hong kong

Everything is different in Hong Kong.  It is like China but it’s not.  Guangzhou is a sprawling, industrial, untamed expanse of Chinese capitalism – mile after mile after mile of construction and industry and activity.   Not always pretty, but very busy and important and functional.  Hong Kong is something different though.  Also very busy, but condensed and rushed and very different influences can be seen – driving on the left side of the road, double decker buses everywhere, much more English spoken here and people visiting from many other countries.

I think I never finished this post about Hong Kong. Today is March 10, 2019 so it has been about two and a half months since I was in Hong Kong and China.  I am not even sure where I was thinking of going with the note since I started it while there. So it is really coming from this place much later in time.  That might make it even more interesting.

So now I find myself thinking that it’s been too long since I have been to Hong Kong.  If I let it go too long, I forget, they forget, and the bonds made on the other side of the world just wither and die. Those bonds are not easy to find but time will quickly rip them away if not tended to, like a precious garden. I am always feeling a real pulling on my heart, a promise like “I will see you again” seems strong and good (and so much better than “well, it was nice to get to know you a little, good luck with the rest of your life”) which happens all too often anyway.  There is no deadline, the only limitation is being capable of doing it.

I personally don’t like to talk to more than 2 or 3 people (and three is a lot) at the same time, in the same conversation.  I am only learning this now after so many decades of life!  And people always say, “well you will get better at it”.  But the fact is, I don’t like it, I don’t see the value in it, I don’t feel safe doing it, and I feel like it contributes to “avoiding” real human relationships instead of fostering them.  Now some large groupings really allow and foster individuals to connect one on one or two in their midst.  Especially the ones that serve alcohol.

I could go on about different social settings, but any party or social gathering is really an opportunity to connect one on one.  And being alone in in a large social gathering where most people do not know each other – like a public gathering for a celebration – is probably the best place to connect with “unknown people”.  I use this term instead of “strangers” because that word has so much more negative meaning beyond the simple definition. In America we are taught at a young age that “strangers” are dangerous, more than likely they are child molesters and kidnappers or perhaps just child killers (meaning a killer of children not children who kill others) but regardless they will certainly either kill you or do something so bad to you that you will wish they had killed you.

So I was thinking about what I was taught about strangers since childhood as I walked around Hong Kong, one of few Americans there, wondering how the Chinese were raised to behave around or caution against strangers. Because of course, I was now the stranger.  It occurred to me that my culture, my society, could do a much better job of welcoming unknown people.  Decisions often need to be made about trusting other people, but most people, I believe, are trustworthy and most people like to do good things, to learn and grow rather than just putting up a wall.  Everyone has a wall, just some are easy to step over and some are almost impossible to climb over.

It’s an actual dimension.  Some people clearly communicate physically that they are not approachable, are not to be interacted with except in the most serious of situations at most, and others display and communicate interest in many many possible ways, but the easiest and most obvious is eye contact combined with a smile.  Man, woman, or child, the sign is very clear.  But there are so many other factors, not the least of which is the context of the location and the languages spoken (or more precisely, whether the spoken languages are shared among the individuals.  Moving past eye contact and a smile without a common language is difficult, but very possible.

So Hong Kong!  I met so many people there and spent so much luxurious time reflecting on life and other important things.  It is the perfect city for this.  It lets you take your whole personal understanding of the world and, if it were flat like a landscape, tilt it up about 30 degrees.  Everything becomes unstable and things that were there in the same place forever, start to fall down and you are forced to re-evaluate, reconsider, renew after realizing these longstanding things upon which so many lifetime decisions were made, just fell over.  It’s kind of the same world as before, but then again, not really. How to trust again what is real and strong and what is weak.

Even more amazing to me is making a friend in one city and then, even though total strangers prior to that meeting, meet again somewhere else on this huge spinning, flying globe.  Like meeting Alex and Jiayi for the first time in Tianjin and then again with the birth of Hayden in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.  It is almost as if we all jumped up in the air, spun around the earth, and met again in a hospital in Atlanta.  If things go as I want, I hope to see them again in Los Angeles, California, USA as crazy-impossible as that sounds.

Now that I have friends in Hong Kong, I have a safe harbor to go to, a place where I can be a part of it, not just viewing something as I pass, like though a bus window or a tv screen.  It is not a matter of “if I go back” it is a matter of “when”.

Every day, every hour, every minute that I spend sitting in my car looking at the red lights on the back-ends of other cars, I wonder how much more of my life I will waste driving a car.  I can hear the clock ticking now, it seems to move at a much faster paste than it did 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years ago.  I drag that out because I am very aware of looking back over decades, not just a few years.  My children have not had enough decades to differentiate between say, this decade and the first one.