You’re Here Too by Tiffany Huang
In Shanghai, I told myself I found my future husband while wandering past the mottled bark of plane trees under spring canopies in the French Concession. He was a Chinese American on vacation from San Diego; I was on a business trip while living in Hong Kong. We had attended the same university in the midwest a decade prior. I was starved for love after five years of failed attempts, so every coincidence felt like fate. He emerged from the shadows of a dimly lit hotel lobby in a collared shirt and slicked back hair. He was gregarious and made for easy company. On our second date, I felt an urge to flee at dinner, overwhelmed by his overeagerness and interruptions, but stayed. Was it so bad that someone was excited to date me? I let him drunkenly plant his lips on mine in a bar called The Odd Couple.
A few months into our relationship, it seemed the best way to close the long distance was for me to move back to America. It was 2019, and Hong Kong’s pro-independence protests had been intensifying for months. I remember the heat emitting from millions of strangers’ bodies as we marched down Des Voeux Central Road. I attended the protests because I grew up in Taiwan. Hong Kong was our brother, and we were bound by the shared desire for our ways of life to be left undisturbed. Home was not a physical location, but a delicate set of historical conditions that made both places possible yet constantly under threat. I clung to a fragile sense of belonging, but now had to face the idea of leaving. The government ignored every peaceful demonstration against an extradition bill that allowed China to seize anyone they deemed a suspect, only halting its passage after protesters stormed past rubber bullets into the legislative building.
Home was not a physical location, but a delicate set of historical conditions that made both places possible yet constantly under threat.
Around the same time, the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread, and Hong Kong’s rules conveniently ratcheted up to constrict the population. As summer broke, the last Tiananmen vigil ever took place in Victoria Park, where a woman’s sterile voice recording warned that we were violating social distancing rules. Weeks later, Hong Kong passed the National Security Law, rendering all protests illegal. People scrambled to snatch up the final issue of the beloved newspaper Apple Daily. Months later, its founder, Jimmy Lai, was arrested.
It wasn’t easy for my boyfriend to find a job in Hong Kong, not that he tried very hard. Mid- to senior-level roles increasingly required fluent Mandarin; my conversations with him were mostly in English. Hong Kong was no longer “Asia’s world city,” as presented on airport posters, but an entity that served China. Multinational corporations were leaving, spooked by civil unrest and China’s influence over the island. My employer slowly migrated executives into two offices in Singapore and Shanghai. We were told not to post about the protests on our social media. In an instant, the line between our private and public lives disappeared.
Winter came. Group gatherings were capped at two and sick people were whisked off to the wilderness of Penny’s Bay for a 21-day quarantine. If one wasn’t physically ill, they were mentally ill. Paranoia abounded. If two people met at a cafe and ran into a friend, was that illegal? The city mandated everyone to check into public establishments with the LeaveHomeSafe app, but it felt like surveillance instead of safety, and people asked for paper forms so they could provide aliases.
I reluctantly accepted the idea of returning to America. I was luckier than the youth of Hong Kong, who felt hopeless about their future. I didn’t know how to say I couldn’t bear to part with my bohemian life by the northeastern shores of the city, the garlic vermicelli served in scallop shells on weekends in Sai Kung, and the shores quietly stroking the edges of public parks during late night raves. Most importantly, I had an active life as a writer in Hong Kong, publishing zines with friends and running writing workshops. I told myself the price of finding love was that I must leave my home, even as—or perhaps because—it was disappearing.
On my last night in Hong Kong, the universe conspired for me to meet you, a stranger, for the first and only time. As the proverbial curtains were drawn, I glimpsed into what my future could be if I were to stay. In the end, I still left.
My last day in Hong Kong was like any other. The sky was white as I walked up the steps to a sleepy street overlooking the city. Holiday shoppers huddled in their coats while nursing hot coffees. Their steps mingled with the bounce of basketballs on a court nearby. They would wake up to another uneventful day, but my world was ending tomorrow. I was in despair.
