The Doppelgänger Reality

It's been a while since I've been writing here, and the reason for that is straightforward: I haven't been writing much at all. Since the pandemic began, I've been unmotivated to write or create (other than, of course, those saccharine reflections upon Choate and high school you'll see if you scroll down — necessary grasps at closure which only writing could accomplish). 

Nothing in particular has been a root cause of this stagnation, I don't think. Rather, it's been the collection of little unhappinesses which have come together to form one big unhappiness, the way a drop of water on your skin could is unthinkingly brushed away but a downpour of rain soaks. Living through a pandemic, living through 2020, is not merely enervating in the physical sense — it is emotionally tiring, too. It feels so hard to retain your identity in regular life (writer, artist, athlete, whatever) when the world around you feels nonsensical, feels saturated with bullshit, feels as if it will implode at any moment. Not one thing is off balance, but almost everything.

I am especially disheartened by America. Hong Kong, for all the turmoil it's endured in the last few years, feels like an urban idyll compared to the country in which I attended boarding school, the country where I am supposed to be now. The States, for all its proclaimed progressivism, appears to me like the wreckage of some unspoken disaster. We're on the precipice of an election that feels like picking between taking a shot of sour milk or a shot of cyanide, and on the table now are the rights of BIPOC, of the queer community, of women, of all the people whom the system marginalizes and tries to stymie in life. Divisiveness rules society. I don't remember what America at peace feels like, at least certainly not a modern America.

My only connection to America for now is online. Yet I feel a little disgusted every time I pick up my phone and scroll through social media — I'm sick of it. I'm sick of seeing Instagram infographics, snapshots of cruel injustices prettified within clean, minimalist squares because that's the only way my generation will reliably pay attention to anything. I silently curse my friends in America who think it's okay to party in this current climate. I despise (right-wing) politicians for the way they've subverted the foundations of American politics and made the country a laughing stock for the rest of the world. A certain anxiety always creeps up on me whenever I click on those icons at the top of my Instagram homepage; I brace myself for something awful just one tap away.

Can we rewind? Or can we skip ahead? This is the scary part, and I don't want to watch it.

In my free time I think a lot about pre-pandemic life. How far away it seems. I miss the unforgettable smell (stench?) of the Choate dining hall, the way the pizza's and soup's odors would linger on your clothes as you hiked down from Hill House to your next class. I fall asleep sometimes thinking about my oil diffuser, and the wondrous smell of artificial lemongrass and tangerine I would run through my room at night. And I almost always return to the watercolor blues and crimsons of the Italian sunset, that magical evening we had gelato by the Piazza Navona. I was inhospitably reminded of this memory during my online Art Humanities lecture on Bernini, in which the Fountain of the Four Rivers was discussed tangentially by strangers through Zoom windows. Part of me still thinks that, at any moment, I can break the fourth wall of my life, and that my surroundings will fall apart to reveal a director, a camera, someone yelling cut!, reminding me that the chaos that's ensued this year is all part of some elaborate, dystopian fiction.

I realize this all comes off as dismissive of my life in Hong Kong. No, not at all — that's not what I'm trying to say. I absolutely love Hong Kong; everyone who knows me knows that. My sadness now has nothing to do with where I am, but rather, what I am — and what everyone else is — living through. Existing through 2020 is something of a collective trauma. To have adjusted to this doppelgänger reality, we have all been forced to give up who we were in our past lives. We are supposed to carry on as "normal" when everything around us is as abnormal as can be. And there lies a social need to continue carving out routine for ourselves in this horrific parallel life, while none of us can hardly appreciate the meaning of the bigger picture still being painted into existence. Whatever you want to call it — a phase, a fever dream, a catastrophe — this chapter of our lives will send aftershocks well into the future.

These days I've split my time between family, online school, going out with friends, and mindless time-wasting on the Internet: League of Legends, YouTube, etc. Like I said, I have not been productive at all, at least not on the personal front. No writing, no creating, not even too much reading. Yet I don't buy in to the phrase people throw around — "it's okay to feel unmotivated," or something like that — because, at least for me, not writing is synonymous with not being. Writing gives me meaning, so not writing essentially means I'm living a meaningless life. I would be a hollow shell, mechanically carrying out motions. That acceptance of complacency robs me of my personhood. It is dangerous; I do not buy it.

