Hong Kong Lassitude

There is noth­ing more dull and point­less in the whole of the blo­go­sphere than a expat blog­ger com­plain­ing about the city in which they live. All too often such posts pick the low hanging fruit of travel writ­ing — petty racism, obvi­ous cul­tural dif­fer­ences, pre­dict­able scams and incon­veni­ences and so on.

With that said, I’m going to write a dull and point­less blogpost.

I love the word las­sit­ude and prob­ably don’t use it enough. Las­sit­ude means wear­i­ness, tired­ness and a lack of energy and also implies an inab­il­ity to focus or con­cen­trate. Las­sit­ude describes the office worker’s inab­il­ity to com­plete a Friday afternoon’s work and also the muddled fatigue that can grip us in the first days of a much anti­cip­ated vacation.

And, las­sit­ude describes the way I feel about Hong Kong right now. I could blame the oppress­ively humid summer weather (it’s been 30C and rain­ing for most of this week). But, it’s not that simple.

Last year, when I came back from my summer break I was deeply dis­con­tent. Gran­ted, that was an excep­tion­ally long and pleas­ant summer break. Two weeks in London, plus trips to Paris and York­shire as well as two weeks in Adelaide. It was an over­dose of the kinds of art, music, food, theatre, shop­ping and out­door activ­ity that I love, while spend­ing time with family and friends.

From feel­ing over­whelmed by choice and social inter­ac­tion I came back to the real­ity, in Hong Kong, of having almost no friends, very little social net­work and few com­munal or recre­ational options. Most of of things that made me want to “get out of bed in the morn­ing” were not based loc­ally. I was fed up with living through the internet.

So, I made some choices and changes and under­went a year of refo­cus­sing. Coming back to Hong Kong this year, after my summer break I was not friend­less or network-less. But, neither was I over­whelmed with a sense of being “home.” Things are better but they are still, well, flat.

I’m accus­tomed (or, is that resigned) to a pat­tern of life in Hong Kong. The daily frus­tra­tions and irrit­a­tions are, in the greater scheme of things small and famil­iar and I’ve grown to depend upon, if not neces­sar­ily need some of the com­forts (includ­ing the excel­lent under­ground system and the much loved City‘n Super food store).

But, com­fort and con­veni­ence is not inspir­a­tion and motiv­a­tion. I’ve met some west­ern­ers who claim that Hong Kong offers them the per­fect life­style, but without excep­tion those are folks whose life­styles I don’t care to emu­late (or, I end up ques­tion­ing the truth­ful­ness of their claims). More real­ist­ic­ally, every city is a set of con­tra­dic­tions and com­prom­ises that we must try to navigate.

This week, having walked passed the long queues of folks wait­ing to buy an iPad (they offi­cially went on sale in Hong Kong this week) I was reminded that as a semi-geeky tech-head living in Hong Kong is not that dis­sim­ilar to living in Delhi (but, with better postal ser­vices and no prob­lems with tax and duty). I’m gear­ing up for the second half of the year and all my hard-drives, ram, guitar strings, light-boxes and bags will be coming from the US. Same goes for soft­ware and sample libraries.

None of which gets in the way of enjoy­ing my days or being pro­duct­ive through the week. By con­trast, I remem­ber all the days I lost in India to power and inter­net out­ages (not to men­tion all the other daily tech­nical and per­sonal cata­strophes). Neither have I for­got­ten the way London’s fickle public trans­port often played havoc with my com­mutes and commitments.

Years ago I was enam­oured by the idea that our loc­a­tion in the world would matter less and less, that we could “tele-commute” to our “vir­tual” office from any­where in the world. The joys of call centres aside, I’m not so sure about that idea any­more. I don’t need to work in what most people ima­gine a pro­fes­sional music studio to look like in order to com­pose music. But, living without a vibrant musical com­munity around me has been tough.

This is a hoary prob­lem with little res­ol­u­tion in sight. I’m not moving yet and not all that sure where I would like to move to if the oppor­tun­ity came up. I’ve got a model that seems to work for life here in Hong Kong.

Of course I’ve done lots of plan­ning for dif­fer­ent cities where I might set up (and where rents and tech­nical costs would be lower). I’ve also got some crazy dreams for moving to remote and less tech­nic­ally apt locations.

But, for now, those are just dreams. What I really have to do is get up every morn­ing and go to work — again and again and again. That’s why that word las­sit­ude comes to mind.