While running final errands, I stepped into a bookstore packed with people crowding around the narrow walkways between tables of books. Post-its with pro-independence messages like “persevere” and “will you stand up to fight for Hong Kong?” covered the walls. I walked to the register.
“Sorry to bother. I’m looking for a gift for my boyfriend’s mother,” I said in Mandarin from under my facemask.
You looked up at me in silver-rimmed glasses. “What does she like?” Your words were muffled behind your own mask.
“I’m not sure . . . she’s Shanghainese.”
“Maybe she’ll like Eileen Chang.”
I’m embarrassed to admit this is how I learned about one of the most famous modern Chinese writers, but you didn’t judge my confusion. “Follow me,” you said, and we climbed up the narrow creaky stairs that led to the second level of the bookshop. You pulled a thick book with a cream cover out of a plywood bookcase and handed it to me. You had long fingers and pink palms sticking out from beneath a navy blue sweater. You looked like the kind of guy a girl dreams of meeting in a bookstore.
My world was ending tomorrow. I was in despair.
As we walked down the stairs, you told me you were publishing a novel soon. “I also like to write,” I said as you handed me my change.
“Really?” you asked. “What are you doing later? Maybe we can talk about writing.”
“Oh, yeah, I can be free,” I said quickly before catching myself. We decided to meet at the bookstore at 6:00 PM. I panicked. Was this a date? Maybe we would just talk about writing? I realized even if it was a date, my answer would not change. I suppressed the small burst of excitement in my heart and met friends before the sun went down, then returned to the bookstore under the yellow sidewalk lights, 21 hours before my flight.
You were closing up shop and asked me to wait a few minutes before re-emerging with a scarf around your neck. “Are you hungry?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, I could eat.”
“There’s a dumpling store nearby, is that okay with you? My place is around here, so we can order dumplings and eat on my rooftop?”
I agreed.
We stood next to each other outside the dumpling shop, awkward. You pulled your scarf off your neck. I asked if you had any favorite flavors. “The normal ones,” you said. I asked if you were hungry. “The normal amount,” you said. Chinese is a language that embodies ambiguity, leaving a world of interpretation beneath the words. I suggested soup dumplings and potstickers. You ordered eight of each. I continued to know nothing about you, including what dumplings you liked.
You took me to your rooftop with the handles of the plastic bags looped through your fingers. The elevator was white and the floor buttons lit up in orange. We waited patiently side by side in silence. Your sweater hung off your shoulders. The elevator opened at the top floor, and we walked towards a warmly lit rooftop with a table and chairs on a cloudless night. We sat across from each other, and the mountains stacked majestically behind you like an amphitheater.
You unmasked for the first time, revealing smooth cheeks, a sharp chin, and a long nose. You talked about your book, in progress for several years now, about a Hong Kong man drifting aimlessly around the world. I asked you how you felt about the protests and noted the resignation in your tone. You wanted to write a book about what it meant to be a man from Hong Kong; if Hong Kong disappeared, what would happen to the man? You told me about your family, and it was clear we were not meeting to talk about writing anymore. When you spoke, you chose your words carefully. You didn’t ask me about my boyfriend, only how I felt about returning to America. When I hesitated, you did not ask why, and when I spoke, you listened instead of interrupting me. I didn’t want to leave.
We spoke in Mandarin for hours, and I realized I had never dated a man from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or China before—only the British-born Chinese who unceremoniously left me to live in Vietnam, the Egyptian guy who cheated, the Dutch guy who returned to his ex, and the Jewish guy whose flat I frequented after midnight. Why did I assume for so long that I would not have enough in common with someone from Hong Kong? I hadn’t seen the possibility until now. Perhaps my dating woes were due to my own small-mindedness. Now, on my final night, I got to peek outside the bubble I blew for myself. Was it any coincidence I didn’t know Eileen Chang? Had I wasted the last five years? When you spoke to me in the language of my parents, it felt like an act of intimacy. Twice, you asked when I would be back. I told you I would return by summer. I was still trying to get my Hong Kong permanent residency, which required that I enter the island once every six months.