Rather, I have forged a loophole for myself. Instead of feeling dejected, I see myself right now as living through something of an interim. What I am living now is not life, at least not my life, but the life of someone identical to me with one exception; he finds joy not where I find joy, but in another place: indulgence. These days I spend my time on purely hedonistic pursuits. I am not the type to go out too much; but he is. I am not the kind of person who wastes time on Netflix; but he is. I worried a lot about everything in high school; but he tries not to. I never considered myself too much of an epicurean, but people change, don't they?

I had high hopes for 2020. After I got in to Columbia, I began to subconsciously place all my hopes on it. It was there, in that most perfect school for me, I was to find myself, to make myself vulnerable, to do all the sorts of ridiculous, cliched things young people do when they move to New York. While I did enjoy Choate for many reasons, I was aching for a change, for a place I didn't feel suffocated by competition and toxicity, by deadlines and rules. In my freshman year, I was going to do all the things Joan Didion must have done when she first left Sacramento: step off a train at Grand Central (or for me, plane at JFK); make friends with everyone I meet; attend rooftop parties and drink cheap alcohol; wander around the Guggenheim and Central Park on Saturdays; speculate in whispers to my roommates about the people I thought I made meaningful eye contact with on the path that day; taste freedom — real freedom — in that delightful, fabled little thing called youth. All these hopes, of course, have sadly not been realized. I doubt they ever will be, at this point.

Like I said, though, I can't complain about Hong Kong. In many ways being back here — and for such an extended length of time — has been revelatory in its own way. It goes without saying that this place is always deeply linked to my heart, but my experience is qualified by much, much more than the parties, the multitude of cafes and restaurants, the hikes through Little Hawaii or Wong Nai Chung. It's very much about my sense of belonging. Hong Kong has, for quite a few years, existed in me as the place I would return to temporarily (though still lovingly, of course). But now, it feels much more permanent. Over the last few months, I've reconnected with old friends, grown closer with people I thought were acquaintances, and made solid friendships with people who were complete strangers not two months ago. My Cantonese has improved considerably — and consequently, so have my interactions with just about everyone (minus my English-speaking friends, of course). And I feel so grateful for the extra time I never thought I'd get to spend with my family, whom I see far too little of. These opportunities sustain me.

In many ways, living here now feels like a return to the days I still attended German Swiss — a homecoming, almost, to the times where Hong Kong was the only place I really knew, and far away from home meant the New Territories, not Wallingford. Although now, having attended school in America for a while, I would describe my existence in Hong Kong as more of an observer than of a participant — certainly not my choice, but it is a necessary sacrifice for anyone who leaves their home for so long. 

I crave the day when this year has long faded as a distant memory. I cannot wait until our current existence feels the way a nightmare feels by lunchtime — a nebulous impression of some unreal, distant disaster we no longer need to care for. Imagine it: a life without masks, without worrying about distancing ourselves, without any of the inhibitions we are shackled with today. A place where we don't wake up to the reality of living through an awful moment in human history, so normalized to us by now because we've numbed ourselves to the irrationalities of our existences. A time where the world is at peace.

Such a life feels vaguely out of reach. But I try to remember it, to hold onto it. That fading memory of pre-pandemic reality, that feeling of opportunity and agency and freedom — that is the fiction I hold onto these days in order to carry on.

Notes on Interning

Written from my desk at Savills.

I crave routine like you would crave sleep or food. Which is, I cannot deal with the absence of schedule or the prospect of idle vegetation and air-conditioning at home. I need an order, a strict one, an order which stems from high school, an experience so rushed and so packed and so filled with short-term destinations — a train with a long itinerary of stops ahead of it — that I eventually staked out my entire existence on scheduling. I need things to do, even if it means mindless work, means folding envelopes and checking up names and doing things I can already tell I won’t be doing in the future.

