In the summer rain

In the summer rain

Behind me the water patters down on top of the aircon that cools this room. Stuck out the window, it is exposed to the weather. It is exposed to the water currently sluicing down the side of the building, from overhang to windowsill. Thus the stacato thump timp tump thump of heavy drips and intermittent splatters behind my head. In Hong Kong, at nine thirty PM on a Thursday, it’s raining. The same would have been true on Wednesday, or most of August. Or most of July. Or much of June. The summer is one of the wettest on record. July was the second wettest month of the name, behind only a typhoon in ’94.

Our walls are decomposing, slowly, as the water seeps into the plaster. It’s nothing dramatic, just the gradual peel of paint, bubble and crumble of the base material. Mostly it is the knowledge of wear that can not be fixed until the weather changes. Once the rain ends we can sand, scrape, patch, and paint again, fixing a part of the wall that has been repaired dozens of times before. This is an old building. Everything has been repaired before. Often the same spots over and over by the same workers, by the same residents. By us, now in our fifth year in this apartment, both intimately familiar with its quirks and totally surprised by the changes. In the three years between our first four years and this one numerous things were patched and caulked. Hardware was swapped, the kitchen was re-done. Some of it for the better, much of it out of necessity. Some of it just because. Through weather we are learning which is which.

Rain, in any tropically-inclined city, is a trade. It’s welcome, for it drops the heat, holds down the daily highs by a few critical degrees C. The difference between 32 and 28 is the ability to go running comfortably, the ability to wear pants occasionally, the ability to walk long distances without considering whether doing so is critical or whether it could be avoided. Rain, in the hottest months of the year, is a blessing. And yet rain for months exposes the weaknesses in drainage systems, in mold prevention systems, in humidity control. With enough rain everything drips and everything leaks. Especially old things. Especially old moldy things that have seen years of typhoons and humidity.

As a child of the east coast I’m familiar with humidity. Without that background Hong Kong would be harder, like it has been for my partner. The transition from Colorado to South East Asia, from the mountains to the ocean, even by way of San Francisco, is a shock. Nothing can ever be left out on the counter overnight. This mantra, so normal to me and so unfamiliar to her, remains a shock when told to those from her home town, where bread, fruit, and butter all survive for days without worry.

In Hong Kong they’d be slathered in ants and chased by geckos, rotten and working their way towards spore production.

And yet when the sky overhead opens during dinner and we are able to skirt buildings home, crossing only four streets in our ten minute walk, emerging largely unscathed despite the downpour, I know Hong Kong is also built for this weather. The overhangs of older buildings, now banned by the poorly-considered code updates of modernization, provide shelter in even the stiffest rain. Standing under one outside the 7-Eleven the other night, buying milk for the youth, I laughed with a fellow customer at the storm just begun. Luckily for me I had only one block to go, and mostly overhangs to get there. Luckily for them they lived around the corner, though on the flat side of the building. Their level of saturation would be determined by their speed with keys on the downstairs gate, mine by my ability to cross the one road at a run. Both of us would be fine, we reckoned, despite the storm obscuring the skyscrapers of Kowloon.

This is Hong Kong in the rain.

My people

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My people

I find them on escalators, walking up the left side. I find them in our building’s stairwell. I find them somewhere in the long, multi-level stairs of Hong Kong’s Central station, breathing a bit hard in the air-conditioned quiet. I find them in the Apple Store’s full floor stairs, a useful shortcut in Causeway Bay’s Hysan Place. I find them walking beside the travelators in NRT and HKG, in ZRH and HEL, intent on their destinations and the pace of their approach.

My people are an odd bunch. They are constantly fitting backpacks into overhead bins and below economy seats, traveling sans roller bags. They bicycle to dinners in Tokyo or Paris or Dongguan, and never rent cars unless on long road trips. They swim in the public pools of Hong Kong, remembering 5 HKD coins for the lockers. My people, they’re weirdos: they walk to the Lyft lines at LAX rather than wait 20 minutes for a shuttle bus because time is time with people. They know it’s possible to be in a friend’s downtown Taipei neighborhood one hour after landing via public transportation with preparation. These are my people: in public and prepared, they’re comfortable in so many places.

My people are at night markets in Bangkok and Taipei, they’re in multi-floor nightclubs in Osaka for someone’s birthday after a long factory visit, they’re wandering Wukang Lu in Shanghai late at night on a Tuesday, they’re comfortable in Beijing bar crawls and biking home from shows in London. My people have tickets to concerts in countries they don’t reside in.

If this sounds hard to imagine, if these people sound too foreign, consider the other parts instead. My people are Waldorf school parents, or graduates. They’re knitting transit card holders and sewing pants for mosquito-infested forest schools. They know how to raise sheep, at least theoretically, and how to use power tools, definitely. They cut each other’s hair and do baking projects on weekends. My people are comfortable in deep water, whether that be the ocean off a boat in Hong Kong or a lake in upstate New York, whether that be Boracay in the spring or Thailand in the fall. My people have swum the far side of Capri after a hike and a ferry ride, though their Italian is to be improved.