We left your apartment and wandered through the empty streets. Neon reds, greens, and yellows bled onto the shiny black asphalt. We walked past the meat and fruit stalls next to Sai Ying Pun station. You told me about your adventures in South America. We skirted the sidewalks next to the Hong Kong trolleys slumbering in their depot. Our steps traced past the row of dried seafood shops near the seaports. You told me your favorite director was Wong Kar-wai. At times, I could feel the fabric of your clothes and your breath on my shoulder. Before we parted, you said, “Let me know if you want to hang out tomorrow.”
I reached home before 11:00 PM, wishing I had stayed longer. Shortly after I opened my door, you texted me. “It’s really nice to meet you, take care and all that.” I shared my Instagram profile and asked for yours, but you had no social media. In a culture of hyperproductivity, you used a brick phone.
The following morning, I was out running errands all day, selling one last piece of furniture and cleaning the apartment, which had returned to bare white walls. I almost texted you several times but held back. There was no point. You texted me in Chinese two hours before my flight took off. “I hope everything goes smoothly for you when you return this time and that you have a wonderful life. If you come back to Hong Kong in June, let’s grab a meal.”
My throat tightened when I checked in at the counter. This was my last sliver of Hong Kong, but it was an austere send-off all the way to the gate. All the shops once brimming with life were shuttered, and a small walkway formed between two blockades. Some travelers wore white hazmat suits and plastic face shields. Reality hit and I began to sob as I walked down the plane. Two minutes after sitting down, I hid my face in my palm. I was losing so much that I would never get back.
Fifteen minutes before the flight took off, I responded. “Thank you, it was really nice getting to know you. If you ever need any help on your book, ask me anytime. I have a lot of respect for you and your work. See you in June.”
“Thank you. If you need any help, ask me too.
Looking forward to your return.”
You were a man of words, so I wondered if you isolated the second line for emphasis. For a moment, I imagined myself stepping foot into a red taxi to zip into the city again or sitting across from you in a cha chaan teng cafe booth. When the plane took off, I couldn’t tell if the pangs in my chest were from the change in air pressure or my profound sadness. Any bystander would have said I was on a lifeboat out of the Titanic, saved by my blue passport, but if that was the case, why did I feel like I was drowning?
When I started telling my American friends I moved to San Diego, they were quick to express envy. There was sunshine, nature, and plenty of distance between humans, but that very last thing was killing me. I was totally disconnected from the world.
There were novel experiences. My boyfriend and I wiped our Trader Joe’s groceries down with Clorox wipes. He drove me around in his two Teslas while wearing Allbirds shoes, both products famous for their lack of taste. We tried the maple bacon donuts at Sidecar, but the sugar didn’t liven me. I was a ghost in someone else’s home. My boyfriend was unemployed, so we were living in the basement of his parents’ house. His parents stayed on the top floor and his brother lived across the hall from us. I felt cloistered and started looking for therapists. I got two for good measure and asked one of them, “How do I know if I want something?” She cocked her head and studied me from two screens away, perplexed.
My boyfriend started saying, “America is the best country in the world,” even though we were very far from the fourth of July. He said it at least once a month, first as a joke and then emphatically, because he could not understand why I was unhappy in this land, which had also been my home once, but no longer felt like it. Two weeks after I landed, I watched a mob storm the Capitol, speechless at the sight of Americans having an insurrection in viking headgear and facepaint, like it was a Halloween party. Back in Hong Kong, the protestors who stormed the legislative building were now awaiting trial, and everyone assumed it would not be a fair one. Three months later, a gunman in Atlanta killed seven Asian women in massage parlors. I watched terrified about the state of the country and my own safety.
I ruminated about why people wasted so much time on the concept of a “best” country, flattening culture into a linear competition. I realized when my boyfriend’s ego was fragile, he was more likely to say America was great. When he felt insecure that he could not solve my loneliness, America could not be faring better. He held contempt for Hong Kong, the phantom in my mind. I began to find him insufferable. I had really outdone myself—I abandoned my home in Asia for an Asian who hated Asia.
