I went to dinner tonight with my father's classmates, a kind of reunion. And while I typically enjoy spending time with people my parent's age especially while practicing my cantonese, there were just too many of them tonight to really feel like I wasn't an outsider.
Half way into the dinner though, I start talking to the person to my right, a tall and rather quiet man in his fifties. He's dressed neatly in a suit and sitting up straight like an exec. He tells me he works at a VC firm in New York that invests in biotechs and has two kids, both in high school. We get to talking and he starts telling me about his first few years in the US. Flying over in 1967, the first place his friend takes him is Haight-Ashbusy! Everyone was so friendly, he said. He spent a summer out in Tahoe, his friends ski bumming and him working as a waiter at a casino. He described himself as a hippy, spent a month (or was it a year) hitchhiking across America.
Later in his life, he traveled all across Asia (perhaps the world, though I didn't have the time to ask). And while other people in the room may enjoy living in Hong Kong because it's convenient for them, he chose to live there since he had seen so many other places and knew it was the place for him.
Books and movies can tell you a lot about the world - descriptions of Indonesian cuisine and social movements in South America. But I admire those who have lived that knowledge, embodied it and have learned it through action and experience. No book could ever make me feel the way I felt the first time I walked through Times Square in New York City. It could never describe the feeling of conversing in a language you hardly could speak 3 months before. Enough of being abstract, I'm off to sleep.
