Dual Permanence

Object permanence is knowing that objects continue to exist whether you can see them or not (or notice them with any of the senses). Young kids don’t have this yet, which is why they think Peek-A-Boo is the greatest thing ever. As you get older, you develop new ways of displaying object (or abstract) permanence - you know your job is still there even though this is not your rota’d or contracted day to work; you know everyone else is having to work their retail job on a Bank Holiday even though you’re going to spend the day in the garden hoping it doesn’t rain on your barbecue; you know where to find a petrol station because it’s always in the same place; you’re developing existential dread because you’re painfully aware that the climate crisis is killing everything while everyone pretends not to notice but you know it’s there waiting - the list goes on.

What about other things? What about places you’ve lived, the way of life or the feeling of being there?

If you’ve ever seen another post on this blog then you’ll know I used to live in Hong Kong. I was there for eleven years. I came back close to six years ago, and yet I can’t seem to shake the idea that this new life is permanent and it’s HK that’s ended for me.

I left for various reasons - I needed to get out, I needed a change, I needed something new. I thought I needed to get back to Blighty and relax in open spaces and enjoy the idea of working after simply flashing the HR department my passport, not sitting through interviews over and over and finally getting a work visa after weeks of struggle (other people’s experiences may vary).

However now I look at it, perhaps I just needed an extended break. I’m one of those people who work and work and don’t look up from my desk, so for three years in a row my boss had to remind me that I had holiday left and I had to take it before the end of the year, as I couldn’t carry them over. I think that may have contributed to me feeling stifled and trapped, irritated at everyone around me when it wasn’t their fault. When I rocked up back in England, it was all empty spaces, deep breaths, crystal blue, freezing skies and a month of unemployment until I could find something.

Something unwound in me. Something was gone - the frustration, the irritation, the wanting to punch the next person who jabbed me in the eye with an umbrella or trod on my foot trying to cut me off at a pedestrian intersection. I was slowly but surely letting it all go. Compounding that was the feeling that, due to being unemployed, I could just sleep an hour more, go for a walk when I wanted, enjoy the fact that I could eat late or early or whenever I wanted to go to the kitchen, and not rush around work times or frantic schedules. Yes, I was relaxing and getting used to be able to spread out again.

But over the next few years I was also immersed in the cold weather, the grey skies and freezing rain, the tepid environment and insipid, boring outlooks of people who thought driving twenty miles was a long way. Conversations I shrank from willingly; most people around me had been born and grown up in the same village or town, and had been to a city maybe once even though they owned a car. They were Small Town People, and there’s nothing wrong with that - if you’re also a Small Town Person. I don’t think I am - I realised I was bored of the tiny fishbowl I’d landed myself in and now I needed the open sea.

When my role at work was made redundant and there was no other company vacancy like-for-like they could offer me, it meant I was free to take redundancy without penalty and I could literally do anything I wanted.

The choice became obvious: back to Hong Kong, or new adventures in Manchester, England.

My friends on all sides of every ocean were quick to point out that they thought of me as an explorer, and therefore going back to somewhere I’d already been was a waste of time. I should head to Manchester, the place I was born but never really spent any time in. Live there, have fun there, see the bright lights and all-night places, go to the international events and have the chance to enjoy the multi-cultural diversity of a major city.

I did. I went through all the sorting and packing all over again - the same as I had done every time I moved to a new flat in HK. I packed my entire life into about nine cardboard boxes and hired a removals company to get them and all my furniture to Manchester. And here I am, living on the outskirts but close enough to the city so that my rent is a little lower but I can still get on a bus (a bus! The public transport works! And half of it all is electric!) to go into the proper city. There’s a Chinatown and proper shops, an eclectic mix of Boho, yuppy, down to earth, just getting by and loving life. The shops stay open when the streetlamps come on, there’s buses until midnight and trams all day and free buses to major points around the city. There’s weird and wonderful eateries and bars, allowances for all kinds of dietary requirements and faiths, there’s a welcoming vibe of just wanting everyone to sit in the same sun and drink, or eat, or listen to music or read their textbooks or holiday novels or after-work comics. When it rains people put on their coats and carry on.

It’s refreshing, it’s a sprawling yet connected place of stuff to do and things to see. There are guided walks if you want to get to know the place, there are apps for proper quiet plods around the city by yourself, there are literally so many things to do that I’ve been out about 70% of all weekends in the past ten months I’ve been here, and I’ve still barely scratched the surface.