Of course, I didn’t know this was the case until I actually ended up here, in this office. The reason I gave myself for wanting an internship over the summer was the sake of getting “experience,” whatever the word, so often thrown around, actually means. Experience in the workplace, getting up at 7:30 in the morning everyday, experience wearing Oxfords and typing up spreadsheets and learning etiquette at business lunches. Experience, as I realize now, that might be necessary somewhere in the future, but is surely not necessary at the moment. I am eighteen, vaguely close to actual adulthood — and life — but am not quite at the precipice of falling into it yet. I have time. I wanted to be able to tell myself that I didn’t waste away the summer lounging around — but perhaps lounging around would have been a more recuperative use of my time.

-

I like my desk. I’m by the window, a wide window enviably overlooking the Kowloon harbor. The skies are magnificent; because they’re not blocked by buildings, as so much of Hong Kong tends to be, the nimbuses and swirling cirri stretch upward to infinities. The weighty clouds, just barely grazing the Tsuen Wan mountaintops, dwarf the buildings below them, as if they were stacks of Lego and not the concrete edifices we all know them to be up close. And I also see boats drifting by — the Star Ferries, wooden junks, an odd liner — streaking the blue water white in their wakes.

I wonder when I’ll ever work my way to an office like this one.

-

Something scares me about the nature of office life. It might be the permanence of all of it — the lack of a collective knowledge that this is all temporary, that this will all end some day, the way kids in high school count down the clock together to the inevitable goodbye. Everyone is here because they chose to, here until they leave; everyone is not finding their own path but already well on the way of journeying across it. Everything is set and decided — tomorrow follows today, and then after tomorrow comes the day after that, in a cycle that guarantees no end.

Maybe I’m scared of letting go of childhood and of innocence, of the promise of youth and of the freedom to do whatever you want rather than whatever is wanted of you. People here are professional, tidied, learned. They are here to earn money, to forge careers, to network — all goals I’ve never quite understood nor felt the need to dedicate myself to. Part of me feels as though it’s a necessary change, a shedding of the skin that eventually hits everyone at some point in life, but another part of me wants only to cling onto what I feel like I’m drifting away from: the summers of youth and adventure and being free from obligation.

Maybe it is simply life I’m scared of — real life, conventional life, life according to adults, and career building, and reading the newspapers over coffee in the morning and meetings in the afternoon. Life as I’ve seen people around me live, but never quite accepted that I, too, would one day start on. On the edge of adulthood, I’m scared of being flung straight off the cliff in a free fall, realizing I’ve hit the ground only twenty years from now, in a house with a job and an unclear memory of having been young once. I don’t want to wake up one day awash with pain and regret that I didn’t cling onto the top for dear life, if only just to breathe in the air at the zenith just a while longer.

Or worse, I don’t want to hit the ground feeling nothing at all, numb to the sheer happiness of what it felt like to be a teenager, the very opposite of refinement and meetings and work at 9 in the morning, lunches at 12:30, and dinners into the evenings but not going through into the late nights. I don’t want to have forgotten who I am.

-

Where am I headed? Where have I been?

The answers keep shapeshifting and correcting themselves in my mind.

-

I must admit I really enjoy being around the people here. We live our teenage lives surrounded by peers close to us in age and parents with decades on top of us. We don’t mingle with others going through different phases of life, have no chances to get lunch or chat on the MTR with people who are 24 and fresh out of college, or 32 and have recently gotten married and had children, or even those who are 60 and close to retirement but still have it in them to not only go for a drink with the company’s team but to be the ones chugging the most. In these three weeks at my company, I’ve been surrounded by an entire array of experiences, a long catalogue of the many stages life will eventually drag me on through at some point. A preview of what’s to come which I honestly don’t entirely hate. Strange.

A part of me thinks I’m being cynical or naïve to resist growing up. There are other joys out there, greater joys awaiting people who eventually get funneled on to a new stage in life. Interning is proof of that — hard, experiential evidence that moving on may not be as bad as I had made it out to be. I had always been attached to my youthful self — particularly the self I was at fifteen — but maybe it’s time for closure on that period of my life. Maybe it’s time I learned to let go.

-

Uncertainty is a recurring motif in my life.

The Story of My Choate

My final Journalism assignment — and assignment, ever — at Choate.

