Before what

The kind of window view I always cherish

I try to always live in the before.

Before whatever terrible event will cut this short. Before our future. Before we stop being able to fly to frisbee tournaments in different countries. Before we need masks. Before we needed visas. Before we were so injured. Before our bodies hurt. Before we were afraid.

So much of whatever superpower I have comes from living in a very brief window between that wonderful day that lives strong in our memories and right now holding on tight to this branch that’s holding us up. It’s the way I scale ledges that will not hold me again, the way I survived a decade of building climbing (buildering, they say now I hear). Mostly survived. Mostly survived. It’s the way I handle traffic, stepping out into it without fear, and the way I have managed to continue.

Parenting is a series of encounters with our own mortality. Between our inevitable physical decline, offset for however long by strong routines, by gym afternoons, by “active lifestyles”, and the clear, clear sense that whatever we do or live for will matter less than we hope to the generations after us, to the generations we are so invested in building.

These aren’t new revelations, and the decline in written correspondence, internet or otherwise, by friends who have children is incredibly clear. Not only do we have less time for thinking, less quiet hours to craft words around our experiences, but we are also so much more aware of the limited importance of our unique point of view, of the experiences that have shaped the self we are now trying to improve. For parenting is a series of attempts to improve ourselves, to be the parents, the people, we aspire to be before our children are old enough to know the truth.

We are learning Japanese, reading children’s books before bed in a language we can barely read. It’s a silly goal, yet it is a goal, it is who we are. It’s who we want to be. And just like that, like our bike adventures this afternoon, across half of northern Tokyo, so much is clear.

We are desperately trying to live, now. While we are able, physically mentally and emotionally. While we are able to, between work trips and zoom calls. While we are able to, after we have been given exceptional opportunities and before we are too jaded to value them. Before we are too jaded to value them. It’s not an easy thing to write. None of this is easy to write. That’s why we share less. We are less sure.

And so I look back to the decades of buildering, to the freedom I feel when holding on to something secure, hanging off the side of our apartment block in Tokyo, checking out a pipe leak. Few people feel that free, even today. And fewer still have the scars, some sharply visible some faded with time, of all the times whatever it was didn’t hold.

We’re getting older, here, teaching our daughter about e-bikes and metro systems, about weather patterns and friend networks. We’re teaching her things we’d never seen, in places we’d never imagined. We’re still learning, all of us, in this before.

I’m grateful. That’s the truth. For every single minute, here now or after.

Practice season

A view of a frisbee field in Bangkok as the sun sets

For much of the past three decades I’ve traveled to chase plastic on grass. More recently on beaches as well, as the sand requires no cleats, which means packing lighter. The frisbee teams we were part of define so much of our memories, both individually and as a couple. Are part of, I should say, as it is the season, and we are out there, sometimes with company. Like all things as parents, practice is at a different priority level, and though we see the field most weekends, we aren’t as reliable as years past.

For a weekend, though, we are back. I land in Bangkok at eight am, fresh off a red eye. Tara’s been in town since the night before, staying with the team in a giant Airbnb. Bangkok’s customs have been improved, and I’m in a Grab on the way to the fields within 25 minutes of landing, only missing some of the first game. For a few hours we don’t think of much else save our abilities, our team, and the effort we can give. It’s muddy, and standing barefoot on the sidelines after the last game, feeling my heart rate come back to normal, I am happy. We are alive, out here in the world. Different, for sure, but still able to run. The end of games Saturday has long been one of my favorite times.

The next day our legs are sore, our bodies surprised but resilient. We wake not to the ruckus of Classy but to the smell of a new teammate cooking. Plus we have a bed. It’s a good change, something our older bodies appreciate. I often tell teammates in Hong Kong they have no idea how many hotel floors we’ve slept on, and I am glad. It’s not a hardship I consider important to growing up with this game. Fewer hotel floors would be good for everyone.