I was so fixated on preserving memories of Hong Kong that I could not concentrate on anything else.
“The city is going to shit!” he said of Hong Kong. “Why would you want to stay anyway?” I was stunned into silence. How could he speak like this about the place I’d chosen to live longer than anywhere else after my childhood in Taiwan? To him, Hong Kong was nothing but a headline, not the breeze against my cheek while leaning out of the trolleys, sharp insults like “puk gaai” (“drop on the street and die”), and the aggressive taxi drivers who still adorned their dashboards with stuffed animals. Another day, he said more loudly, “You’re in San Diego. You don’t have to pay rent or cook. What else do you want?”
I worried that I’d betrayed myself. I stopped writing; the words no longer came, and my eyes grew exhausted staring into the desert from the window in his room. Sometimes I went outside to scream into the wind, my voice muffled by the cars swooshing past. Otherwise, I worked hard to make our house feel like home by hanging a friend’s photographs of Hong Kong’s red taxis, framing Wing Shya’s photography in our bedroom, and polishing hand-painted china plates from Jingdezhen. I was so fixated on preserving memories of Hong Kong that I could not concentrate on anything else and began to do stupid things. I drove one of the beloved Teslas too close to the sidewalk and scuffed a tire. I washed the dishes in a dissociated state, dragging the Amazon sponge over the Amazon plates. “Who washed this?” my boyfriend asked his mom, holding up an oily pan.
“Your sweetheart,” she said to him in Mandarin. Later, he relayed the line to me. I imagined the disdain in her voice and remembered the book of Eileen Chang’s essays, left unopened in her bedroom. One day I cooked bacon and accidentally dropped water in the pan. The entire stove erupted in flames like a Cirque Du Soleil reveal, licking high above the exhaust. My boyfriend glared at me.
Six months into San Diego, I realized it was time to return to Hong Kong for a quick trip if I wanted to remain eligible for permanent residency. “Quick” meant three weeks, since there was now a mandatory fourteen-day hotel quarantine, and I wanted at least a week of freedom to see the city and my friends. I asked my boyfriend if he would get upset if I left, knowing he was in the final interview stages at a company. “Go ahead,” he said with suspicious neutrality. I was relieved I could go without a fight.
With bated breath, I landed in Hong Kong, boarded an airport shuttle, and pressed my face against the window as the driver weaved through the city dropping passengers off at various hotels. I was home, minutes away from the harbor promenade of my old neighborhood and the bustling shops of Causeway Bay. I contemplated sprinting off the bus but remained like the other well-behaved passengers.
During my quarantine, my boyfriend got the job he was interviewing for prior to my departure and quickly became furious that I was not there to help him shop for apartments. In his mind, I ran away to Hong Kong to indulge myself while he toiled building a future for us, making him the selfless martyr to an inconsolable girlfriend. He’d been patient with my grief at the start, but perhaps a girl could only be sad for so long. I reminded him that he blessed my trip just a week earlier and he swiftly blocked me on all messaging apps, a sort of punishment that had been normalized by now. He resented my long blocks of text and preferred to read less from me, but I only wrote him novellas because I was desperate, trying to employ as many words in the English language to make him understand me. I watched my blue text float undelivered in the air and knew he had turned me off like a switch again. I turned to the window and watched the waters of Tung Chung Bay drift below me, feeling unbearably stuck, not just in my quarantine hotel, but life at large. The reasons I chose America, my boyfriend, and a remote corporate job all now seemed unclear.
My life was filled with therapists. On top of the two I had for myself, we now had one for both of us, endless talking with no resolution. I wished one of them would either tell me to break up with him or reach through the monitor and euthanize me. My boyfriend and I had scheduled an appointment for while I was in Hong Kong. I emailed to confirm he was joining; that was the only channel through which I could reach him. When he showed up, he began to yell, frightening the older Chinese woman on the other line. She was around my mother’s age, and I felt humiliated watching him demand her credentials. I had blamed him for not knowing how to tend to my heart and never asking me questions, but perhaps he was incapable of both. If he resisted shining a light into himself so violently, I began to doubt he would ever see me.
