enfolded // one: I am, forever, inevitably yours.
equal parts lament and love letter: a first attempt at returning to Origin City.
But I haven’t described Dream City. I’ll try to. It is a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. […] Why your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner […] — well, anyone can see you come from Dream City. In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues.
Zadie Smith, from ‘Speaking in Tongues’ in Changing My Mind.
When I look at the context from which I emerge, I wonder if I’m not part of an intermission, a chasm in formation between movements. Perhaps it is less grand than this. Perhaps we are but puddles and tentative leaps across into— and yet it feels still larger than this.
I think of my brother’s face and mine— the way we both make meaning of this world with the memory of sharp Swedish winters, intertwining woods north from the Rhein. My brother doesn’t stop laughing in these childhood homes of ours and I wonder at the kind of person he would have become had he grown up under a skyline of high-rises and rising hills. He would hardly have been less cheerful, but what of his movement, his language, his point of view, his relationship with his sense of self— I wonder whether he has reached these questions yet. We are six years apart after all. I hope he never stops laughing. Though I cannot speak for him, I do know this of myself— though there is semblance of home in my features and in the compositional characters of my name, I feel to be of inconsistent (I will not say insufficient) substance to those who grew up in our so-called Origin City. I rarely call this city home— not because it isn’t, but because I have rarely felt close enough to make so powerful a claim. I know what the word Hong Konger means to the people who have lived their lives there, grown up breathing its air, flourishing in the language of Cantonese. Its people are easy to anger and its identity not so easy to seize or erase or manipulate. When you have crossed the line, you will know— you should know well by now. I know the weight of your pulse as one who knows herself unable to bear it.
I have never run from you. I have never had to. My story is that I was never there so entirely à cause de mes parents and I will claim no other tale. In my plurality of cross-cultural experience, I am all of many and none consistently— and that is okay, I have long accepted this as okay. I have thrived without a fixated idea of home. Zadie writes of an in-between realm known as Dream City— a place of dualities, contradictions, multiplicity of identities. Such a place speaks of home to me, more home-like than any particular city in this world. As much as it feels real to me, in the expressions of others it has often reflected back in intense unreality. Often they don’t believe me and so I appear to them unreliable. They don’t understand how it (I) can exist, and so they choose to dismiss it (me).
All this while I have come to understand how I have been estranged and kept a stranger from what is supposedly mine. Origin City knows a different set of multiplicity than myself— one has only to look up the history of my Origin City to know what I mean. I have always felt at one with your contradictions and there has been no bitterness with regards to all our shared differences— only a vague longing and the ache which accompanies not being able to approach you with all of what I am. I feel half-hearted to you often. Perhaps this is partly due to our reality: very little of our simultaneous muchness, for lack of a better word, overlaps. We make for an awkward and tentative Venn diagram, you and I. Even so, I have the satisfaction of observing you from a distance like some unrequited lover— but even then, I have often wondered how to love you in the first place. I have always felt out of place by your side.
The last time I flew to you, two years ago, I stayed for just under two full months. That was longer than the longest time I’ve ever spent with you (aka the occasion of my birth and we lingered but one month before returning to Tokyo). On this trip, I was completing an internship at an ad agency, jumping on mini vans and trams to get here and there, criss-crossing between English and Cantonese in the workplace to ensure that I could be a part of the conversation. For what was definitely not the first time, thoughts of an alternate life lived here overwhelmed— what must it have been like to emerge from the womb and grow up among faces I could see myself in. Had all this been mine, had my mother’s tongue been mine, had all my friends and family surrounded me in prevailing and familiar neighbourhoods—
Each step of that summer were hesitant leaps into moving traffic. I was as one amateur swimmer must feel in the fast lane of a crowded pool. The imposter syndrome has always been very real. You cannot fake proximity or likeness; it always ends in exposure of what you really are anyway. The self-realising contradiction in the attempt to draw closer to the centre is the duality of wanting to cause as little trouble as possible to the sway of local life and to simultaneously grab hold of everything and anything in order to learn. For every convincing step forward at work, I was no winning performer in quick-fire exchanges by the coffee machine or the banter during walks to and from the local noodle spot. They do not know what to say to me beyond the odd question about France and a remark on how good my English is. Every time I ask someone to share the context of a retort to me, they tell me it’s no worries, it wasn’t important. But what if I told you it was every bit important to me. I can hardly blame them; the intimacies of culture and the catching of social cues can’t exactly be summarised in five minutes. I’ve never tried to pretend more locality than I can naturally join in on, but my contradictions keep us apart (in that my people expect me to know things I cannot possibly know because my features are theirs)— and it is thus that I am inevitably othered by my own people. They are hardly at fault here; it is just the way things are when I have your face but don’t sound a bit like you and know nothing of how you live.