And at the end of the day Sunday, well and truly tired, I once again stand on the grass barefoot. It’s a weird sensation, to be out here again, just two of us instead of three. It won’t be that common. More likely, like Malaysia or Bangkok last year, like dozens of weekends, we’ll spend the evening as a family after running hard. For this weekend, though, I’m happy to have a moment without responsibility. Our games done, we watch the finals with a beer. There aren’t many moments like this in our new life, where we have no one else to keep an eye on, nor any need to run ourselves. As the sun starts to set I try to remember the feeling, to store it up for the next few months.

Or at least until the next tournament.

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.

Language of life

At twenty months 5’s language explodes. She sings twinkle twinkle little star after hearing it a half dozen times. She says the abc’s and constantly makes small sentences. We are astonished onlookers.

We have no pride in her outbursts, only shock. I am often an open-mouthed observer of this person, so barely able and yet so clearly someone new. I watch her repeat things to me that I do not understand with a patience I still search for. Her grin when at last I catch on is full of pride, and of joy. The value of communication, after a year plus without, is clear from her face.

In the evenings we sit on the balcony and play with seeds, with shells, with rocks. She makes messes and picks them up, pours small objects from one flower pot to another, and asks for help finding rocks that have snuck out of reach under other objects. I lean against the glass of the sliding door and watch, eyes half on her and half on the harbor. These are the content moments, work done, evenings routines not yet upon us. We are happy here, not yet forty five and not yet two, and I try to watch carefully enough to remember.

Two weeks later she says “Yes please 5’s blow it” when offered hot food, and we are shocked but happy with the easy communication. She wanders the house saying “Mommy where are you?” when one of us is out of sight, the kind of comfortable exclamation that has been impossible the past twenty one months. She exhorts her Tita to take her to the bath house, a place that does not exist in this country. She asks for fizzy water and then for its transformation through fruit into lime soda with a clarity born of our own love for both. In between these moments she tells us how she misses her friends, reciting their names constantly. Soon she recites everyone’s names, including a friend’s new girlfriend.

Mostly we are not ready. The family words of scant months ago, of this same year, like ‘pato’, which she used to wander the house requesting, disappear into potato at a speed we did not prepare for.

These words, like the memory of these months, will drift out of our minds with exhaustion, with worry, with the progress of life. And so I try hard, on this Saturday in Tokyo, to write them down, to remember. Twenty one months now, and astonishing.

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.

Tradition

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.

With the wind as soundtrack

Looking across a familiar section of North Park, Colorado

Back in North Park after a few years, I am most surprised by the sound of the wind. Sitting on the hillside looking south towards Elk Mountain some 30 miles away, the ferocious whipping noise contrasts with the stillness and spectacle of the view. Aside from tree leaves rippling in the aspen grove below the deck, the only other hint of motion is the bugs and hummingbirds that flit past. And yet the wind is unrelenting, pushing ever eastward towards Cameron and Clark peaks.

It’s been a long time since I first sat here. Many things have changed. There’s internet, for one. And cell service. And so I write between work calls. What once was a sanctuary is now just another outpost in our ability to work from anywhere. In some ways I miss the old land line and dial up connection. In some ways I’m glad to be able to work while the rest of the family plays, rather than having to stay behind in town. Mostly I’m glad to watch our daughter rumble around a new location, learning and exploring and banging rocks together.

We’ve told her, since restarting travel when she was two months old, that if she’s good on these trips we’ll return when she’s old enough to remember. It’s both absurd and true, promises we intend to keep. And yet I am realizing she already does remember. She remembered her grandparents house on the second visit just days after the first. She remembers things, now, at a year old. Places. Where the rocks are kept. Where the fruit basket is. Small things, surely, and probably not forever, but is that the point?

In many ways we travel to keep ourselves in the world. To keep ourselves part of people’s lives, and our own lives connected to the places we grew up, the people we grew up with. There are a lot of repeated loops, like to this cabin in the hills of North Park. These return trips are what bind us to the place, what makes each memory more real, layered on so many others. I remember proofreading my novel here alone, at the counter, in the summer of 2009. I remember napping on the sofa here with our cat, long ago when he would join us on the flight from San Francisco. I remember shoveling snow, chasing dogs, and running through the brush to the lake. Years go by and each new visit is built on top of those earlier ones. The next time we’re here I’m sure 5’s will be able to walk. I’ll try to remember these windy days and crawling moments, then. To have and to compare, as part of the palimpsest, uncovered in an unknown future, in odd moments or familiar light.

