Kung Hei Fat Choy!
Two years ago I spent Chinese New Years Eve (which is just one day of what is really a two week long celebration) on the roof of a 41 story apartment building in Tin Hau on Hong Kong Island watching fireworks go off over Victoria Harbor. This was immediately followed by what was one of the best, and most decadent, parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I was just beginning to adjust to living in Hong Kong and that night and the following day pretty much sealed the deal. I freaking loved it there and have missed it horribly since I left, but never so much as now, when I’m trapped in an ice floe in the middle of nowhere in Washington state. Bedford Falls is a very challenging place to live in the winter. Conversely, there’s nothing like living in a foreign country. I knew no one, not a soul, when I got off the plane in Hong Kong, and it was a weird feeling, but also totally magical. It’s such a rare opportunity to start life anew; when you’re abroad you are completely anonymous and you can be whoever you want to be. You merely create the narrative you want to be your own and so it is. There’s no baggage as unless you’re a fugitive (which I most certainly was not) you can leave whatever parts of your past you’d like to leave behind back home. And so I did.
And now I’m back home and I’ve reassumed the old narrative, but that’s fine too, as it’s somehow better for my having had a chance to work on it from a different angle while living somewhere else and I feel like it all started on that night two years ago that kicked off the year of the tiger. It’ll be a while before I can live abroad again, but I’m already secretly planning and plotting how to make it happen and vetting potential locales—hopefully once again in Asia, as I love the chaos and discombobulation that comes with living somewhere so foreign to my own experience. At any rate, to all my friends and family, may your work and love lives in this, the year of the dragon, be prosperous and productive, full of health, happiness, and wealth. Kung Hei Fat Choy!