This is what I wanted, right? This is how it should have been since the first day I got back to England, right?
Then why do I still feel like HK is just around the next corner of the street I’m on? Why does it feel like when you’re texting someone who lives 5,000 miles away but you talk so often it’s like they’re just in the next room? Why is it, when I’m watching an HK drama (I’m currently on Apple Colada) and see them walk past one of my old flats, I wonder why I didn’t see them filming when I was to-ing and fro-ing, and then I realise it’s because I don’t live there? And that’s the thing - it’s always “I don’t live there”, not “I don’t live there any more”.

Someone asked me for directions in the city a few weeks back, for a place I should know in Manchester. But before I could think I said “which one?”. Then I realised there is> only one in Manchester - the other I know is in Hong Kong. Why am I doing this when I’ve been here since November 2018 and it really should have sunk in by now that I’m here, this is where I live, this is what life is now. I’m normally pretty good at adapting to things - I got used to HK in about twelve months, I adjusted back to the UK in about the same. But perhaps I just did the superficial surviving, not an actual adjustment. I stopped calculating what items were in HK dollars as UK pounds became real to me again. I started carrying a fleece around again, knowing that the weather would only feel like eighteen degrees C when the sun was out, and as soon as it hit 4pm the temperature would start to fall off until it was barely eleven degrees by 9pm.

Perhaps I didn’t do the real adjustment; my head is still over here, I think, and to some degree so is my heart. This comes as a shock to me, as I really didn’t think I had a heart.

I know the HK I miss so bad I can taste it is gone, and it’s never coming back. It was Hong Kong between about 2006 - 2012. By the time I left in 2013, I thought I was over the place. But I think it’s like when you’re cooking and you pick up a scalding pan - it burns you and you curse about it, but years later you look at the scar and you miss the cooking part that it reminds you of. It’s like there’s an invisible, indelible mark of HK stamped on me somewhere and I’m only now realising it’s even here. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get rid of it - and I’m not even sure a day will come when I want to.

What do I do about it? The easy answer is just to return to HK. But I can’t do that, due to money, and a certain immigration case that’s been cleared but will always hang around my neck like a millstone, thanks to a certain person who is dead to me. If I won the lottery tomorrow then I would certainly try to find a way to return in time. But let’s be real here - people like me don’t win the lottery, and I will never be in a financial position to leave this country and relocate again. It’s Manchester or nothing, which is why I’m doing my best here.

I hang around Chinatown more than I should, causing me to hold onto the feeling that HK is here, just out of sight round a corner. It’s object permanence for an entire territory of Southeast Asia, and I don’t know how I’ve managed it but it’s a real place that lives in my head alongside Manchester and therefore I’m still connected to it.

I had cause to rewatch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s pilot episode recently. And one part that I never really understood the last dozen or so times I’ve seen it stuck out to me. Well, more like poked me in the eye in painful realisation. When confronted by aliens who do not understand linear time, Starfleet Commander Ben Sisko struggles to explain that humans do the best they can day by day, because they can’t say for sure what will happen next. But the aliens are confused; if that’s true, why does he often think about and get sad over one particular memory? He is brought back to the same awful scene in his life and over and over, but when he demands to know why they keep showing it to him, they say in all innocence that they don’t control it - he brings them back to it. “You exist here,” they say, and “this is not linear.” He accepts this is true - and that a part of him will always exist in that awful moment.

I have no awful moments in HK, even including the day I was officially detained by HK Immigration (very politely and completely by the book, I might add) for forty-eight hours pending an official criminal investigation that I later completely cleared of. I have no reason to get stuck on one memory as Sisko did. Instead I think a part of me will always exist in those happy and not so happy times in HK - a conglomeration of my life there, everything rolled into one ball so that everything is touching everything else all at the same time. I can’t tease it out, I can’t separate any part of it from another, and I think that’s where anything up to half of me exists. They are memories, but they’re alive. When I’m in Manchester Chinatown and I chat with a waiter about living in Kennedy Town, we talk like we’re both still there. When we express support for the current protesters, it’s as if we’re about to attend protests and hand out bottles of water to them from the shadows in silent solidarity. But we’re not there, we’re nowhere near there - so why does it feel like we are?

Is this object permanence or just old age?