The Ghost's Perspective

The wholesome-is-awesome pace of my family-centered life settles in a consistent trend. Work is stressful, the travelling makes me lose my bearings even more quickly but I've more or less adapted in settling with it in my own amicable way. 

The truth is I spend the largest slice of my time with family. I have consciously chosen to enjoy conversations with I. and D. At age 4, he sings Yellow Submarine and Strawberry Fields Forever, and duets with D. on songs from Disney. Spending time with them is something like being introverts, altogether. Nonetheless, I allocated alone time and ran 71.5km last August including an organized half-marathon. 

I've made the most progress in reading this year, thanks to the ebook reader. When Haruki Murakami's new novel came out in bookstore shelves, I rewarded myself with the First American Edition and smelled all the creaminess out of the paper. I finished it in a week. Reading it and holding it was like making a sugary, intangible feeling - tangible. And I know I will find the time to write about that separately. And with everything that occupies our time - we had renovations going on at home.  

I do not find a sense of fulfillment in work. I will not glamorize the lifestyle it has enabled, nor romanticize how the industry I belong to has supported the economy and generated 1 million jobs. But I do find fulfillment in what I do outside work. If I lose my job, I know I have found how to sustain what truly fills me with joy and continue striving to shape life with some meaning.  

For all that I've received, I am thankful. I step away from myself now and become a ghost that looks at the spot where I am. It's not so bad. I go back and tell myself never to take this fleeting thing for granted. 

As a family, we have lunches and dinners out every so often. A Sunday or two ago we were at a Korean restaurant. The sun had just set. We start with romaine lettuce, kimchi, drink barley tea. We order a platter of meat. A waitress grilled the meat at our table: thin short ribs, beef top blade, beef chuck roll. The smoke rises in my face. 

There goes the ghost. I hear it beneath the fizz, humming a quiet Sunday piano piece. It's familiar. Joe Hisaishi's playing the theme from Spirited Away.

 

Drafting Dreams

How does one endeavor to build someone's happiness and draft the blueprint of an early history of someone's dreams? We are never really too conscious of this question as we fulfill our day-to-day obligations as parents - feeding, clothing, reading, introducing the world and being at best efforts to hand off values and a sense of responsibility. We were never the type of parents who think that they will be grooming a genius who will end the evils of greed and capitalism, but we try in our own humble, neutral way, to show him how we went about this fascinating and often perplexing planet that somehow afforded us some joys. 

Our answer to the question is to reciprocate the happiness that has been passed on to us, then let him learn to build it on his own and make it real by sharing it with others and spreading kindness. Now, that's not bad coming from a rather preachy, slightly eccentric father who makes an effort to keep his own table and eat alone during lunch at the office. 

Our answer to the question is to make you thirst for knowing, and discovering joy as you immerse into the process of knowing through books, through your interactions with people, through travelling, through the internet (your favorite). And while you are only four, we also respected your interests and inclinations - which is probably shaped from our own. One of the few things your father believed in Plato was that Intelligence results to Goodness. I simplify it, or maybe made it less generalized, in saying that wisdom persuades us to be kind. 

So to celebrate your fourth 360-degree spin around the earth, we didn't take you to Greece to learn about the ancients, or to Sudan to experience hunger first-hand, nor did we buy you a new Mac, or a new book. Heavily weighing upon your own interests as a four year old, and our middle-class inclinations, we took you to Hong Kong Disneyland. 

So it was now all part of the building of your happiness, drafted upon the blueprint of the early history of your dreams. This is the beginning of your learning about the fascination and consternation that you will gather in life as your travel. You sat on my shoulders while we watched the fireworks blasting in tune with themes from Disney movies. We saw your favorite Philharmagic twice, our perceptions of reality made positively phantasmal by 3D, by evocative scents, by water squirted to us while in the theater. You were wearing your Woody costume in the flights of fancy parade, and Woody stopped by to hug you. We had breakfast with Chef Mickey. 

It was all as if the draft of your dreams was a fulfillment of one of our own. 

Chumu-Chunking Express

It's past midnight. We just finished an obligatory trek up to Victoria Peak via the tram, the ding-ding tram, and a bus on the way down. We went along with our friend B. and her two kids after Xiao Long Baos at the Din Tai Fung. Up at the peak, We congratulated ourselves for the toursity effort with a 22oz Stella Artois each and spent an hour drinking with a panoramic view of the city by the window. I. sleeps on my shoulder.

As soon as we were back in our Causeway Bay hotel at Pennington St., I go down again to get more booze. I'm on the lookout for cheaper beer, as the prices at Victoria Peak and Disneyland had been criminal. During this trip, we've dined at two Michelin star restaurants. In this midnight walk, I spot a hole in the wall and point a picture of a dimsum. The old man, alone at the counter, didn't speak any english but gestured there's no more but gave me a plate of something anyway. I hold my money in my open palm and he takes how much its worth.

I found a supposedly-famous Danish Bakery and it was closed. I peek through the window and in the dark - a baker wearing a sando is mixing the dough as early as 1am.

I remember Chunking Express.  It "depcited a paradox... even though the characters live in densely packed Hong Kong, they are mostly lonely and live in their own inner worlds." I keep walking.

The 7-11's still busy at this time of day, and I get 500ml cans of Stella Artois at about HK$16. A relief after paying almost HK$99 for 22oz earlier at the peak. I try some of the local chips. Back at the hotel, the pleasant staff greet me good night. Chillout music pipes in at the elevator, giving the hotel an urban, contemporary feel. There is an aromatic scent of wood, halogen lights glowing against the black walls and mirrors.  I have my beer and chips by the bed, world cup on the TV along with watching my wife and son sleep in a part of the city that always sells and never seems to get tired. It's like slipping back in this cozy space inside me, lodged in some inner world, in some other country. Only this time, I'm certainly not lonely.