August. And Everything After.
I’m on the massage table and the masseuse is digging her elbow deep into my ribs, my shoulder. She’s trying to take me apart and put me back together, but I can’t relax. I’m thinking about how twenty-one years ago, this room, now so artfully decorated with marine posters and thrumming with oceanic white noise, was a supply closet, as well as my office at a job I desperately needed but didn’t love.
The tale of how I ended up in this office is less important than how I left it, and how I find myself now being smashed and pulled in a million different directions, the memories bubbling like the knots my massage therapist is desperately trying to excise from my shoulders.
I left Virginia for Hong Kong in 2000 incredulous and wary, disbelieving that all the 2am interviews on the phone in my parents’ tiny spare room, all the careful essays and answers would mean anything. I did not tell my then-boss where I was going in case I failed. I would need my supply closet job if the odyssey to Hong Kong amounted to nothing. I told my boss what was not entirely a lie — that my husband and I had to go to Wisconsin and get the remainder of our things from my grandmother’s house after she’d kicked us out at Christmas.
But I didn’t go. I sent my husband instead, and I boarded a plane alone to Hong Kong.
That week is etched in my mind — the way the humid heat clutched me the moment I stepped out of the airport sans camera, it having already been stolen in the baggage claim area during a moment when I left it on my cart to lift my suitcase off the conveyor belt. The way the Gurkha guard took my bags and led me to the truck, where I climbed into what to me was the driver’s side but to him was where a passenger was meant to be. How I felt like I was hanging in a glass box out in the middle of traffic over the Tsing Ma bridge, how we rode that dragon’s back up through the hills to Kwun Yum Shan, where my potential employer, Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden, rested among ferns and orchids on that sacred mountain.
We veered around starving, pregnant village dogs, dumpsters of furniture spilling their innards like giant milkweed pods, hogs’ heads grinning grim in the curbs. Peeling rainbow eucalyptus lined the curving roads in the twilight and their psychedelic colors coupled with all the other sights and scents rushing at me made me wonder if I’d inhaled some magical smoke on the way.
I remember stepping into the Executive Director’s flat. I remember eating toast and lemon curd the next morning for breakfast because there was nothing else to eat and I didn’t know where I should go to get food. The rest of that week is a blur of interviews, dinners, talks, tours, working alongside those who ostensibly would be part of my team when I arrived. If I was chosen to arrive.
The diamond moment of clarity, though, was when the Chairman’s girlfriend took me high in the hills overlooking Sai Kung Bay at twilight. Together, we watched the sun sinking among the green islands, as she talked to me of her hopes for her country and the preservation of wild nature. And the islands were like faces lifting from the water, strung with the pearls of the sun’s fading. They set a yearning in me I feel still, twenty-one years on.
How fortunate I am that back then, my yearning was not in vain. I returned to the States after that week, fighting off jetlag, pretending I’d been in Wisconsin all along. By that November, we moved across the world from so that I could be Editor-in-Chief of all English language publications for Kadoorie Farm and Botanic Garden.
Even now, it still seems like a dream. We were welcomed and helped in every conceivable way by my new colleagues — from helping us set up a bank account to finding a flat to rent in the tiny village at the foot of the mountain. We quickly learned to navigate the bus and train system and the exploration began. My co-workers invited us everywhere — on a dinner cruise in Sai Kung Harbor where a sax player floated by, playing soft jazz. Down the mountain for a nip at a pub called the Golden Leaf. Rooftop barbecues, hiking through the hinterland of the New Territories, even a bus tour into the weird and wonderful mainland resort towns outside of Shenzhen.
Every day I rode the bus up the mountain (or walked if I was feeling particularly inspired) to the Farm. On those steep, terraced ridges, I’d be surrounded by clouds of butterflies or chance upon a wild boar or Tibetan macaque. I never managed to walk the winding road all the way to the summit, though I knew devotees of Kwun Yum (known in Mandarin as Kuan Yin), the bodhisattva of compassion, made pilgrimages to her ancient altar at the top of the mountain to leave offerings, especially around the time of her birthday.
I settled in to work. I befriended our office cat Momami, zipping her into my jacket every morning where she could sleep and purr while I worked at editing exhibit displays and scientific reports. My wildlife biologist husband went off to Taiwan to help a friend search for clouded leopards for a couple months. Gradually, my Cantonese co-workers came to like and trust me as well as my British co-workers. They invited me onto a hired boat to go swimming among the islands or hiking along the reservoir near Luk Keng. We went out for dim sum at the Sha Tin Jockey Club, where my co-worker Winky gently mocked me by offering foods she was sure I wouldn’t eat. I ate all of them, but quailed at the pig bladder, which apparently meant she finally won her bet.
On Saturdays, we had sing-alongs. My Cantonese co-worker Angus brought his guitar to our office and we sang folk music. They particularly loved John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary. There was nothing more lovely and strange than hearing Cantonese voices begging the country roads to take them back to Wes Ba-jin-i-ya (West Virginia). Eventually, they even gave me my own Cantonese name, Chan Fun-ling, which translated to “Bright Spirit.” So often, that name would be said in mock disapproval of my jocular personality.
