luck

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 I return 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.

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.

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.

Never your mind

An alley near Haneda airport in Tokyo in the morning light.

On a Monday evening I walk twenty minutes from Haneda to a small hotel near the airport. The air is cool and dry, the way cleanly paved, and the passers-by mostly on bicycle until the last few blocks. The sun has set. Most of those similarly walking have just left work. It’s the kind of Tokyo evening that will always feel familiar: the quiet walk to the station, ride home, and quick dinner or groceries in a familiar neighborhood. I have never been to this stretch of Haneda-adjacent Tokyo, but it is not unknown. As per my goal, I’ve spent enough time here to be comfortable.

My mind drifts as I walk, between distant locations. This is expected. I am just off a flight from San Francisco, and only outside tonight because of a missed connection. I think of family in Hong Kong an hour behind, just starting to wrap up the workday. I think of my friend, arrived back in LA after our weekend together in Oakland. And I think of my colleagues, now scattered across the US again after our week together in Walnut Creek. Briefly I consider my friends, now scattered to the US and UK, with whom I would have stayed or eaten with on previous Tokyo stops like this. Last, and only once I find the hotel, do I consider Tokyo, my plans for the evening, what I’d like to do. Part of this is due to the unplanned nature of the visit, the unexpected reality of being in Tokyo at all. Part though is because my mind is scattered, pulled at by the remote nature of my job, of my friends, and of our life. As Yoda said, “All his life has he looked away to the future, the horizon.” I would add the pull is that of the unknown, of the different. That pull is strong.

Combatting that pull is a depth of friendship only possible after twenty five years, that allowed my best friend and I to spend a weekend together on the deepest topics, without pre-amble or a pause to catch up. We did, of course, watch sports and go through the mundane details of our current lives, but mostly we focused on the things we can discuss with no one else, the questions for ourselves that only someone with twenty five years of context can help clarify. It’s valuable time, made all the more so because of it’s rarity. Call it twenty hours.

Moving, really relocating, fractures our lives into segments. There are friends from our home town, friends from university, from our first job, from our first city. Friends from Tokyo, from Shanghai, from Houston, SF, and Hong Kong. There are friends met in places we have never lived, on frisbee fields mostly, but also from jobs. And all of these people, like us, have scattered, have spiraled out until we have friends in Austin, where we’ve only briefly ever been, from five or six different segments of life. Likewise Seattle and Boston. Manila holds not only friends but families of friends, and more connections. Shenzhen, a frequent work stop, holds dozens of former colleagues in long-since failed startups. For work we have been all over Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, making friends and acquaintances. And each of these groups exerts a pull, a sense of comfort and place we could return. Each one makes, in some small way, the next move to the unknown harder.

They make keeping our eyes on where we are require more focus.

And yet I am here, in Tokyo, wandering small streets with a Californian originally from Belarus who I met in the airport. We eventually eat ramen and return to our separate rooms, immaculate and tiny. Watching him navigate the Japanese menus and ticket machines I’m happy. Here is Japan, the voice in my mind says, familiar and unique. How lucky we are to see it again after so long.

For a night, that is enough.