Sleep when

For a long time the person I used to be wondered what he would remember. He took photos to invite recollection, and put songs on repeat in foreign hotel rooms to build clear trigger points. Looking back now these were the tactics of someone on the go, someone with little stability in their day-to-day.

Of course they were.

One factory looks much like any other, and one hotel room likewise. Evenings spent alone in third tier Chinese cities quickly blend into one another. The songs playing in each room, then, the books read over dinner, or the long walks around unknown neighborhoods late at night can easily become the trip’s defining moments. Days spent in conference rooms, while productive, rarely lend themselves to emotional recall. Certainly less so than an evening spent looking up at the sky as it starts to rain outside the National Theater in Taichung while listening to Mariah the Scientist’s ‘Reminders’ on repeat.

Years later, the person I’ve become knows there’s another way to make memories: watch someone else change and work to remember the differences. I try to appreciate new abilities by recalling what was impossible last week. For a long time, a few weeks, I watch 5’s try to raise one knee high enough to get onto the lower of our two sofas. Suddenly one morning she can do it, the strength or the flexibility, the height or coordination, whatever was lacking, now present. Her smile as she turns, that first time, and claps to show me her new seated position on the couch, that’s a memory worth holding tight. She still can’t make it onto the other couch, two inches higher. I wonder how long it will take.

The tradeoff, of course, is that I have no ability to place this memory in any context, no ability to remember what day, what age, or what I was doing otherwise. Much like the factory day in Taichung before my late night walk, where everything except the moment outside the theater has been lost. Memories like these are worn down by lack of sleep, by the pace of our life and the passage of time. All memory of which day she first climbed the sofa is likewise blurred, though it was only a week or two ago.

I still play music on repeat. Knowing it’s value I still try to build associations, triggers that will bring me back to these rainy typhoon days in Hong Kong, when 5’s is not yet one. These sounds or sights that might remind me of both adults working as hard as we can around our new responsibilities. These are lucky opportunities, two startups that might, just might have a chance, and we with the energy, the support, and the ability to grind while also playing sports, while also caring for our daughter. Barely, but we do.

And so after yoga on Friday I walk back towards the MTR station and home very slowly. In my ears Tracey Thorn sings songs I’ve never heard before, her first album with Ben Watt in twenty plus years. I listen with my whole body. Will these sounds bring back this spring, bring back Hong Kong, later and in other contexts? I can’t really know, but I hope so. I’d like to remember these rainy evenings, or her smile as she wakes. And I know my memory needs assistance, from years of helping it along, and months of sleeping less than I ought.

With new eyes wide

A view of Hong Kong island as the sun sets, with orange and blues streaked together over the peak.

In the last light of one of the year’s last days, we lie on her futon and stare at the peaks of Hong Kong Island. They are capped in pinks and golds, wreathed by the light of the sun that has itself sunk from sight. It’s a beautiful view, one of the world’s best, as far as cities go. The lights are coming on across the city, and the sky up top is starting to settle into the truly dark blue of space. The air, blown back in from the ocean all day, is soupy, the petrochemical mass perfect for refraction. Like LA, sometimes Hong Kong has the most beautiful smog-driven sunsets.

For five whole minutes she lies on top of me utterly still. On my back, my view is of the sky down to the building tops. Her weight, held upright by my right arm, is scant enough that I do not grow stiff. Her view is perpendicular to the ground, facing the island. She can not see the scrolling lights of the ICC. It’s not dark enough for them to dominate the skyline anyway. The purples slowly drip down into the golds, until the hilltops are ringed mostly in a deep rose. It’s subtle, the matter of a few minutes. Perfect for a post-nap six-month-old’s attention span. I’ve never held her this still and not asleep.

