The year ending feels very long. I wonder about this, about perception in a family of three rather than two. Twelve months represents so much change to a being of only eighteen. I expect the next few years will feel likewise.

The list below, considered as such, is an impossible mishmash. I have learned that in some ways we did not leave the pandemic, and we can never really go back to our former lives. The feeling of freedom, and the lack of surprise at travel, may never really return, even though the act itself has. Even though the casualness with which we pack for a new country certainly has. As Ursula Le Guin once wrote,

“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

From Lone Stars’ 11th year playing beach ultimate in LA in January, to Malaysia with Hong Kong Masters in December, some of the places represent a familiar type of travel made entirely new and more challenging with a third family member. And yet they were still beautiful, as were Bangkok and Boracay for the same purpose. Malaysia also represented the first time all three of us visited a new country together, a list we are excited to expand.

Mostly, the places below represent trying to do a lot. The sheer number of times in the Bay Area (five) and Tokyo (five) go some way towards outlining the pace. With three family trips to the U.S. and another three solo ones, we covered more of the country we came from than we expect to for quite a while. The world is big, and now that airplanes are more regular, there are many new places to see. As to Tokyo, well, it will be a regular feature of future lists, and hopefully a comfortable one.

As always, I look for themes in these years, in their pace or our hopes. This year the recall is harder than usual, a combination of sleeplessness and focus on someone else with the frantic end that saw me spend but one week in eight at home in October and November. Thus the point of writing things down: in this list I see old friends, a focus on family, and the return of places we love. Clara, at a year and a half, saw Bangkok, Boracay, and Taipei this year, the easy hops around Asia that we missed during the pandemic. In this year’s list I also see the new: our foraging adventures around Tokyo hunting something, some collective feeling we were sure we’d know when we encountered it. We did, and are working to make it a fixture of whatever weird life we are building.

That, at last, is the point, the central sensation of this odd year. As always it takes writing for a while before the core of the thing I’m considering presents itself: we are building some truly new life now, on the other side of our big move to Asia, on the other side of the pandemic, on the other side of the biggest decision of our lives. We are building a future that we can barely see, one in which we have hopefully slept more, wherever the places may be. And what I will remember from twenty twenty three is that, for the first time, it was a future we could start to see.

Tai Hang, HK
Santa Monica, CA
San Francisco, CA (four times, two spots)
Cherry Hill, NJ (twice)
Malibu, CA (twice)
Boracay Island, the Philippines
Santa Clara, CA (twice)
Taipei, Taiwan
Bangkok, Thailand (two spots)
Nishinippori, Tokyo (twice)
Shimbashi and Toranomon, Tokyo
Shinjuku, Tokyo (four times, three spots)
Fort Collins, CO
Stout’s Island, WI
Sugamo, Tokyo
Changi, Singapore
Pune, India
Otsuka, Tokyo (twice)
Downtown Singapore
Batam, Indonesia
New Braunfels, TX
Austin, TX
Brooklyn, NY
Manhattan, NY
Cyberjaya, Malaysia

Prior lists visible here.

“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

inhab.it

lived in places

Taipei

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