Pad Thai Poetics: July 2015

When I first moved to Hong Kong, I didn't think much about how long I would stay. I was a restless 22-year-old hungry not for home but for adventure--for youthful, bittersweet memories that would belong in a Jack Kerouac novel, where characters burned furiously and brightly, longed for everything, and saw life as a blank canvas of infinite possibilities to be painted with new encounters and experiences. Three years later, the urge to "move fast and break things" has more or less dissipated, replaced by a yearning for something certain in this uncertain world. I used to think the transience of Hong Kong was romantic and full of opportunities, but now whenever another friend leaves, a petal of romanticism falls, blown away by a gust of desire to build a life somewhere I can call home.

Home: the idea of home has always been more abstract than physical for me, as I've never felt that I belonged to one place or another. Perhaps this ambivalence was inherited from my ancestors--migrants from China who became fishermen, taxi drivers, educators and businessmen in Singapore and Indonesia. In these new lands, home was not an inheritance passed from one generation to the next, but a fragile thing you had to build on your own through determination and hard work. Growing up, I greedily ate up any tales of my ancestry, eager to form a coherent narrative regarding my scattered identity--my ancestors were scholars in the Qing dynasty! My great-grandfather was tortured by the Japanese! Some of my ancestors came from a man-eating Indonesian tribe! My confusion was further compounded when my family moved to Taiwan for new opportunities and I somehow adopted an American accent along the way. All this moving around might explain my reluctance to view any one place as a permanent home, but also the deep-seated longing for a clear heritage I could anchor myself to.

Maybe this is why I really enjoyed visiting the Ping Shan Heritage Trail in Yuen Long, New Terrorities. The trail passes through shrines, temples, ancestral halls, study halls and walled villages constructed by the Tang Clan, one of the earliest and most important clans in the New Territories. The first generation Tang Clan ancestor moved from Jiangxi Province to Guangdong sometime in the 11th century, while the 7th-generation ancestor moved to Ping Shan in the 12th century. Strolling around the Tang Clan Ancestral Hall (built in the 13th century), I was in awe and even envious of the fact that the clan could trace their heritage back more than 800 years, amid various wars and dynasty changes. The brick walls and buildings in the area were heritages in the purest sense--properties passed down for generations. Imagine watching TV in the same living room where your ancestor studied for the imperial exams under candlelight! It was amazing to see these old relics still standing in Hong Kong, a land where "old" often refers to the club or restaurant that opened last year, or to any woman in a bar who's not a summer intern or exchange student (half kidding...).

After the walk, I returned home--an expat-filled apartment built in the 21st century on reclaimed land. I was still uncertain about my future in Hong Kong, but it was encouraging and refreshing to find out that someone wanted to make Hong Kong his home once--and did so for 800 years. Maybe instead of waxing poetic about the lack of permanence in Hong Kong, it was time I followed in the footsteps of my ancestors and stubbornly try to build a home here for myself anyway.