I watch the shadows of the hills against the skyline, reflected in her eyes. It’s a strange feeling, seeing someone so clearly a blend of our families take shape. The square jaw and face shape is so familiar; I’ve been waking beside it for fifteen years.

Her room smells perfect. It smells like vacation, and memory. The tatami is brand new, and the scent of fresh straw permeates everything. The room smells like our onsen in Gero. It smells like the hotel in Osaka where she laughed and rolled for hours. On top of the tatami, the single futon folds perfectly in thirds exactly as mine did twenty years ago in Saitama. Though a single, it is big enough for two or three of us, at least for a while yet. I’m still trying to introduce the cat to it. He loves the one in our room, which is thicker, a solid mass of cotton. This one, softer and more malleable, will take him time. Or maybe that’s the occupant, who he’s fascinated by and annoyed with in alternating measures.

Either way, lying here in the afternoon light looking out over the harbor and peaks feels like a new phase. She has her own room with it’s own scents and objects, a new person and a new story being written. At the end of the year, that’s the biggest change, the thing I’ll remember most.

Patience for me

Light across the rooftops of Tai Hang one day

In the early afternoon, as one lady projects (a family verb meaning “does things around the house that aren’t daily chores”) and the other naps, I sit quietly and watch Tai Hang. The light is great, late summer humidity giving the approaching golden hour a helping hand. The squawking birds wheel and yell, perch on rooftops and cavort in bunches above the low buildings. The balconies and roofs of this small neighborhood are empty, the day’s sun still too close. This morning, a breezy 28 C, was the first sign of fall’s approach, the kind of morning that perks everyone up, that gives the dogs and children an extra bit of energy. Fall is not yet here though, in early September, not in Hong Kong, where the heat will linger until November. Just it’s finger tips, brushing over the city before the full light of day. And so in the afternoon we swim in the public pool, indoors, and nap, one and then the other, until the heat fades.

Hong Kong has wonderful public pools, part of the athletic infrastructure that shapes both the space and the population, who are active, are athletic, are fit and adventurous. In so many ways the foundations laid here are good, and should be built on. In so many ways we are trying to build, to be part of this city. On Saturday I chat with neighbors, with shop owners, with the fruit stand family, and am happy. It’s been four years and Hong Kong feels like home.

The question, then, is how to be patient with myself, with our trajectory. Patience is an oft-mentioned requirement of parenting, a commonly mentioned challenge, to have enough. Yet in all those tellings it is patience for the child, for the burdens of care, for the pain and limitations of childbirth, of rehabilitation and recovery, and of physical growth. These, to me, are the external requirements, the clear and valuable lessons of being part of a family, of trying to build a structure that can raise a human. Patience for each other, while still too limited, is a common goal, and a well-understood shortcoming when it falters.

Less discussed, and perhaps less easy to build, is patience with one’s self.

In our family this too is a constant thread, due to injuries and rehab, due to the challenges of climbing and frisbee where our goals are so frequently beyond our bodies’ abilities. We council the other to give their body the time it needs to heal. We try hard to remind each other to have patience with our own sore knees, with the wrist never quite perfect after that motorcycle accident, with the back that refuses to bend smoothly, and with shoulders that are never again as flexible as we’d hoped. We try to be the buffer between what the other person wants to achieve and what they are able to, to cushion them from their own disappointments.

It is not always easy.

Harder still is to give ourselves that gift. Harder still is to be truly patient with our own slow pace of improvement, with our own slow progress towards strength, towards competent leadership, towards deep friendship and emotional intelligence. Harder still is to be patient with the years of our life that seem to drift by without the kind of growth we’d hoped for, without the experiences we once thought we’d have.