My people host parties when leaving a country so that their friends can take their belongings. My people spend hours reading about visas, spend weeks scouting neighborhoods in countries they don’t yet reside in, spend months wondering if their jobs will support these relocations. My people almost never live where they were born.

And yet when they do, or when they are temporarily, they’re happy and free. They are often busy, clearing driveways of snow and sidewalks of leaves. These people, my people, shop local regardless of location. In their home towns they go to farmer’s markets, chatting with vendors they’ve known for years. They visit stores they grew up supporting, glad to hear the proprietors plans for retirement. In foreign lands they seek out odd neighborhood shops and buy the produce or wine that the owners recommend. They’re excited to know the humans behind whatever counter, wherever they may be.

Mostly my people, as strange as it seems, are optimistic. They should be, given how far they’ve already gotten. Their curiosity has given them wings.

Sento moments

Sento moments

Neck deep in the hot tub I contemplate people. A man washing himself slowly puts on soap with a sound like his skin is on fire, a light hiss for every movement. An old man shaves with great care and then puts his stool back against the wall with equal reverence. A father teaches his son how to scrub, demonstrating each action with gestures larger than usual. Another father and son enter quietly, ten and forty, perhaps, and bathe next to each other barely speaking at all.

A well-tattooed man in his thirties winces at the medium tub, tips into it gingerly. Later he is in the cool tub calmly relaxing. For each of us, I think, some things are difficult. In the opposite corner of the bath house an older man sits neck deep in the tea tub, 42 degrees C, letting the scented water pull sweat out of his brow. He too winces, but does not move.

In the last year the sento has become a place of peace, an odd space for thinking time for this boy from upstate New York. On off nights, when 5’s is in the women’s side, I sit in the hot water until my brain starts to melt and consider things. Then, half melted, I sit in the cold tub until my body begins to shiver. And repeat. The process is elucidative, and lately in the meta sense. While I often work through the problems of the day, or things I have been meaning to reflect on, sometimes around rotation three I can focus on the act, on how these tubs in this quiet part of Tokyo are one of the place I’m comfortable enough, and at peace enough, to contemplate.

On weekends and at odd hours for all of us I talk to former colleagues, to professional contacts from one life or another. These are good calls, people I treasure, and I’m glad to see their faces and catch up on their journeys. I am glad to share some laughter. We hear each other’s stories and watch each other’s faces for a bit until we’re simply talking again, caught up to where we need to be to discuss things, to discuss what we’re trying to do. These are the conversations that come back to me in the sento, body boiled and chilled, with still a few minutes to go before bedtime. In these hours I can at last think about the conversations, about where people are trying to end up.

“I want to be a failed novelist in Europe,” an American friend tells me one morning. It’s a wonderful description of a dream. It’s so dear to me, to someone who spends so much time writing, to someone who spends so much time abroad. We joke about how job titles weren’t a goal we were raised with, though we have been caught aiming for them at times. We joke about how work can be aspirational but shouldn’t be defining, having spent long evenings together working at what we thought would make a startup successful. Sometimes it’s the pain that brings out the truth, or that makes us question what we’ve been doing. Sometimes it’s the memory that, while hard, those were happy times, and that we were excited to strive to create something with a group of people.

In the hot part of the baths again I think about theater, about how my long-ago passion was so much built on the same threads. Theater, I used to tell people, was about bringing humans together to build something unique. We aimed to create something that would only exist for a short time, with those specific humans. And once it was done we were inevitably sad to have lost that feeling, and would try again if given the chance.

The same truths describe startups. And that realization gives our calls more comfort. We all miss something that was, even though it was built to be missed, even though success brings the end of the part we enjoyed.

I watch an older man shave carefully around his nose, in the delicate way so common to humans wielding sharp instruments near their skin. Listening, I realize I can no longer hear 5’s singing in the women’s half. Time to extract my self from this heat, then, and head towards bedtime.

The pink bike

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The pink bike

In Colorado after another set of long loops we relax. Like my home town, Fort Collins is quiet in the summer. Our first day passes in back yards and playgrounds, with low thunder and the occasional shower breaking up the hot afternoon. Unlike the east coast the evenings are still chilly, and the lack of humidity makes everything easier to bear. After the sweat of Hong Kong we are grateful for the lack of moisture, and marvel at the idea of leaving things out on the counter for days. We encounter a few people while wandering to one playground or another: fellow dog walkers and a few joggers, a few neighbors on porches. Even the cars are slow in the heat.

After lunch on day two I pull out my favorite bike, which has lived in this garage since our move from San Francisco in twenty eighteen. Like most bicycles it has been through several iterations. The pink handlebar wraps that give it the name are the second generation, the first having crumbled off after a half decade’s hard use. The wheels, with white hubs, are replacements for the ones with white rims that were stolen one night in SF at Southern Pacific Brewing. And the whole thing, initially built as an engagement present for a woman who gave it to me on moving out of SF with her new boyfriend. She had done her own alterations, swapping the foot cages for pedals after a horrible crash, and was shedding old objects as she started anew. Like all objects that survive, it’s the story of the survival that is astonishing, not the item itself.

