HOME LEAVES HOME

When diaspora isn’t, yet

by Karen Cheung

The airport is a beginning and an ending. It is just past 6:00 p.m. on September 13, 2022, and I am in the slow-moving queue for Turkish Airlines, along with 10 of my friends who have shown up to see me off despite repeated assurances that my student visa was only good for a little over a year. The departure hall is sterile; it smells like the inside of a hospital appropriate given that for at least half of the people here, it is the death of a life as they knew it. Ahead of me are about 50 suitcases and a dozen children in face masks that do little to muffle their shrieks.

My skin still smells like the ocean. The day before, Kaitlin and I went for one last swim at Turtle Cove, and on the beach I ate a whole snowy mooncake for breakfast, in honor of mid-autumn festival. The surface of the water was broken up by trash, and there was a lining of sunblock residue that was at once dreamy and disgusting. I couldn’t resist putting my head under. My visa would not come until the morning of my flight; for days, I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to fly out after all. I didn’t go through the motions of things one was supposed to do when they leave host a ceremonious farewell hotpot, take the tram from Shau Kei Wan to Kennedy Town, get dim sum with my old teachers. I didn’t do any of those things because I told myself I wasn’t really leaving.

My two suitcases are stacked onto a trolley, which Francis and Gareth take turns pushing across the sleek speckled floor, even though I told them that if I couldn’t haul them around on my own here, I’d be screwed when I got to Heathrow on my own. Gareth mumbles something under his breath about how being at the airport reminds him of the protest they staged here in 2019. Not so loud, I say to him.

Hsiuwen has brought along a Polaroid camera and is snapping portraits of me and everyone else, photographs that I would carry with me in my wallet for weeks to come. I’ve instructed everybody that they aren’t allowed to see me off if they think they might cry, because I don’t want my eyes to dry out on a 17-hour flight. Emily breaks that rule when I pull her and Bernadette into a group hug. I don’t know if it’s because Bernadette’s seen something of my future in the tarot cards that she hasn’t yet told me, or if Emily’s been disappointed by too many friends who had promised they’d be back and never returned. Surveying this entourage of people I love, Holmes says, “I’m starting to think maybe I should not have believed you.”

The beginning: a new climate, new city, new community. The ending is the part of my selfhood that had been constructed upon the narrative that I could not and was incapable of leaving home, even for a short period of time. Being someone who has never lived anywhere outside of the place I had grown up has, over time, become a core part of my identity; I like being rooted in one place, a place that informed how I see and move through this world. It felt vaguely punk to choose to stay when everyone was adamant about moving across the globe.

But, as the political conditions deteriorated, my imaginary list of factors that could kill me kept growing: getting arrested, never falling asleep again, being crushed by the sheer weight of my anxiety. If I do not leave now, on the cusp of turning 30, I know I will never leave. It feels like time to challenge my hypothesis that I would wither and perish if I ever left Hong Kong. I am powerless to change the course of history, but at least I can control the distance of the seats from which I watch my world burn, if only for a little while. •

When I was 18, I got the words seize the day tattooed on my wrist because I was convinced that I’d die young. It wasn’t because I had an underlying medical condition or that I thought I was some genius child doomed to an early death; it was that, throughout my adolescence, I had lived on the precipice of mental collapse, the result of growing up in a volatile family environment. This eventually drove me to move out, and from that moment on, home became a singular obsession, in both life and writing.

Home is not a place but what is it then? White walls and a scented soy candle that constitute what writer Hyejoo Lee recently called “an amalgam of affects,” an oval cast-iron casserole dish, the monstera plant aesthetic? A person you promised to be partnered to forever? A miniature toy model of the bus of your regular route, a bath mat that says Home Kong? What I desired, above all else, was a permanent address. I had moved, over the past decade, from 5 Water Street to 21 North Street to 1F Sands Street to 343 Des Voeux Road West to 62 Po Hing Fong. I wanted to be parented, to have a bowl of soup waiting for me at home after a long workday, to know where I was meant to be during the holidays. Oh, why don’t I have a home, I’d moan, feeling so damn sorry for myself.

