xu xi

City Notes with iPhone

Sunday Morning: February 15, 2015, Hong Kong.

The morning after Valentine’s night, I’m at the gym, the seriously cool branch at Exchange Square, Hong Kong’s Wall Street, not my usual one across the harbor in TST. I arrive at eight when they open, having checked their hours online the night before.

Only the vacuum cleaner is in motion. The other machines are silent, unoccupied, probably because of excesses the night before; every restaurant deemed romantic was fully booked. That’s probably true for the members of this gym, the highly paid globally young, on the 37th floor of excess space in my city of far too little space to breathe, to live, to simply exist.

My Valentine’s night was spent on Skype with my partner in New York. We have loved via distance since 2010, when I finally conceded to move “home” and take a full-time job to help care for my elderly mother with Alzheimer’s. I abhor indentured servitude, however well paid, but family is family, and I am just Chinese enough to be filial. In this age of life by electronic proxy, how would we survive without our iPhones and laptops and Wi-Fi and virtual cities that make transnational lives possible?

However, since the protests by those who profess to love what we are and have been—the peaceful, two-month tented occupation of several key districts in autumn 2014 that was the Umbrella Movement—my birth city has begun to slip away from me. It is complicated belonging to a place that is part of a country, yet not. “One country, two systems” could only have been dreamt up by China, a country that encroaches neighboring shores but denies its lust for conquest (unlike Western colonial powers that simply annexed space and squatted). It’s not unlike having privileged access to this 37th floor, all because ages ago I joined the gym that went viral across the city and the world. Capitalist conquerors always are the fittest survivors.

It’s Sunday morning, and I need quiet and empty space. I walk through buildings and back roads, tunneling through all the alternate, less-trodden indoor and outdoor pathways I can find to get here. Public transport, roads, and the most accessible pedestrian walkways are too, too much, too packed with people all the time. Urban life in the 21st century exploded on our shores. Hong Kong is a wealthy playground for privileged global professionals but remains a land of opportunity for migrants from Asia and the world. My parents arrived here separately over sixty years ago and never left. Despite my complaints, I know this is still home, despite my U.S. life.

During my treadmill run, I overlook shoreline construction upon reclaimed land that further encroaches space.

We plant a Ferris wheel instead of trees and widen roads for yet more vehicular exhaust. The romantic mists that passing Chinese poets once observed of this city in the early 20th century have given way to a perpetually polluted haze. A few weeks later, a pollution documentary “Under the Dome” will go viral in China, only to be removed by Mainland authorities in a matter of days. Hong Kong air, say my friends who live in the major Chinese cities, is still way better. Ephemera on an overcrowded shore.

Thursday morning: January 26, 2023, Worcester, Massachusetts.

32 minutes past midnight and it’s already the next morning and of course I still haven’t fallen asleep. Tomorrow is my 69th birthday. Back in our rural home in Northern New York where my husband is probably asleep, it’s snowing even more than here. The storm system that migrated across the nation has now landed in the northeast. Fortunately, I can stay indoors until Friday morning, when the weather should improve. When I relocated to this city, temporarily, for my final full-time job a year and a half ago, I learned it was the second largest city in New England. That was news to most everyone I knew both in the U.S. and internationally.

I finally left Hong Kong in the autumn of 2018, about a year after my mother passed away at the age of 98, and my siblings and I sold the family flat, rendering me homeless in my birth city. Earlier that year, I also finally married my long-time partner, the same man with whom I Skyped faithfully once a week between New York and Hong Kong. Twenty-one years together, we decided, was long enough to be sure. These days, we Zoom faithfully once a week between New York and Massachusetts but are together far more often, either at home, in Manhattan where we still have our apartment, or here in my second city life.

My 4th floor apartment is in a new-ish complex that covers an entire city block in the Wall Street of Worcester. It faces south and overlooks an enclosed courtyard.

The complex has a gym on the 1st floor that looks out onto the north courtyard with its outdoor swimming pool. Unlike my Hong Kong gym back in the mid 1990s where an outdoor pool was open year-round (heated in winter), this one opens after Memorial Day in May and closes right after Labor Day in September, even though the weather is still very warm. That’s by law in this state. Also, unlike the real Wall Street, which is all about markets and finance, this business district’s economy is fueled by sports (Polar Park), medicine (St. Vincent’s Hospital complex), some finance (the Mercantile Center), and government (City Hall). The silence of my neighborhood streets is deafening.

But Worcester is a city on the edge. A housing shortage is evident thanks to the urban sprawl of Boston commuters in search of more affordable housing. An economic renaissance, a.k.a. gentrification, for this former manufacturing center is happening; most recently the local post office I could walk to closed, because the building will be converted into downtown apartments. Expensive new restaurants and stores sprout up like weeds around me during my brief time here. Yet it’s still relatively safe and peaceful, still just “city-lite.” The junkies and panhandlers are less present in the streets compared to when Covid reigned. Now the city square brims with life when the weather is warm, with live music and weekend fairs for every occasion, shattering the deathly silence that greeted my arrival.

Covid and the 2019 Hong Kong protests that ended life as we knew it are now almost history. I was in Hong Kong during the 2019, oftentimes violent, occupation of Polytechnic University, fearful for our future, unable to freely wander the streets of my city on Sunday or any morning, the way I used to. That was my last time in Hong Kong and it’s not yet clear to me when I’ll return, even though I have traveled internationally since Covid eased, to Athens and London for instance, and will fly to Sweden and Singapore later this year. Many writer friends have left Hong Kong, are leaving, are trying to leave. My publisher warns me about being too public or vocal there. However, I still have my sister, cousins, and some close friends who will likely never leave. There is still a cultural, educational, and literary world to which I belong. In the end, Hong Kong is still “home,” even though its transformation into “one country one system” feels almost inevitable, erasing our cosmopolitan history, a denial of who and what we were.

Years of living between New York City and Hong Kong are over. Even my husband, the diehard New Yorker, prefers life up north in our rural home. But we retain our Manhattan apartment, at least for now. After all, it’s easier to fly to Hong Kong from New York.

Worcester is a temporary respite, even though I lurk in the dark of pre-dawn mornings, only wanting to leave my apartment for work, grocery shopping, and supplies. An Asian grocery, Super Mekong, is close by. I have indoor parking, free cable TV, and reasonably reliable Wi-Fi. Next year, I turn 70 and will likely be done with work as I knew it. Then it’ll be time to go home, with luck before life slips entirely away.

Still life, a privilege.

author photo by Alizah Holstein