The Story of My Choate

A line from Aeneid 1

December just began, and for some reason, I can't stop thinking about this line from Aeneid 1:

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit

— very fitting for where I am in life right now.

—

Anyways, here's a celebration of some moments I caught on camera. 

January Discontinuities

from January.

hoping is futile —

doing the rest of the laundry

and airing it out on a late night,

blended stardust pouring in,

a soul grasping blindly in a dark room,

artwork abandoned.

it is poetry

and words, and music,

drink, sandy shoes, and moonlight pouring into two-thirty,

creeping past the glare of the sodium lamps standing guard,

etching memories onto the sidewalk,

carving a home in sixteen, seventeen.

it is romanticism,

fairytales, happy endings, and a good bedtime story —

back alley chasing, coffee store daydreaming,

door opening, slight breeze pouring in,

tired pastels coloring the afternoon.

it goes to print.

when the most important moment comes,

it hovers in the air,

flitters there, for a second —

a speck of dust, or,

an infinity quite like nothing —

so very beautiful, so delicate,

gone before you know.

Letting Go

Before my grandmother — 嫲嫲, as I knew her — had begun to forget, she cooked. 

Inside the cramped kitchen in the old apartment, she would concoct the most wonderful dishes, a textbook image of a perfect housewife. In my youth, it was a routine, a resolute variable in a distastefully changing world. With radio static and the gentle sea breeze through the open window as white noise, she would slice, steam, and boil just in time for my parents to come home. I alone knew why my grandmother did it, the cooking. I knew, all along — it was a charade, a game she played with herself. It was to remind her of a former life, as if the mere hand movements or familiar aroma of fish sauce would somehow liberate her from time and revert her to sweeter memories: the red-bricked cottage; the air of the Fukien countryside; and, of course, my grandfather.

I will never forget what 嫲嫲 told me one day as reclined on her bed, a frail figure sending ripples across a creased ashen mattress. It was one of those special moments: one that lingered without reason or forewarning; an indent on a memory; a grainy film on repeat. As if bestowing upon me a divine revelation, she placed a frail hand on my shoulder and spoke with an age-old softness. “The strongest man,” she said, “is the one that knows to let go.”

As all stories go, my grandmother eventually moved out of the apartment to a retirement home — a rustic, thronged place halfway across Hong Kong Island. This was the waning period, a conclusion to her penultimate era and beginning to the end. Perhaps it was because of this that she became an unfamiliar version of herself altogether: no longer a woman who spent her days against a backdrop of steam and seasoning, not even one who wandered by the South China seaside in the mornings or the complex’s gardens in the afternoons. No, there was none of that. After the move, all she had was a small room in an elderly home, a curtain and nothing more separating her from nurses, from afternoon mah-jongg, from the occasional visitor, from the world. 

And so, a younger version of me came to know the lifeless odor of the home every Sunday afternoon. It suffused the air, this alien stench, staining the whole facility like an expired vignette. As we drove home in the dying afternoon, I’d feel the sterility still dampening my T-shirt like vomit. It was only when I stripped and scrubbed myself in the bathtub later each night that I managed to remove this infectious layer, this physical coat of chronic demise. 

On better days, of which there were more as the end approached, my father would drive us to Tin Hau to take my grandmother out for the day. We would traverse the island and drive her to her special places — her 老地方. There were only a few: the congee place in Jordan; the old mall in South Horizons; the monastery in the New Territories — incidentally, where my grandfather’s ashes are kept. At these locales, she would break character and laugh, as if, even for just a fleeting moment, walking onto the cobblestoned alleys and marbled verandas of her history would allow her to access her fondest memories, sealed off today by circumstance. Again, though no one said it, I knew. I knew exactly why we did this. It was for her to escape the monotony and to relive a life long gone. We were supplying an inhaler to the victim of a terminal asthma attack.

The truly insightful are precise in picking out each flaw of a man’s life, each imperfection of the human condition. My grandmother was one such person. She could look at a face and from it locate every insecurity underneath the surface. She could hear a man speak and know exactly what secrets he held to himself. She could ask the most probing questions and know even without an answer what words would come spilling out. I know this because she raised my father, a man conditioned to defend himself against precisely such weapons, a man who drowned himself in education, in criminal law textbooks, a man who eventually became a litigator of the courts. 

