Moving On

I started writing about objects a year ago because I was moving at the time and I was afraid I would forget what "home" feels like just when I was beginning to get a hold of it. Otherwise, my core is spectacularly untethered. To accept this lack of grounding as a feature and not a bug, it was only recently that I was able to articulate how: I move through the world in language and in abstraction. In turn, I envy people who have a real gift for the material, when most of the time, objects are just things that don’t occur to me. Possession, or ownership, changes the meaning of knowing or understanding something (I think).

A little more than a month ago, I moved again, unexpectedly, back to Hong Kong, just as my roommate and I, after six months of living together in this khrushchevka in the far north, were congealing into a mode of comfort harmonized in silence, and so when I broke the news, it felt like a minor betrayal. (Am I changing my life or am I changing my roommate’s life?) Every move triggers to some degree the trauma of past moves. For example, I am quite convinced that my knee-jerk resistance to owning and accumulating things is a traumatic response to all those times I had to ration my life into a 23 kg parcel and pray to GOD for mercy from the check-in agent at the airport. As for the trauma of giving up—that original curse of the emigrant—the reason for the first big move away from New York remains unresolved, although as time went on, it seems less and less important to close in on the particulars of cause and effect, and more pragmatic to preserve what’s left of those years, like leftovers under plastic wrap.

Late summer, I find myself returning to a place of filling up a new home with new, concrete things, and it’s crazy the amount of things you have to fill a home with in order to make it liveable. I have been using a pair of scissors as a knife for almost a month now because the thought of researching knives is somehow a bigger burden than eating only soft vegetables for a few more weeks. I ordered curtains too quickly and now when I look at the drab shade of beige, they fill me with such disdain (“functional, but uninspiring”). (As far as I have an “interior design philosophy”, color has one job and it is to inspire.) Moving out of her university housing in parallel, a good friend of mine—a hoarder with a mind for strategies—agreed that the only way to relieve ourselves of the inevitable humiliation of moving house is to outsource our humiliating chores to each other.

For the most part, moving is still a blessing. The second year my family emigrated to America, we moved to our own house and for the first time, instead of sharing with my brother, I had my own room and a double bed. I remember thinking I will probably never have a room with a bed as big as this one in the rest of my life. I thought that again when I lived in the master’s suite of a shared off-campus apartment during sophomore year of college. I thought the same in a different shared house during senior year. The only time this wasn’t true was during the five years when I lived in Brooklyn. But while I was lamenting the barely-good fortunes of my scrappy life, I never even imagined it would ever be possible for me to live alone in Hong Kong, one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world. There are, of course, many matters of practical privilege that make changing one’s life more possible than others. Maybe the lesson is just this: if you can afford to, it is worth giving yourself the chance to need less than you think you do, and end up with more than you imagined you wanted.

I think often about what a Hong Kong stage actress once wrote: You thought growing up is about what you accumulate, but it’s actually what you discard. The first iteration of this Substack series was an exercise in letting go: the premise was I would catalog the belongings I lost during my last move until I no longer missed Beijing. This is not to say I don’t miss Beijing from time to time, but at the end of the day, the things I missed the most about life in Beijing were never the objects. What they did stand for, however, was the question I had first moved to Beijing for: how do you build a life? Moving back to Hong Kong, this is now a journey of what does it mean to build a home.