Questions like who is your emergency contact? or name of next of kin? on a form at the doctor’s office or on the university registration website used to pull me into a black hole of despair, make me feel like I was all alone in this fucking world. When I had food poisoning and passed out from dehydration, I refused to check into the hospital, for fear that they would call up my father. When I attended weddings and saw the parents dabbing at their eyes, I’d drink until I threw up. At my graduation, I cried so hard amidst the other proud multigenerational families that the vice-chancellor twice turned back to look at me in alarm. I lived in chaos mode, channelling my energy toward the simple task of not dying.

During the protests in 2019, I wondered: who the hell was I supposed to call if I landed myself in the hospital or at the detention center? Rules around visitations are archaic, privileging one mode of social relations those decreed by blood, or by your willingness to sign a piece of paper betrothing yourself to another over freer forms of love. This question I had been wrestling with since my early adulthood suddenly took on a perilous quality, as if it was connected to my fundamental survival in this city.

For a long time, I did not have a place that felt like mine, so I sought refuge in my friends’ apartments. I am now almost 10,000 kilometers and an eight-hour time difference away, but if I close my eyes, I can still see every one of these with photographic clarity the warm insides of these apartment blocks stacked on top of one another.

What I remember about each of my friend’s places: the mug, etched with an initial K, that sits on the shelf of Jesse and Bianca’s tong lau flat on the quiet Sycamore Street near Tai Kok Tsui. It is a street that would have been unremarkable if not for its melodious Chinese translation, 詩歌 舞街, the street of song, poetry, and dance, and the fact that it’s been cemented in the pop-culture imagination by an eponymous indie pop song. Jesse, an engineer and my gig buddy, is one of the best home cooks I know, making elaborate meals to feed his friends every weekend. After dinner, we’d clear the table and lay down board games while tiny men ran after a ball on the television. The mug was presented to me by Bianca, and it sits beside other initials, a gesture that says to their friends, now my home is yours, too.

The line of potted plants at Rachel’s rooftop garden, in a leafy village nothing like the boisterous Kowloon neighborhood I was raised in. Bees wander in through gaps in the glass doors and circle the room while we duck our heads, and sometimes, when she has guests over, she cuts leaves of basil and tosses them into the sauce. Rachel is a journalist, with an ability to talk to just about anyone, and a ferocious dedication to reporting in a hostile political environment. She writes the menu onto stiff cards chawanmushi, clams steamed in saké, salmon chazuke and it was here, this past Lunar New Year, that I finally learned how to play mahjong, overcoming my adolescent shame of having to sit in a corner whenever my friends gather round the square table.

At Rocky’s public housing flat, it is the framed Death Cab for Cutie poster on the wall, next to a bookshelf of volumes by Paul Auster, political theory, and manga. His place faces a track field with glaring stadium lights that cast fluorescent imprints onto his window every night, and vinyl records are scattered across the space, spilling out of their worn sleeves. After a few beers, we would force each other to listen to our favorite music. Our friendship came slow, formed after years of running into one another at gigs or reporting assignments, and cemented through traded book and music recommendations. Rocky has been a 40-year-old punk since he was about 21, and by that, I mean he’s a hater who loves very fiercely. When he plays with his band, I never miss a gig.

I have had the same friends for the past five, then 10, then 15 years; if I ever felt lonely, there was a contact list on my phone of dozens of people dating back to my secondary school days whom I could ask out for dinner or a drink. We were all here, and never more than an hour away from each other in this tiny ass city that does not even have its own postcode, separated at most by a narrow harbor and the taxi drivers who refuse to cross the tunnel.

