So Long, Farewell, Goodbye, Amen

Well folks, that’s it.

We set up this blog to chronicle our adventures and misadventures in China and now that time has come to an end. After two years and over 900 blog posts, this is our last. I have set the timer so that this last entry will be posted at the same time that our plane takes off. By the time your read this, we should be in the air bound for The States.

Thanks to all our friends in Hong Kong who made the last two years so memorable. And thanks to all of you readers for tuning in on a regular basis.

Until we meet again,

Jack, Julie, Annika, and Elise

Identity

When I was younger, identity was a much simpler concept.

For example, I had a clear idea of what it meant to be German: spoke German, ate sauerkraut, grandfather used to wear lederhosen. But what about the Turkish immigrant who has lived in Germany for twenty years? What about his seven year old son who has spent his entire life in Germany and grew up speaking German?

What about the white farmer in Zimbabwe? How long does she have to live there before she gets to assert that she is in fact a Zimbabwean?

Or the how about Alberto Fujimori son of Japanese immigrants to Peru? At what point does he get to claim to be a Peruvian? Was it when he became President of Peru, or did he secure his Peruvian-ness at some point before that?

Like I said, concepts of identity where a lot simpler when I was young.

Shortly after arriving in Hong Kong, I remember asking somebody “So what do you call a person from Hong Kong, anyways? A Hong Kongan? a Hong Kongite?”

Well, it turns out the preferred term is Hong Kongers. That’s cool, I thought. I can work with that.

If I had been an American living in Beijing or Shenzhen or Fuling for two years, it would never presume to claim that I was now Chinese. But Hong Kong isn’t Beijing or Fuling. Despite her return to China in 1997, Hong Kong is not just another Chinese city or province. It is a Special Administrative Region with the operative word being special.

Hong has always been a mash-up of many things. From the day it was established as a British colony over 150 years ago it has been a blend of Chinese and Western influences. Many of the places in Hong Kong bear very English names: Chatham, Queensway, Aberdeen, Victoria. Many observers thought that after the handover, one of the first orders of business would be to start changing place names in an attempt to China-fy Hong Kong and scrub it of her colonial past. But that didn’t happen. There was no rush to shrug of names like Glouchester and Hennessey. Hong Kong knows who she is and that is a mix of East and West. No sense denying it. No sense trying to change it.

What’s more, the population in Hong Kong is very fluid. In an end-of-the-year goodbye note my principal started by writing “I have lived here long enough to know the drill.” He went on to say that people leaving Hong Kong was in inevitable part of life here. There does seem to be a constant stream of people settling down in Hong Kong and of people pulling up stakes and going to university in Toronto or taking a promotion with their employer in London or reverting back to a teaching job in Chicago.

As a result departing isn’t a barrier to being a member of this city. Rather, transience seems to be part of the definition of what a means to be a Hong Kong-er.

I spent my youth living in three different cities in Michigan. For the last twenty years I have lived in Chicago. But I can honestly say that I have never engaged and embraced a city the way that I engaged Hong Kong. Maybe it was because I traversed so much of it on foot. Maybe it was because I knew that our tenured here came with a deadline and I was committed to soaking up as much as this city had to offer.

Hong Kong wormed its way into my heart and has become a part of who I am. And I like to think that maybe in a small way, I impacted my little corner of Hong Kong through the students that I taught and the people I worked and lived with for two years.

So at what point does the young man from Turkey get to call himself German? I don’t know. I guess I will have to leave it up to him to decide.

But here is what I do know.

For two years I was –and I suspect that to some degree, I always will be- a Hong Konger.

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday part 2 of 2

-seeing young men who spent more time on their hair than their girlfriends did
-embarrassing my daughters on the MTR by making faces at little local kids
-having a backpack of one size or another strapped to my back almost every time I leave the house
-old dudes with multiple long hairs growing out of that one mole on their cheek
-seeing flowering bushes year round in this subtropical clime
-seeing young people wearing thick black frames with no glass in them simply as a fashion accessory
-living in –and having to clean- just 900 square feet
-bottled water advertising wars between Watsons and Cool
-getting pinged by Chinese cell phone carriers every time I take a hike in the mountains near the Chinese border
-old women doing early morning tai chi while wearing a clashing mix of brown checks and gray stripes

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday part 1 of 2

Some of the aspects of life in Hong Kong that I will miss once we leave:

-living without a car
-my multi-purpose Octopus card
-good cheap Indian food
-riding double-decker buses
-watching soccer highlight on the MTR
-living and working in the same building
-standing on the street corner in Tsim Sha Tsui in the evening and watching people of every nationality walk by under the electrifying neon lights
-being able to leave my house and twenty minutes later be hiking in the mountains
-old men playing Chinese chess in the not-quite-a-park area under the highway access ramp
-seeing six or seven old guys watching said game of chess with the intensity of world cup fans

A little adventure

In part, I wanted to live and work overseas for the sheer adventure of it all. It’s been quite a ride. In the last 24 months, I:

-ate eel, chicken feet, squid, pig’s ear, jelly fish, cow tongue, and yak
-speared shrimp in the waters off the coast of Sumatra
-slept on the roof of a wooden boat in Halong Bay in northern Viet Nam
-smuggled Bibles into China
-dined and slept in the home of a traditional Hmong family in the hills of Sapa
-rode elephants in Northern Thailand
-had -not one but two- very large boa constrictor draped around my neck
-walked through the slums of Manila
-motored through the Mekong Delta
-stood in a Chinese police line-up
-floated down a Thai river on a bamboo raft
-was nibbled by a rat as I slept while stranded in an Indonesian village
-hiked the terraced riced patties in the mountains of Northern Vietnam
-crawled through WWII bunkers built to repel the invading Japanese
-got hustled –not once, but twice- on the streets of Bangkok
-zip-lined through the jungle canopy of Southeast Asia
-saw orung utans up close and in the wild in Borneo
-watched the sun rise over an 800-year-old village in China
-rode sampans, cyclos, tuk-tuks, trams, cable cars, sleeper trains, overnight buses, and motorcycle sidecars
-climbed on and among the ancient ruins of Ankor Wat
-hiked the Great Wall of China
-bicycled atop the wall of an ancient Chinese city
-was stung by a sea urchin in the Gulf of Thailand

I would say that that is about enough adventure to keep me sated.

At least for a while.