Rain, rain go away
just got back from the third anniversary junket to heng keng. after whirling about the city in a daze for most of my first day there, i found that i had been mentally bracing myself for a thoroughly crappy hong kong experience.
at first i thought it was the literally the black stormcloud looming over our weekend (g had sent me a heads up on the crappy weather conditions the night before). as you can see on the left, our welcoming committee consisted of a less-than-picturesque mix of chinese street signs and british weather.
later on, i realized that wasn't the real black cloud hanging over my head, but one simple, emotionally loaded question. it was my mom asked me over a year ago, when i was still working for the factory. we'd been talking about how relocation to hong kong seemed to be as much as a goal as an eventuality for promising factory people, including -- it would seem -- myself.
then she let the bomb drop. "who wants to work in sh*tty hong kong?"
in it was all the resentment and bitterness she felt about my dad's experience as an expat in hong kong right before he died; how she felt, in a way, that what happened to him -- to them -- there led to the irreparable damage to his heart, to her life, to their hopes, to our life as a family.
i told marlon about this as we walked in a hong kong that seemed so full of light and life. all i could say at the time was, "it's not shitty at all." but now i know what i really want to say -- expectations and disappointments, parallels and differences, past and future all taken to heart.
it's such a blessing when, every now and again, things turn out differently.
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