I have never been able to draw conclusions about you. Your very nature rejects it. Every attempt has been left filled with contradictions (my own as much as yours) and open-ended questions. Perhaps that is why I have always been slightly terrified of you— your truth is towering. Though your surface is ever-changing, your roots hug close to each other. I see through you, I know what your heart is because those whom I love in this life are yours. This shared core is the only intangible tangible for me. Now, with your skin flayed and barely recognisable, I watch wide-eyed from afar— I don’t want to see you like this. Most unsettlingly, your name feels like familiar fabric now. In your creases and your irreparable ruptures, we are finally one.
This union is no occasion for celebration. This is grief. I wish you didn’t have to feel as I have all my life— unsettled, disowned, dispersed. I wish it didn’t take your fall to give me the courage to face you. I’m trying to wrap my head around this: much of me feels an absolute fraud for reaching out only now. I wish I knew more of those who were also born in the aftermath of Handover— who knew you better than I ever could but who also know the impossibility of feeling quite on par with our parents’ side of history. You have always been a city in crisis. You, who have been torn between nations, toyed by ruling parties, idolised by Hollywood, made a token of by businessmen, denied and instead fetishised by expatriates. Perhaps I am like you in more ways than I’d imagined. Perhaps we are similar not only in disparity but also in resilience and shared identity crisis.
From Dream City, I have watched you break apart— chasms filling with the millions who attempt to flee— we used to see you fill the news, your fists and statements flying sky high. For a moment, every headline was you, the bloodied flags of freedom filled my days and nights. Then, as quickly as you seized attention, you were denied it. Not hearing about you on major platforms made me realise how little the world could give you. If you had to break, I wish you fell to the ground while the world had little else to think about. I wish it was a Sunday afternoon, when everyone was waiting for something to feel— perhaps then they would cry for you more, work up some more anger for you. I wish you got the attention and the action you so deserve. Your insides are still being spilled on the streets and your children clutch blank pages in protest, wordless, but never silent. I have reckoned with how little I have/am able to do. I saw how the masked university students protested for you in the UK, saw how they were threatened exposure and violence, saw how universities did nothing but avert their eyes. I saw how in speaking out, I would endanger the lives of loved ones. I saw how every petition I signed, every post I shared was met with silence among my network. I see the limits of my own freedoms, though I speak a whole continent away. I saw that my distance doesn’t take away the risk. I saw how you and I are one and the same after all.
It doesn’t feel like Dream City where I stand. I vividly see those fleeing— parents who fear for their children and are inclined to raise them abroad, families who must leave loved ones behind, passports that will become British, Canadian, Australian— this is the dispersal of a people— what now of the name of Origin City. By nature of a one-way ticket, we send your name to the grave, one by one. As for those we have left behind… All this weighs heavy on me because I see myself in all their departures— I wonder at the next generation of children who will speak Cantonese with hesitation from foreign grounds, who will clamber for their broken histories when they reach adolescence— as for myself, I know it will be years and years before the possibility of safe return. I have said too much.
Looking back two years ago when I had the chance to intimately get to know you, I feel overwhelmingly lucky. I hugged you tight. I got one last good look at you before you were mutilated— and so this is my survivor’s guilt. I hug my mother and my brother tight.
Was it from another time? Another space?
Was it just television?
Or a hallucination? A prophecy? A fragment of collective memory?
- Agnes Lam, ‘The rape of a nation’ (1997).
I know my home is not a country anymore,
just a festering colony of the mind:
- Jennifer Wong, ‘Gift’ (2013).
We must perhaps settle for a strange reunion abroad. There is far more than one impossible chasm being attempted crossing here— the physical one of travelling as far from home as possible in the flight from tyranny, the cultural one which accompanies distance (as I know well), and the emotional one— the one which carries yet-to-be-fathomed trauma, grief, the lingering of unanswered phone-calls between the protester son and his mother, the anger—
The relationship you and I must have now cannot be the relationship we used to have. I need you to take me for all my inconsistencies. I need you to forgive me for my absence and my distance and my broken spoken tongue. I need you to let me fight for you. I need you to let me try even when I am silenced. I need you to know that my resilience is the one thing that keeps me yours entirely.
enfolded // one: I am, forever, inevitably yours.
this is amazing. I’m from HK & have always lived here, & many of your words resonated with me so quickly in the way you describe this place. thank you for sharing and articulating about Hong Kong, it feels so rare and precious to see someone write about it (& their personal experience of it) with such mastery and aptness!
2018? I am not sure if we met in Summer 2018.
Dear Jas, things are fading, enchanting sceneries in HK are fading, too! Are dreams made to believe? I am getting weaker on this.... while soul is aging....