It is January 22nd, 2011. My last blog post was sometime in late December 2009. So there was a whole year in there? Who would have thought?
Tonight I began to read my blog for the first time in several months. After chalking it up as another "gave-it-a-whirl-but-it-didn't-quite-take" project, I said goodbye to the blog when it became clear in the early months of 2010 that the demanding teaching obligations of Spring 2011 were not going to allow me to continue my pet project of documenting my every whim and thought during my time in HK. I would get questions about the blog every now and then, with a handful of people remarking that they were still waiting for my next entry, but I would just shrug, smile, and just say that I ran out of time. Which was true. But here's what was more true.
The truth is: the stories eventually became too much. Too unwieldy, too remarkable, too astounding, too infuriating, too vexing to be properly put into words, at least for a good but untrained story-teller like myself. After returning from Vietnam in January 2010, I was so overwhelmed with emotional responses to the country to convey adequately what the trip had meant to me. I was also in a Zen-like state of contentment that I didn't want to puncture by an overindulgence of self-reflection. As I grew frustrated to the point of blinding fury with California Fitness gyms in HK in the spring over a contractual dispute, I did not want to take to the blog to vent my anger because it would require explaining all of the little details about the case in order for it to make sense - when, truthfully, any time I even thought about the situation, I became livid. I didn't feel like taking the time to rehash the fight on the blog. As my flat very quickly succumbed to an invasion of black and white mold in late spring, I just honestly did not want to sit still in the flat long enough to write an entry because it meant my lungs were slowly being invaded by the raging pestilence that was growing all over my bedroom walls (and as I only found out much later, my pillows). On top of all of this, I was going to America (first once, then twice, then again - four trips, all in all, to the US in 2010) - I could tell everyone the stories in person once I got there, complete with dramatic re-enactments.
Did I also mention that December 2009 was when some of my students in Hong Kong discovered my blog? I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not that had anything to do with my cease-and-desist of this project.
So why this blog post, now? I received an e-mail from one of the candidates for the Yale-China CUHK post for next year, asking me questions about the fellowship and what the whole experience has been like. I receive these questions quite often, but there was something different (kind of sweet, kind of panic-inducing) about giving these answers to someone who could ultimately be my replacement. Meaning that in about five and a half months, this time in Hong Kong is going to come to a close for me, and two new people will come to have their own adventure, their own lessons, their own frustrations, and the like. Two new people will discover just how different Hong Kong is from the Mainland, how the challenges of living here are so very different than those of the Mainland (more subtle, for one thing), how their relationships to their job, teaching, and their students will grow and mature over time, and how even in the days when they detest everything about being here, the whole experience will never cease to be fascinating.
It's hard because as I learned more and came to realize so much more about this city, its people, and its culture, I was silenced (at least in the blogosphere) by my profound awe of the whole experience. The more I knew, the less I could say. I'll never really be able to explain to someone what this experience will be like for them, nor will I probably ever be able to convey adequately what this experience has been like for me.
In the end, though, I think that is a very good sign.