In many ways these are the challenges not of children but of the pandemic, not of our family but of our expectations. Yet the same call for patience comes to me in seeing one family member asleep across the room and feeling the immediate need to accomplish things in this bit of time. The true need is for patience with my back, sore from rocking her to sleep, and with my mind, tired from the work week. The challenge is not in being calm until she nods off but in being calm once she has done so, in being productive, whatever that means, without feeling like these moments are fleeting. At forty three I am half way through the average lifespan of someone of my gender and country of origin. There are not infinite days to come, but there are enough to let the body and mind appreciate this sunset, and watch these birds for a while. There is no need to move quickly, and nothing I am missing, other than perhaps a good photo as my phone is in the other room.

Ah well, the sun will set again tomorrow. Time instead to watch the sky.

Finding freedom

The 7-Eleven steps, benches, and a parked taxi in the rain

On Sundays, after she’s eaten early and we’ve done a second diaper change, we head out. Our routine, like all things, is benefiting from practice. The first time out I forgot my wallet, and the second, a metal cup for tea. The first few times going into the carrier she fussed, almost but not quite enough to wake Tara.

Now we are happy and quiet, going into the carrier with no complaints, collecting wallet keys phone mask hat cup flip flops, and heading down the stairs before anyone is much the wiser. It’s humid in the stairs, and those seven flights are a slow way to get used to the weather after our air conditioned bubble.

By the coffee shop around the corner she’s often asleep, a scant twelve yards from our door. Sometimes she watches me order cold brew before passing out again. It’s early, after all. And then, standing outside in our alley, coffee in hand and baby asleep again, everyone lightly sweating, I am free.

I think a lot about freedom, what it means and where we find it. I think a lot about the hours in our lives that matter to us, and how they change. I remember strongly the feeling of freedom late at night, after the town or the campus or the city was mostly asleep. For as long as I can remember I’ve loved to be up high at night, to look out at a place and think about all the people who are there, invisible with their lights off, asleep. Mostly of course I think about those still awake, those heading to work at odd hours, or just finally coming home. I think about those up for no reason, and those up because of pain, medication, or young children.

In those contemplative moments I am free. Free to think about almost anything, to consider new ideas and observe things I’d otherwise ignore. It’s a feeling I love.

Lately I feel this way a lot, standing at our window watching Tai Hang at three, at four, at five am. I count the taxis parked along Wun Sha street every night, when their driver’s shifts are over. The current high is twenty five in sight at four thirty am, a number hard to top given the streets physical limits. For this view and these hours of freedom I deeply love Tai Hang. I love the 7-Eleven with it’s large entry, where people sit at all hours. I love the coffee shop next door to it that put up benches. These benches, unknown to the shop staff, have featured dates, late night delivery worker dinners, and smokers on their phones at three. They have hosted drunks of all genders in all combinations, continuing their evenings or sobering up before heading upstairs. Late at night our window is a great view into the kind of city I most appreciate.

And yet there’s another side, another set of hours in which to find freedom. San Francisco first convinced me of freedom in the early mornings. As painful as they were, once we were on bicycles to the gym at seven, we were free. Being first on the mats, able to climb any route without concern for overlap, to hear the songs the staff played while cleaning to wake themselves up, and having the sunrise pour through the windows, blinding us on top out, was freedom. Biking to work afterwards, having showered, past the construction site that is now the Warriors stadium, I felt almost as free as walking home late at night.

On Sunday, as I walk around the small blocks of Tai Hang at eight am with Clara asleep in her carrier, sipping my first coffee, I am free. I pop in to the French bakery for bagels and a croissant for Mr. Squish. I put those on a bench and drink coffee while leaning on a parking barrier, holding Clara and watching people in line for one of the cha chaan tengs in the back alleys. The clientele, at this hour, is mostly those like me, with young children, and groups of spandex-clad bikers and runners, eating after even earlier rides or runs. Half of us are escaping the later day heat, and half of us are simply following the child’s cycle. Later we will all be replaced by families, and by those with dogs, both of whom dine closer to 10 am on Sundays. I like this changing of the guard, and remember similar ones from my own restaurant days: the older folk, couples or alone, who would dine at five, right on open, and were often regulars. Then families, six to seven, and finally dates, younger couples and a wider variety, after eight. The hours change with country, or like with San Francisco, the weather, but the themes are consistent. We are all human, and hungry.