I thought of you when I was alone with my thoughts, first on the plane ride to Hong Kong, then again the first night in the hotel. I had restrained myself because I knew I had feelings for you but I was still in a relationship. But after being blocked, I felt so desperate for connection that I texted your number on Signal hours later, knowing it was an app my boyfriend would never check. “Are you in town?” I asked, but never received a response. It was an irresponsible message I had sent without a plan—I just wished to see you, to escape from the misery of my decisions. Several times, I opened the app to a blank screen, then closed it, telling myself I was being selfish and unfair to you, that it would be better for me to constrain the mess of my life instead of bothering you with it.
After my quarantine ended, I bolted out of the hotel like a woman unchained, rushed into my friends’ arms, and ran from the Mid-Level elevators to Mong Kok’s alleys until my legs grew sore. At the Hong Kong Museum of Art, I studied a Chinese watercolor painting featuring nearly 30 beasts—from elephants and lions to cottontailed rabbits—surging forward. The painter was Hu Zaobin (胡藻斌), who escaped to Hong Kong as the Second Sino-Japanese War broke. This was his last, defiant piece of art, a call to Chinese people to fight with courage, titled Righteousness Permits No Turning Back (義無反顧). I studied the ferocity of the tiger’s spread claws, lion’s tongue suspended in mid-air, and the commotion of galloping hooves, a far cry from the passivity of my life. I found myself a coward who had chosen a life of convenience, incomparable to the great generations long gone. Eventually I turned my back on the painting and left.
I returned to America with dread. My boyfriend and I moved to an apartment in Los Angeles that he explained took him significant effort to find alone. Our relationship was as tattered as the wrinkly conversation script on our refrigerator; our couple’s therapist had written the exact words to help us speak and listen to each other, since we’d lost the ability to do either naturally. Maybe we never had it. I continued to think of you in bed; distant white street lights filtered through the blinds onto my cheek. It came as no surprise that my boyfriend and I fell apart two months later at the start of fall. When we broke up, he admitted, “I always thought I wanted to date an independent career woman, but after dating you, I realize maybe I don’t.” I congratulated him on his self-discovery and pitied myself for trying so hard.
A month before we split, I texted you and finally received a response. It was a short conversation, born out of my desperation for closeness in a relationship that had lost all its warmth. You let my message hang on Signal because you thought I was a scammer, and insisted you would have responded had you known it was me. Your book was coming out that month. I ordered two copies. When I broke up with my boyfriend, you didn’t ask for more information. I assumed we were both single.
Your book arrived in Los Angeles. It was my first Chinese book and I worried I wouldn’t understand it, but I did. The protagonist wandered across countries while mostly unemployed, searching for belonging. He was selfish, stubborn, and sad. I wondered how much of you was in him.
Around the time of my breakup, I caught up with an old friend and learned she was part of a rapidly growing crypto startup. When she said they needed help, I immediately raised my hand. For the last few months, I had been trying to leave a remote role with my Hong Kong employer, and the startup felt like an exhilarating, fresh start. I was ecstatic to learn that the company was going to be incorporated out of Hong Kong. In as short as five months, I could move back home. I imagined running into my friends’ embraces over dim sum and forgetting the last few months. I imagined meeting you again.
When I told you the good news, we began texting more, sharing mundane details about our days in a daily rhythm. I snapped a photo of your book in the center of Times Square while on a work trip. You sent me Frank Sinatra’s New York when it came on your Spotify. I sent you photos from a conference. You said I looked “great.” We were now seesawing between Chinese and English. Was this your modest way of saying beautiful? You watched Her on my recommendation; it was a way of flirting, putting you through two hours of watching a man talk to a woman he could only access through his phone.