嫲嫲 asked me one time whether it is more painful to have forgotten that something happened or to have missed it entirely. In the end, it was she that did not have this choice. One of the final burdens of being an incredible woman, so it goes, was a precursory departure from reality — dementia. Arthritis to her mind claimed her before the other ending could.

For me, it happened in stop-motion, chunky frames disconnected from one another. It opens with my mother pulling me off the schoolbus, just as it was about to depart for home. My mother hailing a taxi and muttering an unfamiliar address. Hearing one word — the Cantonese for “hospital” — and understanding all that needed to be understood. Watching the pale blue evening fade to black through the window. A pair of high heels followed by sneakers, leaving the car and going through glass doors. Standing in a waiting room for eternity. Heart quivering slightly. Being ushered down the hall, third door on the right. Nurse pushing the door open. Walking in, slowly. Por Por and Anna in the corner, eyes darting from floor to ceiling fan to bed. Connie leaning on the windowsill beside them, legs trembling ever so gently. My brother, not there. My mother and I, both saying a few things to her. Eyes landing on dark brown marbles, hushed lips meeting a fragile smile, strained whispers greeted by silence. 

And the last shot — my father, clasping a pair of delicate hands he would touch for the last time. 

The news came to me in the same way it had happened: peacefully. Mami dialed me after school the next day. She asked me if I wanted sushi for dinner tonight, and I told her anything was ok. She didn’t say anything about what had happened, and from this omission I learned everything. I called Babi after. He told me he had stayed the night at the hospital and was still in the lobby filing some paperwork. He asked me how was school and what are you working on right now and I said nothing much and asked him when will you be back home for dinner? Mami wants to get sushi. We didn’t speak about it. It was a balloon aching to be popped, but all we did was let it deflate slowly on its own. 

I still wonder what hell my father must have faced on the day of the funeral. It is one thing to have witnessed your mother’s lifelines dart frantically on a screen before yielding to a flat line, but it is an entirely new experience to see that same woman’s motionless, beautied corpse lying finally at rest. It was the first time I had seen him cry.

So, there it was. A woman sent off. A coffin in flames. A lifetime condensed to an urn. 

—

The last time I saw 嫲嫲 was a few months later, in the late afternoon of a crisp autumn day. My father and I were in the garden, basking in the last few surges of August air. It was then that I noticed a soft azure glimmer in the evening haze, a jewel pinched out by dark green foliage. It was a butterfly. 

“Butterflies aren’t supposed to be here, not at the southernmost tip of Hong Kong. No, no. That’s not a butterfly. That’s your grandmother,” Babi told me. To my wonder, he spoke with an air of conviction, half smiling. “She’s here to say farewell.” 

My father was raised in superstition — he is a man with peculiar beliefs, not all of which are derived from logic or legitimacy. But, this time, I think that he may have been onto something. The butterfly was my grandmother. He believed it, I believed it, and that was all that mattered. Here was the woman we loved, visiting us for a final time. 嫲嫲 had come to say goodbye.

In time, we will all meet the same end. Whatever precedes it — a morning spent wandering along an esplanade; an afternoon hunched in a kitchen; a night wasted pretending desperately that the ceiling was the sky, that you were anywhere but here — is of little consequence. When the time comes, the passersby and the taxi driver and the nurse and Por Por and Connie and Anna and my brother and my mother and my father and you and I — we will all be gone. That is not a choice. That never was.

This is the tragedy we all share. By nature or by circumstance, we will all arrive at the same fate. How peculiar. Death — the singular doctrine we know for sure, and at the same time, the one mystery we will never know anything about. 

It is useless to linger, it is useless to wait, it is useless to try resurrect a memory from an inescapable designation six feet underground. There is no tangible extinguisher or emotional narcotic that will stop the casket from going up in smoke. Though, I did realize something on that day so many years ago, as the crematorium faded to a speck on the horizon through the car’s rear window. 嫲嫲 was right. She had been right all along. If everything we love in this world must end, then the strongest thing anyone can do — the only thing, really — is let go.