My last place of residence in Hong Kong was a seafront apartment on Connaught Road West. There was a view of the harbor from the study, the bedroom, the kitchen, and the balcony in the living room, a smudge of distant blue that cast an aura of serenity over the space. A few days before I left, my friend and colleague Elaine came over to pick up a monitor and a couple of miscellaneous items for her new place. “This is such a nice flat,” she said, wistfully, looking at the famed Hong Kong skyline that was right outside my window.

The apartment was crammed with belongings that were not mine, because every time a friend left Hong Kong, their things would inevitably wind up in my apartment. Over the past year, I had inherited a soda stream I never bothered to order capsules for, a biking helmet I did not use because I couldn’t bike, seven potted plants, and dozens of tote bags from a civil organization that has since disbanded. People kept giving me things because I was the person who was not going to leave, and I kept adopting them because I was ready to become a Person With Things, in a home with a person that finally promises to feel a little permanent.

When I was 20, I had lived in a seaview flat with six others, among them Francis and Gareth, and despite the messiness of the bathroom and our interpersonal relationships, I remembered the moments of quiet staring out at the nautical lights drifting gently on the surface of a sea that disappeared against the night. I always thought, so long as I found the right person and lived in a perfect flat that replicated those previous conditions of quiet, my void would be filled once and for all. interior differences, looks almost exactly like their studio in Sheung Wan, where I had been a constant dinner guest. Beth has my spare keys; she is listed as my local emergency contact.

What I missed wasn’t the place itself, but the version of myself that had existed in that place: open-hearted and young enough to still believe that, so long as I tried hard, my love would have to be reciprocated, whether by another person or by a city. I never felt quiet in this place, not after I hung my friends’ artwork on the wall, not after I populated the flat with musical instruments and cooking equipment, not even with the photographs I had carefully framed and propped up in each room symbolizing our union. I thought maybe the difference was that this apartment had been adjacent to a highway, and the sounds of cars racing down the road bled into my dreams. I had equated home with domesticity, believing I could build a welcoming space like the one my friends had generously offered me, but I was crushingly lonely, making meals for one despite living with another, and trying to distract myself via podcasts and baking and reality television.

When it was time to clear all my personal items, I threw out the Things with a calm indifference that surprised me. On my last day in the flat, I baked a lemon cake. It was dry and did not rise; in bed later that night, just before I fell asleep, I realized I forgot to put the eggs in. It was inedible, but the sweet smell of baked goods lingered in the space. At least I tried to make it home. I tried so hard.

I moved to London for a graduate program in writing. Over the past decade, I had worked first as a reporter, then as an editor at an art archive. I wrote a book about growing up in and loving and resenting and mourning Hong Kong. I was proud of being a Hong Kong writer, but I was starting to feel unsure about whether I could ever write about anything else, so I came to England to find out.

I thought I would finally give myself the freedom to write about music and heartbreak and literature, but instead all I was writing about was still Hong Kong. I often said that if I ever left, I would not write about Hong Kong anymore. I harbored some faint moralistic objection to being a Hong Kong writer who no longer lived there. What right do you have, I muttered to myself, as I read yet another piece written from afar, portraying a version of the city so long past it was unrecognizable to anyone who had lived there in the past decade. Now it was, What right do I have?

When I was in Hong Kong, everything had felt urgent. We were documenting the times, keeping the memory of the fight against the authoritarian regime alive. Now that I am so far away, nothing feels urgent anymore. My writing has always been maximalist, stretching to the limit of the permitted word count. There are gaps and asterisks, yet too much happens over the span of 700 words, as if I’m trying to cram an entire life and history of a city into a piece of writing. The writers I meet here in England don’t write that way. They hold the gaze; they single in on one idea. I am fast and out of control, swerving from one crisis to another. Their moments unfold gradually, deliciously. In their company, I, too, learn to slow down.

