What Happens When an Asian-American is Plopped Into Asia, Part 1: Hong Kong

Traveling is not for the weak of heart.

Over the roughly 37 days of winter break, I spent about 28 of them traveling. The first few days involved a botched attempted trip to Canada (long story short: on my family’s way to the airport at 3:30am, our flight got cancelled), followed instead by an impromptu foray to Hershey, Pennsylvania; a few days later I headed to St. Louis, Missouri with my Christian fellowship for Urbana—an international missions conference; and then, several days later, I jetted off halfway across the world with a group of friends for a nearly three week long journey in four Asian countries: Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Japan.

Every part of my trip in every place I visited was undeniably valuable and memorable. But don’t get me wrong: that doesn’t mean everything was perfect. Sometimes, even far from it.

My Asia trip took up the bulk of winter break and frankly, the bulk of my energy. Our first destination was Hong Kong, but first, we had to endure a 17-hour plane ride with a five-hour layover in Beijing. (At the Beijing airport, I slept on my boyfriend’s lap in the middle of a cavernously deserted waiting room, jackets drawn up over me as blankets.) Once we arrived in Hong Kong, I felt liberated from the confines of narrow airplane aisles and the constant droning of jet turbines. Hong Kong was certainly a new place to me, although there was, somehow, a familiarity to it. The temples, the incense, and the tranquil gardens I had seen, in some form or another, in Taiwan before. The food too struck a familiar chord with me, although I had seen and tasted dan tat (egg tarts), bo lo bao (pineapple buns), and dim sum not in a different foreign country but in Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens with my own family.

And the language. If there is anything in the world for me that can seem both achingly familiar and incomprehensible at the same time, it is Cantonese. In other countries, surrounded by Italian or Japanese or Mandarin, I had felt no urge to push myself linguistically. But here, among people who spoke my mother’s native tongue? Not only was I inherently inclined to listen for words, phrases, and gosh, even full sentences that I could potentially understand, but I also had no choice but to practice my less-than-functional listening and speaking skills in the presence of my boyfriend’s kind, welcoming, native Cantonese-speaking family. How can I explain the simultaneous comfort and rising anxiety of listening to Cantonese chatter all around me, reminded of large family gatherings and lavish banquet dinners, but also reminded of instances in which I could not respond to my own relatives’ disappointed sighs over my lack of Cantonese proficiency?

Thankfully my boyfriend’s family was, as I said, kind and welcoming, and I enjoyed spending time with them and challenging my listening skills to gauge how much I could understand. By the time I left Hong Kong, what stood out to me most was not necessarily the Big Buddha (which does certainly stand out from quite a distance away) or the temples or the food, but instead, the immense hospitality I had been shown and what I learned about myself.

I could regale you with stories of the tourist attractions I visited or reviews of the restaurants I visited and dishes I ate, but those are perhaps not the focus of my travels. I can also post pictures on Instagram and pretend that everything about my trip was dandy and perfect, but that would not be accurate either. Instead, I realized from Hong Kong that the world is both a scary, big place … and it isn’t. I am connected to the people around me more than I know. And while I may not have a newfound, all-encompassing desire to become fluent in Cantonese, I can at least appreciate anew the language of my mother’s family and what it has meant and continues to mean for my past, present, and future.    

• Asian
• culture
• hong kong
• travel