In flight

From somewhere above the sea, between Hong Kong and Tokyo.

So much of what I write about recently is through the lense of a toddler. Our life in many ways remains, its outlines no different from the days before her arrival. We work constantly and travel often. We play frisbee wherever and whenever we are able. We climb, see friends, dine out, and are almost more social than our bodies can support.

And yet.

On this flight I am in awe of the toddler. Not yet three she is comfortable on planes in a way I only dreamed of. She knows the path to the airport, taxi to train, and how many stops. She is ready for the lines and then her spinny cart. She asks if we can go to the lounge and get food before the plane. Then she’s excited to find “her airplane”. She carries her own stuff, in her brand new unicorn backpack, and pulls out her hoodie when cold. Onboard she knows to wait till takeoff to watch, to wait till we are in the sky.

And now, crushing egg waffles onboard Hong Kong Express, watching Totoro in Japanese in her hoodie and sambas, she is a happy little crab, a person in her own world.

I’m so grateful to be here for it.

Smiles, a decade on

Looking at Elements from the Hong Kong / Macau ferry terminal in the afternoon

The beauty of living in Hong Kong strikes me on a Wednesday. As too often I am in a rush, trying to make it home before a call, trying to make it from one appointment to another despite having left myself no buffer. It’s too common an occurrence because I try always to say yes, always to do one more thing. Even when there is no physical way to do both, when attempting will add more stress to an already crowded life. I do it not because it’s possible, but because trying, while hard, makes me feel alive. Life is short. Our daughter is almost three. There’s never enough time, for any of us. And so I rush, and so I am scrambling out of the subway on the first hot Wednesday in 2025. There will be many more, and we will tire of them quickly.

Today, though, people are excited, and the outfits are good. Hong Kongers have great style, a huge diversity of styles, and today in Causeway Bay they are on glorious display. Within two blocks I see an older man in a flamboyant suit, two ladies in model-level outfits, and a passel of children wearing everything from Pokémon to 90’s rave wear. I see a man carrying a small dog and a women with a printed dog on her shirt. I see two old people with canes wacking the ground with ambition, hard sacks to scope out the sturdiness of the built environment. I appreciate his endurance. I appreciate the consideration for the weather, for the appearance in public, for the part of all these people that brought them out today.

Hong Kong makes me happy. Often, in the current job, I step off of zoom and outside without thinking, my brain still wrapped up in whatever I was working on a moment prior. I leave my apartment for food, for an errand, part of a city but also alone in it, removed from it by remote work. Within a block, or two, I am happy to live here, happy to be among so many humans. Living in a truly dense environment, in the kind of built density that is so rare even in humanity’s busiest cities, is a gift. I encounter so many people, and they pull my mind away from zoom, from the internet, from the annoying burdens of modern life.

I am finally realizing that people need different things. Some people thrive on long quiet walks across the rolling hills, or through forests. Some thrive on the mountains, or the beach. And some, like me, are best when presented with so many external stimuli that the internal whirlwind of the mind takes a back seat to “wow that’s a big dog” or “watch out for that hand cart”.

And so a wish, on this first warm Wednesday in twenty twenty five: may more of us get what we need from the place we choose to live.

The gift of mornings

It’s been years since I appreciated the strongest drug humanity has yet discovered: rapid motion over great distance. My body, newly returned from America, has been moved so abruptly as to have lost all sense of itself, it’s location. And so I make coffee at five thirty am and sneak outside through the kitchen door that creaks to stretch on the balcony, and then write. The light is not yet bright enough to see by. Instead I rely on my sense of my body running through familiar routines. The long years working to write in straight lines are valuable when neither my eyes nor my hands are fully present. Jet lag has always been a glorious event.

I treasure these moments more on returning home than on departing. On the road, everything is new and the lack of sleep will cost me more in the afternoon, when others are awake, than it will grant me in the early hours. For years I have been the type of traveler that calibrates on airplanes, sleeping in accordance with where I am going, rather than with where I have been. I eat nothing, drink water, and sleep only lightly on the twelve hour overnight flight to San Francisco. The goal is to adapt, to be functional, and to focus on what I am there to do.

On the way home I do likewise, sleeping 12 hours straight to ensure my early morning arrival is in line with my body. And yet, in both directions, there’s a night of waking at five am, my body utterly lost in a swirl of dreams that have no anchor in the day’s activities. In San Francisco I lie still until sleep reclaims me an hour later. At home, though, I treasure the feeling, the quiet moments of my own routine I never see. Before the family wakes, when even the cat is content to check on me and return to his bed.

It’s been years of this life, from one side of the Pacific to the other. A search of this site reveals dozens of posts written with my soul halfway across the ocean behind me. I’m grateful for every chance to move so fast, and for every morning like this one, awake before I ought to be.