I loved it there like I’ve loved nowhere else. For the first time, I felt I was in the place I belonged, and I was eager to soak in as much of it as I could, to be as respectful and as useful as I could to the people who were hosting me. Never once did I feel unsafe or in danger, even when illegal immigrants from the mainland would sometimes crash through the Farm canteen doors, seeking food. Invariably, we simply gave them what they asked for and let them go about their way. I felt deep empathy with those who’d fled to Hong Kong seeking a new life. While I certainly wasn’t a refugee and couldn’t fully comprehend the struggles and sacrifices they’d made to get there, I had fled a life that was insupportable — a post-graduate struggling to find meaningful work, being kicked out of a relationship I’d hoped to deepen with a family member while my parents looked on with disapproval and anxiety at my failure to launch my life in the way they thought I should.
Here at last there was no one I had to please except my employer, no one’s disapproval to endure except the occasional teasing of my co-workers. Looking back from my perch on this massage table perhaps I see it as far more romantic than it was at the time. There were cultural hurdles; there were back issues and the difficulties of being a fat person in a country where fat people existed only as monstrosities or curiosities. I had a burning desire to write and sometimes got tired of feeling like a glorified secretary in my job. The subtropical climate was hell in the summer; mold, sweat, and flying cockroaches were my constant companions. My landlady got angry at me once for hosting a barbecue on the rooftop and made me wash three flights of steps clean from all the foot traffic before she was satisfied. It was not all perfect. But in most moments, it was absolutely the fulfillment of a long-held dream.
And then the call came.
We had been in Hong Kong for six months when my mother called to inform me that my father was deeply unwell. He had begun to feel ill shortly after we’d moved and had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Now, with none of the treatments working, they feared it was something else.
I flew home alone. It was strange to step into the O’Hare airport and to fully understand the cacophony of voices all around me again. It was overwhelming. During my layover, I ordered a bowl of soup the size of my head and realized I wasn’t used to such portion sizes anymore.
When I arrived at my parents’ house, the house I had escaped six months prior, I didn’t recognize the skeleton wrapped in blankets on the couch. My father had lost 100 pounds. The next day, he was diagnosed with CUPS (Cancer of Unknown Primary Source). Tumors had sprouted throughout his body like mushrooms, and during the time he had been misdiagnosed and treated for rheumatoid arthritis, cancer had gotten a strong foothold and was wasting him away to nothing.
The oncologist gave him two months tops, though he would start on chemo immediately.
I sobbed in the bathroom of the oncologist’s office. My nurse aunt stood with me. “What do I do?” I railed. “I just moved halfway across the world!” I was an only child and my mother was sickly herself. Though my father had many siblings (eleven still living) and friends, I was his only daughter. He needed me.
There were no hugs or shoulder squeezes. Nothing gentle for me to latch on to. Just me crying over a white sink, trying to stem the tide of tears and snot with a rough paper towel.
My aunt leveled a strong gaze at me and said, “You will do what is best for your family.”
I spent the rest of my time at home sitting with my dad on the couch. Sometimes I held his hand. Once we watched “The Legend of Bagger Vance,” and my father wept because he feared he would never play golf again, and it was the only thing he really loved to do. I reassured him, though I had no right to do so, that he would. He would tell me later that that moment inspired him to keep trying so that he could stand on a putting green again. And he did. For a while.
He was so nauseated he couldn’t eat and yet was always hungry. He begged me constantly to cook him food that he had once enjoyed — summer squash, zucchini, and onions in soy sauce, for instance. We tried many different takeout places, hoping something would stimulate his appetite enough to overcome his nausea. I tried to get him to smoke weed, but he refused. “That’s illegal!” he croaked, aghast that I would even suggest such a thing. I sighed.
I returned to Hong Kong, but it felt like all my newfound freedom was gone. I struggled against the diagnosis. I spoke with my father’s oncologist on the phone, demanding to know if he really thought we were in the place it seemed we were. “If you want to spend time with your father, I suggest you use the time you have,” he said. He was firm that there wasn’t much time left — two months was the continual ominous refrain. When I asked about the chemo, he was realistic. “It might buy more time, but with so many tumors at such an advanced stage…”
No more needed to be said. Just as my husband had finally gotten a job and we were talking about adopting a child from Hong Kong Social Services, just as we were looking at being able to pay off our school loan debts and invest for our future, just as I was planning to stay in Hong Kong as long as we were allowed…I decided we needed to return home.
To its credit, the Farm tried to work with me. They offered me two months’ leave without pay, at the end of which I could return and be reinstated to my job. But the truth was there was no way to know how long this would go on. I felt that it would be irresponsible of me to say yes to that proposal because what if he lingered and I left again just as he worsened? My Cantonese friends absolutely understood. They would do the same for their parents.
Even when I found out that the chemo was working better than expected and my father hid that information from me to keep me from changing my plans, I was determined to return home.
My dearest Scottish friend, however, took me aside during one of my final weekend trips with all my friends. Her flaming hair, which had earned her the nickname of Tiger, stood out around her head in the humid Guangdong afternoon like a solar corona. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “You don’t have to be the good girl anymore.”