Then work started to take off and I could barely keep my head on straight. Unless I was showering, I was working. My responses became sparse. You simply said, “Don’t you think you should just lie down, stop working, and have some rest?” You felt like a faint dream to me then, trying your best to support me from afar, but I could not explain the chaos of my life to you, because it was barely understandable to me.
As gusts of fall wind swept through Manhattan, my boss called me into a cafe in Midtown on a Saturday morning. He broke the news that we would no longer be based in Hong Kong, but in Singapore. We had raised a seed round, and without exception, every venture capital firm told our founders we could not incorporate in Hong Kong. It was far too risky. Singapore was much safer and regulations were clearer. My boss offered to still process a Hong Kong visa for me if I adamantly wished to return, but I would have to battle time zone differences and likely wouldn’t perform in my role if I went. My heart sank as I weighed the city I loved versus my career. My job was an existential expression of personal agency. I wanted to reclaim myself, not be the small girl who got lost in a relationship. I knew what I had to choose, but didn’t know how to tell you, so I remained distant. You texted me again after a few weeks of silence in early winter. “Everything ok?”
I broke the news that I was no longer coming back and was giving up on Hong Kong permanent residency. I said I was sorry. You say it was okay. We remained in each other’s phones but not in each other’s lives. Around that time, you texted me that it was our first anniversary since meeting. Christmas was around the corner again. You were reading Japanese novels. Not too long after that, I disappeared. I didn’t know how to keep up a relationship with you when we would not meet anytime soon. I couldn’t keep up with Hong Kong in America. I dated someone else.
Early the following year, I lost nearly all my possessions when thieves broke into my storage unit in Los Angeles. Every reminder of Hong Kong was gone: most of my clothes, the Wing Shya photographs, and every journal over the last five years. A news article described me as an American woman with no address. The loss of my belongings was compounded by the continued loss of Hong Kong. Xi Jinping visited for the first time since the pandemic and declared that patriots were now running the region. I tried not to dwell on the headlines.
One of the few items to my name was your book. It rested in my parents’ place in Florida, then New York, when I moved there a year later. While sitting in my new apartment overseeing the East River, I finally finished it. It was brilliant. The last line was a reflection about how everyone is waiting for something or someone to make them feel less lonely. I wanted to tell you I loved it, but years had passed. I had already gone in and out of your life like a tourist twice. I was dating someone new, someone who finally felt like home, and I did not want to make him worry. I didn’t want to toy with your feelings either. I couldn’t keep being the girl with a boyfriend in your messages. Silence felt like the most respectful path.
“Damn,” I said slowly, when I put the book down. “I just finished this Chinese novel.”
“What was it about?” my boyfriend asked.
I told him about your book and our time together, a sweet memory, a moment lost in time.
Another three years pass. I’ve drifted for a long time since Hong Kong: nine months in California, a year and a half of being a nomad, another year in New York, and finally, Puerto Rico, where I now live with my boyfriend. It reminds me of Hong Kong here; 30 percent of the population voted to be independent from a larger neighboring country but have no say in the matter. Many of them didn’t bother to vote at all—their voices have been suppressed for so long. Puerto Rico is worse than Hong Kong in many ways, from cracked roads to power outages and expensive groceries, but you can hang a pro-independence flag without getting arrested. You do not get thrown in prison for graffitiing “go home gringo” on buildings.
I don’t think of you for many years, until one day, a friend complains to me about her dating experiences in Taipei. I tell her to try dating men from Taiwan instead of expats and recount our evening together to her. The memory of you lingers in my mind. A few nights later, I write about you for the first time. It’s an indulgence I allow myself while gazing at the calm waters of the Condado Lagoon. I write 4,000 words and realize it’s a thank you letter. I lost myself after I left Hong Kong, first in my relationship and then at work. I never revealed my depths of despair to you, but every time I reached out throughout those tumultuous months, you responded, as if you understood I was flailing. I wonder if it would be selfish to send it to you. I search for signs of you on the internet from the darkness of my bed. You don’t make stalking easy because you have no social media. I smile after pulling up old articles about your novel release, then I see a more recent Instagram post I haven’t seen before. Someone’s hand is holding your book against the mountain skies. “Will miss you forever,” the caption reads. My mind goes blank before I realize it’s a memorial post. I stop breathing. You’ve been gone since the spring of 2024.