At the pub after class one day, I tell a friend I have no idea what an English village looks like. We open Google Street View and show each other where we grew up. We click on the arrow to move down the road: I see a fish and chips shop, a barber that hasn’t updated its storefront since the ’80s, a pub dripping with bursts of flowers in hanging pots. The roads are flanked by aggressive trees on both sides.

This is the tree my window faced, I say as I zoom in on the banyan at Blake Garden I had written so much about. Then I type in Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park; the description says, Green space with a jogging path & pool. It is still marked as 7 min walk home. I plant the little man onto the waterfront, point at the tall buildings lined up neatly in front of a soft mountain ridge, the cable bridge on the left, the solitary fishing line dipping into the waves by the fence. And these are my waters.

I came to England for no other reason than to prove that I could do it. But I also waited for there to be a critical mass of people I love in this foreign land before deciding to come. Two of my best friends from university had moved to England, one after the other, just before I came: Beth and Lam and I met over a decade ago in university in Hong Kong, and by some stroke of serendipity we are now once again no more than an hour away from each other. Every day we share the stray thoughts that cross our minds, trade photographs of the meals we make for ourselves, exchange tender encouragements. Beth teaches tenancy law to a group of middle-aged moms and dads who have moved with their kids. She and her partner’s flat, for all its structural

The other people I knew here are émigrés from Hong Kong, an assortment of artists, lawyers, activists, and writers. They aren’t here to prove a point to themselves. They’re here because they can’t go home, after the national security law in 2020 effectively outlawed all dissent in the city. Or maybe they could, but they aren’t sure. That’s the whole point of the national security law: that fuzzy slab of uncertainty in between. They don’t call themselves exiles it’s too loaded a term. They aren’t diaspora either, at least not yet; that is an identity that perhaps their children would assume when they grow up. They learned to make their own char siu and have an arsenal of information about the best deals at Asian supermarkets. I speak just as much Cantonese here, in a place where I am no longer the racial majority, as I did when I was living in Hong Kong. At dinners, we joke about making our own TamJai minced pork and selling it at Colindale, a neighborhood saturated with Hong Kongers.

I’ve always hated how corny missing home was, the diasporic food writing and the empty signifiers of home and mother tongues, and now, despite my best efforts to resist, I was turning into a corny person. The sudden food cravings for baked pork chop rice, the thrill of finding a boxed carton of Vita lemon tea (the bitter kind!) at your local co-op, the impulse to put a Hong Kong map up on the wall, blasting Cantopop in your bedroom in a house of foreigners like it’s an inside joke (wait, but remember, they aren’t the foreigners anymore, that’s you). I haven’t turned off my push alerts of Hong Kong news, so while I’m at the local pub quiz with my neighbors trying to figure out what years Horatio Nelson had been alive, I get daily updates about the number of buildings given mandatory mass-testing orders in Hong Kong, the warning signals for the unseasonal typhoons that have now been hoisted.

I had promised myself I would never write a piece about leaving Hong Kong, but maybe I could write about all the ways Hong Kong never leaves us: how, when I’m walking down a biking lane reveling in the novelty of living next to a graveyard, I’d still be thinking about the noise of the city from the first row of the tram, the pink bougainvillea that drapes down a graffitied wall, even the black layer of grime outside a street food stall in Mong Kok. I plop myself down onto my neighborhood in Google Maps every now and then, wander the streets, click through the alleys and past the blurred faces of ghostly pedestrians. I’d see the storefront of the goods store and think to myself, there ought to be a cat with a red collar writhing on the pavement right there, between the bus stop and the boxes of dried scallops.

When I saw on social media a poster of Rocky’s upcoming show in December, a day before Christmas Eve, I realize that, for the first time in years, I would not be joining hundreds of others in a sweaty mosh pit at a grubby warehouse dancing along to his band. Instead, when I am at the organic food store next to Hampstead Heath, I put his music on my iPod, listen to him scream into my ear, then send him photographs of all the produce I’ve previously only known from cooking shows: pumpkin and squash of all sizes and mutations, celeriac, tiger tomatoes, plantains.