Back then, I was sure I did. Twenty-one years on, my certainty is gone.
I sometimes imagine what it would have been like if I had stayed. Especially now when Hong Kong is so much in the news, and friends of mine who have been there thirty years or more are leaving. It was only in 2019, for instance, that I achieved the same salary in the US that I had been making in Hong Kong in 2000. What more might I have been able to do for my father if I had stayed? What person would I be now?
I will never know. But I dream of those roads often — the rainbow trees, the emerald and sapphire wings of the Paris Peacock butterfly glinting among the lantana, the gardeners carefully digging among the leaves to scare away cobras and many-banded kraits. So much I sacrificed on the altar of my father’s death because I was a dutiful daughter, and what I had learned from Kwun Yum, who likewise gave all her limbs to her father so that he might live, was that these are the sacrifices we make for those we love, for those to whom we owe our very existence.
My re-entry into American life was harsh. A couple weeks after we’d returned to the tiny room we’d left, destitute yet again, my father yelled my name hoarsely from the living room. I was desperately trying to print out my novel and having difficulty with my parents’ refurbished computer and the old dot-matrix printer.
Irritated at being interrupted, I went in and saw a plane fold in on itself in the middle of a glittering tower on TV. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, and neither was he until we suddenly realized we were under attack — that terrorists had hijacked four airplanes and driven them into the Twin Towers, with another one due to crash at the Pentagon, while the other bound for the White House ended up crashing in Pennsylvania due to the courage of the passengers onboard. Even when he wept over golf, I had not seen my father look so utterly devastated. “Never in my lifetime…” he kept whispering to himself, his cheeks hollow with horror.
During the Vietnam War when his younger brother was deployed to Vietnam, my father had asked to be deployed with him. Mine was an Air Force family — uncles, aunts, and cousins are veterans. He had ended up in Thailand, working on navigational satellites for pilots who dropped bombs and Agent Orange across Vietnam. It could have been exposure to Agent Orange that had ultimately signed his death warrant; we will never know.
Then the campaign for revenge began, and my parents joined the chorus calling for blood, as the media whipped everyone into a frenzy with images of jihadists burning and stepping on the American flag. I tried to sue for peace; I tried to show them how they were being manipulated by the images they were shown, but nothing I said mattered. We went to a bloody, pointless war; we stirred even deeper hatred against our country into the hearts of the rest of the world. And the long division between my father and me began, not only because my patriotism was in question but also because the cancer wore away the veneer of humor he had used as a shield all his life. All that was left at his core was anger and despair.
By October, I had a new job with a research institute at my alma mater. We moved out of my parents’ house again as fast as we could. The Farm asked me to do freelance editing for them, so I worked for them, the institute, and on my own writing while my husband began working with the Allegheny Bear Study, monitoring bear movement and bear reproduction in the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains.
I tried hard to get used to my new workplace. I made beloved friends. We had good times. But my heart still seemed caught somewhere between the South China Sea and the dear old Blue Ridge. I walked every day looking at the mountains, dreaming again of looking into the distance of the Pearl River Delta from the peak of Kwun Yum Shan, incredulous that I had ever been part of such magic and grateful that it existed, even as I resented being forced to part from it.
It took me a long while to get used to home again, my southwestern Virginia home in particular. It was like donning an old skin I thought I’d shed. It took me even longer to accept that while my father had lied to bring me home, it was ultimately my choice to leave Hong Kong. Acceptance never nested easily in my chest; it was a restless bird that sought escape from the confines of my ribs whenever it could.
My father’s battle (and despite the overuse of the metaphor in public parlance, that’s exactly what it was) dragged on. When the bear study in Virginia came to a close, my husband could only find another technician job in Florida. I worked remotely for two years for the Farm while working at the institute, and then came the day that the Farm asked if I would return to Hong Kong, as they really needed a person in the office.
It took everything in me to say no, but I had to because my father was still on this side of the veil, still struggling through drug fever, dialysis, bone injections, and gastric failure — all due to the poison in his veins. I couldn’t leave him, even as it was the hardest thing in my life to stay.
One more year, a job change, another move to the first house of our own, and my father was gone. My last project for the Farm, an educational CD about native trees and native landscaping in Hong Kong, arrived not long after. The proceeds from that work had helped us buy our new home. Somewhere I still have that slender jewel case, even though I no longer own a computer that could read the disk inside.
Twenty-one years ago in an August like this one, I celebrated my final days in Hong Kong. My officemates bought me a small cake, gave me gifts, and sang to me, honoring the Western custom of celebrating individual birthdays. A storm was coming down the valley, and I turned from my little celebration to watch the rolling thunder-silk obscure the jungle across the valley.
In that moment, a golden lace curtain of flying insects obscured my vision. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing until someone murmured a Cantonese word and then said in English, “Termites.” So many times, the beauty of Hong Kong broke my heart but that last gift nearly undid me — those fragile golden creatures rushing into the oncoming storm, beautiful in their living and dying.
It’s a metaphor for making art in the face of death I hold close even now, twenty-one years later, as I rise from the table, August thunder growling outside.