A gift of space

Looking towards the sun setting over Toshima, Tokyo

In Otsuka young people linger outside on a Sunday night even in the winter. It’s been a warm day, though the morning will be sharply colder. Monday will come with the feel of winter not out of place this first weekend in March. And yet in this joy at the sun, in the crowded outdoor space by the station and the group of people sitting laughing along the tram line I feel another joy as well. It’s one that I miss, that makes me feel both young and old: it is the joy of the student or the hourly wage worker. It is the joy of those with no children, and no place they should be. In the light breeze of evening then they gather, celebrating the day ending, the weekend that has been. As a victory lap on time, it’s a good moment.

I watch them from my seat on a bench near the station, grateful for my partner putting the baby to sleep. I am thankful too for the brief respite from work’s mental assault that the coming Monday off has granted me. I am grateful for this space to think, and to write. Although I can no longer feel the freedom of those without salaried jobs or children, I can enjoy the presence of those who do, and relax in their joy. We all grow older, I think, and find our own ways back to peace.

So much of Tokyo is this now. It’s our peace. It is our spaceship, as Tara said today. Our way to escape whatever we are running from. May it ever feel so.

For we need youth in our lives, need to feel the sense of having no other requirements that grows harder to remember each year. We need somehow to remember what we were once, and can again be. To remember who it was we fell in love with, and in turn who they did.

Places we reside

A girl drawing with chalk on an outdoor terrace, with chairs and a bike behind her. Tropical plants and trees frame the buildings.

In the fall of twenty four we move apartments and I remember how much the place we live shapes our view of the world. I remember how much the things we discover and the ways we relax are shaped by our physical space, its location, and our attention to its decoration. In leaving our old place I say goodbye to the view, and to the neighborhood. In smaller ways I say goodbye to the quiet corners where I sat leaned against the floor to ceiling windows and to the balcony sized perfectly for the folding camping sofa. That sofa was one of my first purchases on signing the lease, an item long coveted and suddenly ideal for this balcony twenty seven floors up, able to fit either back to the house or along the side wall, looking out at the city.

There’s a long tail indeed now of apartments that have shaped where we put things, places we’ve created snug nooks and added bookshelves. Five apartments now of finding space for a liter box, from the first one that required sealing a section of crawlspace to the most recent, tucked under the edge of a bath tub larger than we’d ever purchase on our own. We’ve hung the same art on multiple continents, and re-arranged the same light panels on a variety of walls, aiming for shapes that reflect a new start, that retain the feel of our old homes. In our first Hong Kong apartment the light panels were spaceship-esque. In the current one they are a crab, copying a children’s book we love. Our inspirations shift, and the materials remain.

Some things we’ve standardized: the foreign currency remains in neat rolls but is no longer hidden in a closet. Instead a small set of Muji drawers holds both money we may never need and the stack of transit cards, bookstore memberships, climbing gym punch cards, and all the rest that remind us of how long we’ve been gathering. We keep a shocking number of business cards for no reason save the difficulty of digitizing them, the difficulty of parting with them. Each stack, of electronic component suppliers in Shenzhen, of packaging suppliers, of film extruders, of business development people and hotel concierges is a window to a world we remember but no longer visit.

In our new space we spend weeks painting and gathering plants, re-shaping the exterior to fit our needs. In the evenings we throw frisbees, ride tiny balance bikes, kick soccer balls, and do yoga on it. In the mornings we read magazines out of doors with our coffee and tea, subscriptions we’ve resumed after a half dozen years of avoiding paper. It’s a good feeling, to go backwards in these ways, and to have an outdoor space. It’s a new home for our small folding sofa, even if a larger set of chairs would fit. Like all apartment-dwellers we repurpose things bought custom for other spaces. The desk that rolls up into a set of drawers is a great part of my new office, two houses on from where it began. The tiny wooden chair, one of the only things we brought across the pacific, is perfectly at home in it’s fifth apartment, more in use than ever before. Much like the cat, who is happier than ever before, actively hunting at almost thirteen.

In Hong Kong the mystery of prior inhabitants is stronger than ever, almost every space re-shaped by some previous resident. Whole rooms and walls have been moved and created for helpers and twins long gone. A walk-in closet replete with aircon built for a banker with a library of suits to protect, and finally an open kitchen created for someone who likes to host, who likes to share breakfast across a counter with some children, as we now do daily. We repurpose some, the closet for a bedroom, the bedrooms for an office, removing doors, adding curtains, painting and spackling until we feel comfortable. Putting down the tatami in multiple rooms I wonder if future inhabitants will be able to smell the dry grass long after it’s gone, long after we have moved on. I wonder where their children will sleep, or whether they’ll tear out this remodel, now more than a decade old, for some set of spaces still unimagined.

I think about the secrets of old apartments I can no longer remember, of all the items that now reside in a Colorado basement, or were given away on leaving San Francisco. I think of our Bunjo chair, rediscovered in the mountains last summer, a joyful piece of furniture I’d long since forgotten.

“My blue worm is in Tokyo,” says our daughter. “And my other blocks”.

For a moment, like all our American friends with houses purchased on thirty year promises, I am happy to have another place, to have a place that will see fewer future residents, where the changes we make will be discovered by friends, will be remembered by our family.

And then I remember to embrace the temporary, to relish the interplay between our ancestors in residences and our as yet unforeseen homes, still occupied by people we will never meet.