A hard day: homesickness, and a rant.

Today was a bit hard.  Of course, I was nauseous the whole day, but in addition I was feeling really quite homesick, which was a new concept for me.  Then, the short time I forayed out into the world,  every Chinese person I met yelled at me, so I slunk home and spent most of the day in bed. 

That's it in a nutshell.  The rest of this is me whining, so you can stop reading here. 

In the past 16 years, I have lived in 11 different cities (not including "couch surfing" for various lengths of time with friends and family) and each time I have left, I have never looked back.  I may reminisce about good times, but I never felt bad about leaving the old place or felt the current place I was in was better or worse, just different.  In short, never once did I feel homesick.  In fact, I never really considered myself having a real "home" to feel sick about.  I certainly didn't miss the crappy trailer I grew up in with out electricity, water in the winter, that my mother kept saying she was going to "blow up" she hated it so much herself.  And I never really felt terribly attached to any other place I lived.  I enjoyed myself when I was there, made friends, but easily detached. 

So perhaps I'm just getting old.  Perhaps this a stage in culture shock I just skipped the last 10 times. Perhaps my hormones are getting the better of me. Or perhaps I hate Hong Kong just that much. But today, for the first time ever, I thought about the place I lived before I came here and couldn't stop crying. I was totally homesick for a place I only lived 2 years.

Let's compare:

In Fairfax, I lived in a two story apartment complex with about 30 or so other families. Our apartments all faced an inner courtyard that had a pool, grass, community toys for the kids to play with, and a track kids could race around in.   I knew every single person there.  And almost everyone liked children, loved Kai, and gave him toys, clothes, snacks, candies on a regular basis.  Often I would have no idea where my child was, so I'd stand on the grass in the middle and call out "KAI!" and someone or other wuld stick out their head and say "He's in here!"  And I'd go over and have a chat and thank them for their hospitality and  encourage Kai to play outside where I could at least hear him and have a vague idea where he was.  Our apartment also had a community area where people who no longer wanted their books, music, toys, candles, dishes, etc would drop them off and others would take them to use.  Large furniture often moved from apartment to apartment and enjoyed long lives. Everyone thought Kai's fashion choices (green tutu, sparkle purse, white communion dress) was fabulous and unique and no one questioned my parenting for allowing him to wear such ensembles. Local restaurants had community toy areas for the kids to play, and the local playground had sand and trees and a small creek, and lots of community trucks and bikes and things for kids to play with, in addition to the normal play structures.  There was one ice cream shop, all organic, with a poster "How to make a community" on it, and a wall of photos of all the people in town eating their ice creams.  They had massage fairs, crystal fairs, wine fairs, organic farmer's markets, coffee houses that were locally owned and operated and had open mic nights, music clubs, pubs, and even a vegan (no meat, no eggs, no milk no nothing) restaurant smack dab next to the greasiest meatiest hamburger and hot dog joint in town.   Everyone and everything was OK.  It was like the 60"s never went away.  people wore their hair long, were often barefoot, wore non chlorine, non dye, handmade garments that flowed like a cloud around them.  Halloween was a community affair, preceded by the costume parade (there were always parades, it seemed).  Easter too.  They had one and only one church, and I visited there once just to see what it was about, and basically their message was "We don't know what we believe if we believe in anything".  It was kind of Agnostic, which I found a rather interesting concept for a church.  Surrounding this village was rolling hills with hundreds of trails and MT. Tamalpais, and a 20 minute drive through the hills brought you to to the great Pacific Ocean.  A 40 minute drive brought you to San Francisco. The sky was clean and  blue, you could see millions of stars at night, nature hugged and nourished us. Everywhere there were redwood forests, rolling waves of grassy hills, and sparkling blue ocean. Everything was clean and the temperature never got colder than a morning frost, and was usually warm but not boiling.

Except for the fact it was damned expensive like the rest of California and you needed a car because public transportation was non existent, it was perfect.  I even knew that before I left.  But I just couldn't live there on  the salaries Mabo and I were trying to live off of.  Rent, child care, car payments, and school loan repayments, all the very lowest I could find, ate up 90% of our income, and we had about 200 a month for food, clothes, gas for the car, etc.  I suppose 200 could get you somewhere in Maine, but in CA, you can spend that in an hour.

The only way out of debt was to leave my heavenly Fairfax. 

Now, in Hong Kong, after months of living frugally, we have paid off all our debts back in the US, except for the school loans, ad even have leftover every month to take Kai to go on dolphin tours, and see "Live dinosaur" shows, and do all sorts of cool fun things we couldn't afford in the US.  We finally were financially in a position to consider having another child.  We never have to worry if we have enough money to buy groceries, or whatever we want.  But at what price? 

In Hong Kong, everything is dirty and spoiled.  The air is poisonous, the paint is leaded, the walls have asbestos, the furniture formaldehyde, the ocean is clogged with trash, the foot paths in the hills are "Paved" with broken bits of china and other trash, there is trash everywhere, the food makes you sick, the ocean is unswimmable, and the tiny bits of grass that exist are corralled off and guarded, literally.  The other day we saw a whole ten stars and got so excited because usually the pollution prevents you from seeing any at all. 

The worst part for me is the yelling.  Chinese people are paid to yell at everyone all the time.  Today, for example, we went to the pool.  There are no fewer than 20 rules posted.  We followed every damn rule, and still got in trouble.  Kai brought a toy, and that was not allowed.  I put sunscreen on us, and that is not allowed.  Imagine, no sunscreen allowed!  Shit! So I put on my T shirt to prevent hospitalization from being burned, and no T shits allowed!  A leaf from a tree planted around the pool fell down into the pool.  Kai started to play with it.  Yep, no playing with leaves allowed either.  Fuck me!  Kai was in the kiddie pool that is like three inches deep and was jumping around...no jumping!   I was just giving every life guard the look of death, I just couldn't believe it.  But I COULD believe it, because this is life in Hong Kong.  Everything is NO.  Every playground, every beach, every place had signs the size of billboards to accommodate all the rules what you can't do. And still, there are tons of rules not written down that Chinese people just make up to get a chance to yell at kids.

  And hundreds, maybe thousands, of people are employed to enforce these rules. And they don't just say "Hey, don't do that."  Most of the time, they yell and yell and yell and just don't stop. I have a teacher I work with that yells in the kids' faces, with a microphone, and they are crying and hysterical and she still yells and yells and carrys on for 20 minutes.  This is very Hong Kong style and I hate HATE HATE it, especially when it's my kid.

Now most people tell me my son is pretty well behaved.  I watch him carefully and make sure he never does anything obnoxious and when he gets borderline obnoxious, I nip it in the bud instantly.  Non Chinese people praise my son on his manners.  Chinese people invent things to yell at him for.  It is horrible. 

So I earn enough money to pay my bills and have left over to start saving up for the next move.  The sooner I can afford to get out of Hong Kong, the better.  Sadly, I do not think I will ever be able to afford to live in Fairfax again.  The problems of cost of living vs teacher salaries is never going to balance in Fairfax's favor.

I don't know if I will ever find a place that felt like home as much as Fairfax did.  But if I do, and I can live there sustainably, I will never move again.