Perhaps I would not have seen permanence as a worthwhile pursuit had we not grown up in a city with a countdown timer. But it felt only fair that, if I were to be forced to get used to a new residence every few years, it would at least be in the same city, a vast expanse of land and water, people and streets that would be called home. For those who had recently moved, either forcibly out of fear of arrest or voluntarily, Hong Kong as home was now an abstraction. They may think of the city as home until the day they die, but when they say 返屋企 these days, they mean a suburb in a new apartment development in a British suburb that reminds them of LOHAS Park.

I am not as fully here as those who have emigrated, nor can I pretend to be as up to date with political developments as when I was there, as in back home. I don’t want to be caught in that punishing loop of post-protest memorialization. Observing certain protest anniversaries is necessary because it is now dangerous to do so in Hong Kong under the law, but the memory is still fresh enough to be an open, gaping wound, and nobody could say what the purpose is beyond commemoration. I have no patience to follow the drama within exile and immigrant communities, but I don’t want to lose my connection with what had defined me either. I’ve also come to understand that any guilt over not being physically present is utterly meaningless and serves only to entrap myself. All I could do is keep the people who love me close, people who still keep home close.

One afternoon in late September, a group of us all find ourselves within the vicinity of Liverpool Street, and so we meet up at a Hong Kong cafe that offers French toast that costs three times what we’d be paying at a cha chaan teng in Prince Edward. The menus are sandwiched between a square of glass and the table, and the plates are a cheap yellow plastic. Behind the counter, a young man in a white shirt is making milk tea with an impassive expression while singing along to N.Y.P.D.’s “Mee & Gee” blasting over the speakers: 屌 你老母 Giordano, 屌你老母 Bossini. I had left home, but home had also left home.

•

Once upon a time, I was in love with someone who was fond of telling me I was rubbish at taking care of myself. I internalized it so thoroughly that I started making even that a part of my identity. Haha I’m so rubbish, I’d say when I knocked something over or misplaced an item or burnt a piece of meat I was cooking. One morning at work, I was describing something I don’t even recall what to Paul, and I let it slip out again. I’m just useless, lol.

Paul, my colleague and one of my best friends, turned to me and shook his head. With an almost pained expression, he said, “I really wish you would stop saying that. But whatever, ugh. You do you.”

From then on, I’d let my friends know that they can call me out if they hear me saying that again. When CC caught me reverting back to my self-hating monologue, she chastised me, too. “You’re not allowed to say that anymore!” •

Callum and I met when he was on exchange at my alma mater in 2015. He lived across the street from me and would come over to my flat every other day to watch Community. He moved back to Britain after a year, but we kept up a long-distance friendship, weathering our failed relationships and career changes and family drama alongside one another, albeit virtually. Callum works as a doctor with the NHS, one of my few friends here who isn’t also from Hong Kong. He lives in a beautiful house in Kilburn that faces out to a garden with two other flatmates and “Rita the fake bitch,” a plastic monstera.

When I visited him in May, he told me that he had read my book and that he took issue with one thing: that I believed the only way I could fill my I’m-so-fuckingalone void was to succumb to a heteronormative family structure. Queer folks have long understood what chosen family meant. I mean, we’re basically family, he said.

For the five years we were apart, we never forgot to send each other cards and books and recorded video messages on birthdays and Christmas holidays. Whenever he’s in town, he sleeps on whatever vacant couch or bunk bed there is in the flat I am then in. When our hearts are broken, we hold each other and cry. These days, when he’s not working night shifts, the two of us, along with his friend Brian, order takeaway and nestle onto the couch in his house and watch the latest episode of Bake Off, my head resting on his arm with an easy intimacy.