After the coffee is gone we purchase milk tea, in a metal cup we’ve carried clipped to our belt, for the sleeping family member. She’ll appreciate it, iced from her favorite street stall. After saying thank you we head home, our half hour stroll almost over. These are our moments of freedom. Our missions, small though they be, are accomplished and with (including the cat) three quarters of the family asleep, we are in no rush.

A second cold brew, perhaps, and then the elevator up stairs.

Faith in each other

A month in, the clearest part of parenthood is the reflection it provides. In the late nights, in the long days with sparse sleep, we see few things clearly save each other. Our ability to rest, to walk, to eat, to see friends, and exercise depends on our partner’s abilities, on their tolerance, and on our mutual trust. We have, in this small child, a way to finally see the compassion in our relationship, and our kindness for one another. It is humbling, to understand that our ability to hold the baby while she cries and our partner eats is perhaps the best gift we can give. It is clarifying to understand that our push for an extra smile when she will not sleep takes more energy and is therefore more appreciated than anything else we’ve done in weeks. And it is revealing to understand that our ability to do things, from lunch with friends to climbing workouts to dinners out depends entirely on our partner’s ability to be ok when things go wrong. We serve at the pleasure not of a higher authority, but of each other, a pleasure that must be re-iterated daily. Would you like to go out, would you like to go to the gym, would you like to meet friends? Each one requires explicit confirmation, and the understanding that it could take extraordinary effort, extraordinary patience.

Mostly they do not, and Clara is peaceful, is at peace with our decisions. She is ok with electronic music and ambient heat outside the pizza parlor on a Friday night, where we eat on a bench and share a beer with friends after a long week. She is ok with the bright lights and bouncing tunes of the climbing gym, with the many voices and odd sensations of an afternoon at the swimming pool. She tolerates a ferry ride, an MTR ride, and many taxi rides, without outburst. In some ways we adventure at the pleasure of the child, and I think in some tellings this would be true. But it is not, for while she has a voice, and uses it at will, she has no say in the initial agreement, in the planned outlay of patience and effort. That is instead an agreement built on all our years together, almost fifteen now since those early scooter rides in Shanghai. Almost four now here in Hong Kong, where the idea of family became more possible.

And so we continue to grow, our true selves revealed to each other in the things we are willing to smile together after. It has always been this way, of course. In many ways our four hours together in the back of a flatbed from Nong Kiaw to Luang Prabang remains the clearest mirror, held up to our relationship in pain, guilt, and the joy of adventure. It is good, then, to find new joy together in these late nights and the early mornings they blend into.

First days

Looking southwest from the Peak in Hong Kong, across Wong Chuk Hang, and Aberdeen to Repulse Bay, Stanley, and the ocean, where container ships pass.

Like anything new, the first days are a bit of a blur. We sit in a room overlooking all of Hong Kong and try to take in the view. We are looking at the face of a new human, someone never before met. We are looking out at an island, at hills of jungled green and reservoirs that mirror the trees nestled in the valleys. Expensive homes dot the hillside below us, and beyond that the flat areas of Aberdeen, Wong Chuk Hang, and Repulse Bay. Past all that container ships pull towards us and away. The main sea route in and out of Hong Kong feels busy enough. Only the skies are quiet, with no airplanes in sight for much of the day.

The view is shocking on a clear day, all the way north to land that is not in Hong Kong, that is part of the greater country that surrounds us, some twenty miles up the coast. It’s a view worth millions, a view utterly unavailable in most major metros, and the thing that sets Hong Kong apart among world cities.

Mostly we ignore it, focused instead on the new person who has joined us. Our spare moments are spent texting family and friends, sharing photos and chatting about the new responsibility we’ve taken on. It’s a weird one, learning how to care for a human who most definitely can’t care for themselves. Like every new parent, I’m sure, I’m shocked at how unready we humans are released into the world. Unable to walk or talk, and not particularly close to either. While friends with older children say that the time goes quickly, by any reckoning three, five, eight, or eighteen years is a long time. Thinking back to the start of our relationship, fifteen years prior, makes it clear just how long a commitment we’ve made. Life will not be boring.