I pump the tires. Their odd mechanism takes me a few moments to figure out, the same as every time I’m here. Once a year is not frequently enough for my brain it seems, especially when those on our Tokyo e-bike, a Panasonic Gyutto, work slightly differently. I do not clean the dust, and barely any of the cobwebs, off the frame. Instead I pull on a hat and push off down the block, out into the flatlands of Fort Collins’ suburbs. It’s a peaceful ride save for Lemay, Prospect, and Drake, each of which are so filled with cars that I ride on the sidewalk instead of the shoulder-slash-bikelane, a horrible construct.

The next day, having eaten all the bagels, I get up even earlier and kick off, no hands out through the small streets to the bike path through CSU and onto Spring Creek Trail, new to me. At seven am everything is beautiful, the air still night time cool and the light vague through the trees pm. In t-shirt and shorts I ride the first half dozen blocks arms crossed for warmth, uncurling only to wave at dog walkers and joggers who too appreciate this moment of chill in the sunlight of Colorado’s summer.

At the bagel shop I’m talked into a dozen and have a coffee in the shade. I’ve been reading Andrea Gibson in spare moments like these and it’s perfect for a strip mall at seven thirty am on a Friday, folks swinging by in huge pickups to grab a bagel before work.

I ride home a different path, up Raintree onto Centre to the usual bike path, the Mason Trail, pumping steadily. Bikes are transportation, sure, but they can be love too, at least this one, at least when the roads are empty and the bike path smooth.

The next place we live will be better for biking, I tell myself. Like Fort Collins, though I’d prefer to pass more people than cars. Until then I’ll give this bike a spin every day that I’m able.

Considering the past

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Considering the past

In the spring the upcoming milestone dawns on me, and I pause to consider this site, twenty years old as of June. Out the window the flower sale for the new year is in full swing. The concrete soccer courts of Victoria Park are covered with tents, with stalls, with bins and pots of flowers. They are covered with people, a throng in from all over the territory, from the mainland, hunting flowers and snacks. It’s a busy time, here on the first day of a week-long holiday, at the end of a year.

It’s warm for a February in Hong Kong, up to twenty five Celsius, almost calling for shorts. Across the harbor the buildings of Tsim Sha Tsui glint in the late afternoon sun, and the mountains beyond are varying shades of gray in the haze. The air is not clear, but also not bad given the temperature. In a few days visibility should be better, all the factories to the north shut down and the wind blowing. Across the way a helper cleans a mop on the rooftop. Laundry is hanging on a half dozen roofs in front of me, the signs of a Saturday in the neighborhood. On the top of a water pipe several stories above, a solitary cockatoo squawks occasionally. It’s almost six, and I’m sure the rest of the local flock will arrive soon. Two more flap in as I write, joining their ambassador on the building’s roof. These birds are another great part of this neighborhood, the flock that lives mostly in the park and the hills behind Tai Hang.

For most of the last seven years Tai Hang has been home. It’s a small neighborhood, smaller than our last San Francisco one, the inner Mission near 16th. In some ways they’re not dissimilar, both flat spaces in hilly country. They too share quite a bit with the Inner Sunset, where we initially landed on moving to San Francisco. That first neighborhood was comforting because of the park and the trees, because of the other immigrants, the long-ago-arrived-now-locals who had brought noodles and bagels. I remember walking in the morning to Uncle Benny’s Donuts and settling in to write with a coffee and a bagel sandwich in the beginning of our time in San Francisco, before jobs and frisbee.

I remember too our humid neighborhood in Houston, that small second floor apartment above the car park. I remember biking and skateboarding to Rice, getting a coffee and sitting down at a table outdoors to write. I remember the peace of free wifi and secluded public space that’s one of the best gifts of American universities. I used to frequent a half dozen small spots, outdoor tables and benches, near flower trees and classrooms, dining areas, and the student center.

Writing later, from the third floor of the IFC looking out over Hong Kong’s harbor, from a spot I frequent after dropping 5’s at the ferry to school, the memories make me glad. What a gift it has been to have spent so many mornings over the past two decades relatively free, relatively at peace, and writing. I remember writing in an apartment in Shanghai when starting this site, before taking my first office job, before moving my writing time to Cotton’s in the evenings.

For all the hours that have been spent in transit, for all the hours spent at work on one small company or another, there have been hundreds spent with a notebook or a keyboard. Some of that output has produced this site. Quite a bit of it has been torn out of books and posted off to friends on various continents. Still more remains in the notebooks on our shelves here in Hong Kong, or in Tokyo. It remains in notebooks in my parent’s house, or in my in-law’s. In an odd way notebooks are the thing I accumulate most, behind only other people’s writing. And bicycles. The collected paper, scuffed and ink covered, is an accumulation of time spent thinking, of time to myself. It both proves it’s own value and enables the more social and extroverted parts of my life. Two decades after I began this site, all these bits and pieces remain a good record of life, and I appreciate each email they and this site have brought me in return, each friend I’ve been able to share something with because it was written down.

Someone recently said that they write to remind people they’re alive, that they write not to be forgotten. The idea made me laugh, because I so clearly write not to forget.

Here’s to another twenty of doing the same.