All of my Things are still in Hong Kong: my four boxes of belongings are at my friend Ysabelle’s art gallery, packed by Rachel, who became exasperated by my lack of progress and showed up at my door clutching paper boxes one morning, methodically instructing me on what to do about each item and sealing my clothes in a vacuum bag. My books are at a community bookshop, and my vinyl player and collection at Jesse and Bianca’s flat. What I do have with me are my suitcase, a gift from Elaine and Bernadette, who bought them from the Wing On department store after work one day as I was preparing for a reading that evening; my charging cable, which had belonged to Paul; the Polaroids from the airport, now on the wall of my bedroom, along with postcards bearing my friends’ handwriting; and gig posters from indie shows over the past decade.

On my first cold day in London, I realized I’d forgotten to pack either a raincoat or a winter jacket; I didn’t even have an umbrella. I was caught in the rain and hurrying home from my daily walk at Waterlow Park when Wilfred texted to tell me a package was due to arrive at my new address. I tore it open at the door: it was a down jacket with a rain hood, exactly when I needed it most.

Every so often I am caught off guard when it occurs to me that I am 29 now. I have been kept on life support by all the people who made me chicken congee when I was sick and made pacts with me to spend every Lunar New Year’s Eve together and sat in dive bars with me until I worked out my shit. These days, every morning, I wake up to a wall of texts from friends back home: messages checking in, or conversations in group chats that have continued without me. They are the permanent fixtures in my life in these transitory times. Home in the form of everybody who has taken care of me when I was useless, kept me alive through all these years.

There is a tree outside my window here, too. My banyan tree back home was a deep green all year around, a facade of permanence. Here, over this past month, I’ve already watched this tree lose its golden crown of leaves; it is slowly growing bald. Seasonal cycles of death and rebirth, movement and renewal. We never return to the same place twice.

The line outside Genesis Cinema on Mile End Road curls all the way down the street, a mini-parade of Hong Kong people in all shapes and ages yabbering away in Cantonese, attracting the curious gaze of passersby. Within the first few minutes, I run into three different groups of people I know, upon whom I thrust miso chocolate chip cookies I had baked the night before. We are all here for a special screening of Blue Island, a documentary film billed as “Four generations of Hong Kongers, one impossible dream of freedom.” I had thus far avoided watching films that touched on the anti-extradition protests in 2019 too many of them felt like it was too soon, and I was allergic to the sentimentality that set the tone of most of these works, but I had heard good reviews about this film.

The lights go out, and my stomach lurches with longing when I hear the crowd on the screen chant slogans that had once been so familiar to me. It feels unbelievable that it’s already been three years: so much has happened so quickly since the protests ended. But what stays with me aren’t the scenes of the marches and clashes it’s the B-roll footage that book-ends the transitions. There are brief shots of an intersection, and immediately I know that it is Whampoa. When you’ve known one place your entire life, all it takes is three seconds to locate it on the map. One day, that street corner will change beyond recognition, but until then, we will always see it as what home had looked like.

In the streets in 2019, it was nearly impossible to get home safe if we did not rely on fellow strangers in masks or anonymous handles on Telegram groups that gave us exact locations of police sightings, grabbed our arms and pulled us away from the tear gas, told us where to run or rinsed our faces or tended to our sprained ankles. We were in this together. We left no one behind. When that ended, we returned to our regular programming of yelling at each other on forums and social media, shitting on each other for leaving, for staying, for advocating in freshly pressed suits too much, for not advocating at all. We retreated to our default stance that we had only ourselves in this world.

There was a time when I believed that the most useful, least rubbish I could be as a human being was to make myself very small, not get in the way, not need anything from anybody. If only I could truly be alone and self-sufficient in this world, I could fill the void all on my own. I don’t believe that anymore. I genuinely think the most revolutionary thing we can do is take care of each other; to make a home for each other wherever we are.

In the film, the director asks each individual interviewee what Hong Kong meant to them. One of the protesters pauses, then says, Hong Kong to me, it’s like family.

Inkjet print on paper Courtesy of the artist