We look forward to the learning, to sharing our lives with someone new. After all my years avoiding housemates, it’s a bit of a strange choice. I hope that the cat feels the same enthusiasm, at least eventually.

In the afternoon, we are lucky and nap together. The pleasure of three people tucked into a single bed is pure joy. After an hour, when the nurse comes to take the new member for a checkup, we realize how free we are, going to sleep without any responsibility, without worry or hesitation. In the first few days of parental leave, rather than adding to our stress we have ceded our normal tasks, our professional goals and targets. In the hospital for another twenty four hours yet, we have not yet assumed the full burden of our new role. I have no complaints.

Looking north I can barely see the buildings of North Point over the hill, the tops of the AXA tower and One Island East poking above the mountain. I can see Red Incense summit, where we watch the sunset and fireworks. I’m excited to take Clara up there, to show her the world we live in. To show her the place she was born.

Mostly unprepared

Before change, like before a storm, there are moments of peace, of pause. On a Wednesday after yoga I work from a courtyard, free until a dentist appointment. It’s beautiful here, cool enough in the shade to be pleasant. For two hours I write documentation and update plans. I want to remember these moments, with little to worry about save my own responsibilities.

Often big changes are visible some ways out, and yet still impossible to anticipate. The end of university. The first days after moving to a new country. These events are monumental, and will be permanent memories. Their dates are known in advance, planned around. And yet the feeling, the act of being on the far side, remains invisible, unknowable until it arrives. I think often of our first week in Hong Kong, walking the TST waterfront in the humid evenings. That week, at a hotel paid for by a company long since bankrupt, was uncertain, and beautiful. Every act, of getting coffee at Starbucks while messaging real estate agents early in the mornings, of eating noodles at a Japanese place at the end of the day, awoke us, reminded us of the shift we’d made, from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

On this afternoon in June I wonder what the next few weeks will feel like, how well I’ll remember them. I know everything will be different, but the how of it, the feel of the change, is invisible to me. I hope I remember to write.

Ahead of us

The hardest thing of being on pause is figuring out what’s ahead of us. The hardest thing about lockdowns is not knowing when they’ll lift.

In Hong Kong the last week of March is filled with rain, and without activities. Friends message from blocks away to say the’ve done nothing with the weekend. Friends message from other islands asking if we did anything. Friends message from other sides of the world, having just returned from Mexico, from Hawaii, from Mexico, and we must explain that Hong Kong will not let us out, won’t let us go to gyms, or use the exercise equipment in the park. Hong Kong won’t let us use the beach, or the airport. Hong Kong won’t let us see the world, or come home.

The rainy week is a perfect match for these restrictions, for the quiet that overtakes us when the only thing to do is stand in line for cookies at the fancy store across the street. Fifty people do at all hours, or at least at all hours the shop is open. I laugh at them, but can’t blame. There is nowhere else to go, not much else to do. Hiking, the only activity of any potential these past few months, is less appealing in the rain.

Instead we consider what will come next, when this child is born, when our life of two is a life of three. It’s hard to imagine, not least of all because we don’t know who we will share this apartment with. It is hard to imagine because we can’t see into our own future at all. There are no trips, no vacations, and haven’t been in years. There are no moves, no visits from distant friends, no concerts, no movies, no holidays. There is, in short, nothing on the horizon, which again matches this rainy week perfectly, the physical horizon as obscured as the chronological.

To counter these feelings of opacity we cook and see friends, sharing meals and light banter. We build lego, we work, and we work out in our apartment, glad for the quiet and free from any external requirements. It is, in many ways, a low stress environment, a relaxing few weeks of calm time. We are lucky to have jobs, to have food, to have shelter.

In other ways it is sad to have these low bars be our only achievements, and we desperately miss the feeling of potential that used to lift our spirits, that used to encompass our lives.

Summer will be here soon, and another member of our household. Perhaps by then the future will have returned to us.

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