and a brand new copy of Blue purchased in Shibuya. The afternoons of sunlight on the balcony are built on copies of the Jezabel’s Brink and Star’s Set Yourself On Fire, and the evenings to Massive Attack’s Blue Lines and Burials’ self-titled debut.

Like my friend hearing Disenchanted and 25th of December for the first time in Ann Arbor, our listening is supplemented by what friends have given, from Joan Armatrading to Nirvana and Daft Punk. As we play them all in rotation we remember the friends, their gift and their intention. Some times, building block towers with Clara to tunes I know well but did not bring to this space, I look up, realizing that “Landslide” will always have a new meaning, of tiny magnetile towers tumbling, and say a silent thank you to the visitors who brought us both.

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.

Weekends away

A two story concrete castle play structure in a park in northern Tokyo

On Thursday we slip out, taking calls from the airport mid-day. By dinner we’re in Tokyo, eating sandwiches and milk on the Skyliner, holding on to the grip handles of the Yamanote, and wandering the little streets we know before bed. It’s a good way to start a long weekend. It’s exactly what we were hoping for.

On Friday the ladies visit the aquarium, a day out in the kind of chill rain Hong Kong never gets. It’s 5 C and we’re happy, wearing clothes we’d almost forgotten we owned. Winter feels like a long time ago, in our lives, and 5’s has never really felt one, only a few days on the east coast of the US last year. She says “rain” and “cold” as we wander, both relatively new words.

Mostly we enjoy the kind of simple empty life that is common in new places and rare in our homes. It’s rare to have weekends without schedule, without sports or birthdays, friends or planned gatherings. That’s good, because we live for the groups, for the sports and activities. We are who we share our lives with. Mostly. Other times it’s nice to take the tram to stations we have only seen from mapping apps and to explore new parks without larger ambition. We find castles this way, and a view of train lines. We find swings and slides and so many children. These are the parts of Tokyo we’d hoped to learn, entirely new areas. We have a new way of looking at a city we both love, through the eyes of a toddler searching for rocks, for seeds, and for playgrounds. The kid infrastructure here, like I tell my friend, is amazing, new kinds of play areas, castles with double decker slides.

In the evening we bathe together. The Japanese style shower before tub enables a certain kind of sharing, a certain family style, that’s hard to do otherwise, especially in the cold. Here it feels normal, and the weather makes 5’s clamor for bath a couple hours earlier than normal. It’s the kind of evening I hoped for, no tourist spot or life reason to be in Tokyo, just the quiet reality of being here, of living like this.

Twenty plus years later I still feel more comfortable here than most anywhere.

Later we go to dinner, a local place that caters to groups of young working folk, good food, big drinks, and not very expensive. I love it, the combination makes a perfect spot for our family. 5’s charms groups of ladies and we already know the staff. As we pack up a group of eight middle aged women come in to share a meal, a kind of social gathering that doesn’t feel so rare, here on the north side of Tokyo.

We walk home happy, a quick stop at the grocery store for yogurt and strawberries, and then read books and roll on the floor before bed.

“This is your twenty year old self’s dream,” a friend told me, back in October.

I’m not sure, any more. The twenty years between then and now are hard to see through.

I am happy though, here in Tokyo in twenty twenty four, exploring parks and buying groceries, taking baths and eating out. It’s a good break from the rest of our lives.