I knew I would give up our connection and my home for stability, even though looking back, I chose the most destabilizing path.
I search endlessly, but there is little information. I don’t know how you died, and I don’t know any of your friends or family. The following morning, I message the bookstore’s Instagram account, leaving a long note explaining how we met and asking for more information. I receive a short response simply encouraging me to keep your memory alive.
I never got to say goodbye. There was a chance, but I didn’t take it. Four months before you passed, I finally made it back to Hong Kong with my boyfriend, the same one with whom I shared your book. It was my first time back in nearly three years. I didn’t contact you out of respect for my boyfriend, but you were still alive. By then, the bookstore where we met was long shuttered; the owner left and relocated the shop to another country. Police had stalked the premises for years, intimidating the staff until they grew weary, the last guest’s footsteps faded and the last book was sold in a fire sale.
I imagine an alternative ending to our story, where I call you on that last day in Hong Kong, cancel my flight, and order the shipping company to haul every last item back to my apartment. The truth is, I was always a pragmatist. I knew I would give up our connection and my home for stability, even though looking back, I chose the most destabilizing path. You were so brave for remaining an artist and finishing your book, the only public evidence of your life. I never told you I was scared to write, worried I wasn’t talented enough, and chose to work at that startup instead for four long years. By the time I quit, I was convinced I had nothing novel to say, and that my talents were best served ghost writing my CEO’s tweets. Only years after quitting was I relieved to find the writer in me had survived, alongside a handful of past artifacts. Your book is the only item in my apartment from Hong Kong.
I visited New York recently and found myself at a Brooklyn house party standing face-to-face with a couple whose time overlapped with mine in Hong Kong. When I brought up the protests, they only nodded as the thudding bass of house music engulfed us for a few moments too long. The party suddenly felt so mundane, but mundanity was a blessing. Just one month prior, Hong Kong’s police arrested five bookstore employees for seditious materials, including a young woman who looked like she had been plucked out of a college class, standing proudly with her hands cuffed behind her back, flowing straight hair framing her neutral face. She wore a black t-shirt with white Chinese characters that read, “I am a bookstore employee.” You were a bookstore employee too; how would you have felt seeing this news?
The couple from the party admitted they had not returned since Covid to preserve the old Hong Kong in their minds, but such decisions were luxuries only for people like us who did not have to feel the pain of 50 journalists getting arrested or 40 bookstores shuttering one by one.
I imagine if the protests had never happened. Were we so foolish that we ironically expedited China’s strangulation of Hong Kong? If this were true, how does one know when to speak or hide? Your old bookstore is an empty shell today. No business dares open at an address with so much police scrutiny, but I still imagine it flourishing again: the lights flickering on, swarms of people quietly reading towers of books, each page a beckoning into a new universe.
You’d be happy to hear that I finally started reading Eileen Chang, including her short essay titled Love. It is about a boy and a girl who only see each other for an instant under a peach tree. The boy says to the girl, “Oh, you’re here too?” The girl is silent. They stand next to each other for a moment before they each go their own way. The girl is sold, then resold many times over. In old age, the woman remembers the boy under the peach tree. At the end, Chang writes:
在千萬人之中遇見你所遇見的人，於千萬年之中，時間的無涯的荒野裡，沒有早一步，也沒有晚一步，剛巧趕上了，那也沒有別的話可說，惟有輕輕的問一聲：“噢，你也在這裡嗎？
Among all the thousands of people you meet, in all the thousands of years, in the boundless wilderness of time, there is neither ‘early’ nor ‘late,’ there are only the moments in which you happen to catch up to each other. In these moments, there is nothing to say, only the gentle question: “Oh, you’re here too?”
