before you go
In the winters, students at Shek Kip Mei Ming Yin College were supposed to wear their school jackets on top of their uniform. It was a dark green blazer, a very British color; it reminded him of range rovers. One winter, he found that he had grown unexpectedly; he could not fit the jacket around his shoulders. And so this was the work-around: from that day on, he simply carried his jacket in his hands. It allowed him to almost, just almost, blend into the sea of green, as if to casually say: I would wear my jacket like all of you guys, but I’m just choosing not to right now.
My dad retold this story to me, smiling into the distance, as if he were seeing his younger self right in front of him. So fond - these memories. So cute, he said, and leaned forward in his chair, ever the eager interview subject. So what other questions do you have?
My dad was born in Hong Kong on December 1, 1969. From when he was born to when he graduated university, he lived in Shek Kip Mei Upper Village. About twenty families lived on his floor, with a few shared bathrooms at the end of the hall and an outdoor kitchen on the balcony. Most families lived within one room, 10 square meters each, but his extended family of eight lived between two. One room was where he slept, along with his parents and two younger brothers. The other room was for his paternal grandfather, aunt, and uncle.
Two bunk beds pressed up against the walls of their little square home. He shared the bottom bunk with his second brother, while the top bunk became the designated storage place for just about everything else that they owned. Anything that you didn’t need, you would stuff into the upper deck, he said.
“How did you know what to put where?”
Oh, very random, he said. I remember there was a set of mahjong that was missing a few pieces. When we played hide and seek, I would hide there and cover myself with all the stuffs. Cooking pans. We had some chairs, and the chairs were of course foldable. We didn’t have – what do you call this — he leaned back on the chair he was sitting in, indicating that they only had –
“Stools?” I suggested.
Yeah — all of them were foldable stools. They were wooden stools. Yeah. Tell your boyfriend this. When I was younger, we would sit on wooden boards in the day, and sleep on wooden boards in the night. We didn’t have mattresses. We just had 蓆 (zek, bamboo mats, to put in footnote).
I come from a people who strongly favor hard surfaces over soft ones; from grandparents who proudly slap their mattresses with wrinkled palms as an indication of a good night’s rest to come. When you were raised on beds like theirs, in the heat like ours, you rest better pressed onto something so flat, so constant. To feel the full gravity of everything that had floated about freely throughout the day, mind and body, anchored, home and temporarily final.
During humid Hong Kong summers, sleeping on bamboo 蓆 also had the added benefit of being far more cooling than any comfort a proper mattress could offer. On the hottest nights, opening windows did not suffice. The unbearable heat of so many bodies, packed into so little space induced a regular exodus, when children of the families of the corridor emerged from their rooms, over-spilling into the hallway. Like how heat makes molecules restlessly spread apart, so too do these little humans venture out and away. Bamboo 蓆 in hand, in search of the best spot to lay their mat, they find refuge on the cold hard floor. Giant glassless windows – no, gaping holes – hollowed out the corridor walls and welcomed in a much-awaited wind.
One such night, my dad was the first to slip out into the hallway. He eagerly plopped his 蓆 down, pleased that he had reserved himself, what most would consider, a highly-sought-after spot on the floor. He anticipated that a crowd would soon follow and he settled himself into place. Just as he was getting ready to sleep, an older kid came along and told him to move over. This guy… he had a weird name. He came late, and then he asked me to move!? I could only nod to indicate solidarity in his disbelief.
And dang it, so I had to move. To give the spot to him! he said, suddenly invigorated. Write this story down, he instructed. This is how we lived in our childhood, like animals. There were lots and lots of kids there. Some days it was just me. When I was sleeping in the corridor alone, for some reason I was not scared. And maybe then was when I started enjoying being alone. Being different. I sensed the familiar and incoming momentum of fatherly wisdom; he began to rattle off life lessons to conclude this anecdote. You have to adapt to the environment. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Can you sleep in the corridor? No freaking way.
I was both relieved and sad to hear that my dad was accustomed, well-adjusted, to being alone. Because for the first few years of my life, my dad only made appearances on the weekends. He was a Deutsche Bank trader, suit-and-tie-wearer, who brought home pens where if you pressed the silver knob on the side, a light would shine out with the bank’s logo in the middle: DB. On Friday evenings after work, he got on a plane and flew to Haneda or Changi Airport. So I have only about two memories with my dad during the year and a half we lived in Singapore, a time when I was too young to notice the pattern of his appearances and its correlation with the days of the week.
The first memory I have was when we had barely any furniture in our living room, which alone was bigger and emptier than any home our family had known. My parents bought a giant daybed that they thought would fill up the space, but when it was all done and placed there was still so much emptiness to fill. I remember that one afternoon my dad told me to sit next to him there and we sat there for a while reading our books – him, something with very small words, and me, probably Magic Tree House.
Some families remember where a child took their first steps. Some families have videos of their baby’s first comprehensible word. They realize the significance of that moment, how it memorialized an instance in which an oblivious child joined the rest of the world in becoming a little more human. The second memory I had with my dad in Singapore was the first time I ever came to understand the meaning and sadness of goodbyes, a nascent heaviness that from that moment on weighed on me forever.
Up until that moment, I had woken up on Monday mornings with a blissful ignorance of my dad’s whereabouts. I always trusted that he would reappear sometime soon, when needed, at an unknown point in time. But this one particular day, I was about to sleep when I said to him:「你走之前同我講」. A moment in which I was unaware that I had for the first time felt what it meant to miss someone before they were gone. To brace yourself for their absence all while they were still in front of you.
Tell me before you go. These words carved out a little section, the bottom right corner of my heart, which was from then on permanently reserved for the occupation of a dull but never-ending pain, the knowledge that things you loved didn’t stay forever.
