Hong Kong Reunion

In a little more than two weeks, I will leave my first summer home here in New York to spend the rest of my vacation in Hong Kong. I look forward to the trip not only for the chance to be with my family and to sleep until mid-afternoon; once there, I will also take part in what has become a enjoyable but slightly awkward ritual among me and my Hong Kong friends. Several times a week, I will get together with the dozen or so people who have come for the summer from all over the world as if we were the closest friends ever existed, while at the same time trying my best to get to know them as if I was meeting them for the very first time.

These are my best friends from kindergarten and elementary school. Together we have lived through class bullies and tyrannical teachers, and have bonded through numerous birthday parties and family gatherings. These are also the friends from whom I have been virtually separated since fifth grade, when I left Hong Kong to live in Houston, Texas. But it is not simply that I had left my friends behind; during those years, everyone who had the means to were leaving Hong Kong in fear of the handover in 1997. Our group of friends gradually became scattered to all corners of the world by the immigration wave, induced by the fear and uncertainty of the impending change of sovereignty from Great Britain to China. Among the addresses I had scribbled on postcards and envelopes in those bygone letter-writing days were a half-dozen cities in England and Canada, plus Singapore and New Zealand, among others. Perhaps the one thing that kept us lazy kids writing to one another was the chance to add so many exotic stamps to our growing collections. Besides occasional short notes, we did not share too much of our experiences as each of us faced the challenges of learning English and living in a foreign country, plus the conventional dramas of middle and high school life, years that we should have spent together under normal circumstances.

As we grew up and our 24-hour days became shorter, our interests in collecting stamps vanished, as did our commitment to stay in touch. Throughout the last decade, our annual summer get-togethers has served to remind us both of how close we once were and also of how distant we all seem now.

Because most of our families still had family or business ties in Hong Kong, it was necessary that we visit the city at least once a year. These trips always took place during the summer, when the children of the families would be out of school. Thus came to be established the annual practice among us friends to gather every summer, as children who followed the adults to the city from which personal or professional obligations still beckon.

During all other seasons of the year, this circle of friends would be almost entirely out of touch, minus the occasional e-mail forward or chain letter. Come summer, however, we would come together most naturally and go to every movie showing in the theaters, have long conversations on the phone, go on crazed shopping trips, plus all the other regular summer bonding experiences. Our times together are always memorable. It was with these friends that we all felt most comfortable, as it was senseless trying to act mature when we were surrounded by people who have seen all the childishness in us years ago.

These summer days, however, never cease to be slightly strange to me, as I often struggle to keep up with the most commonplace details of my friends' lives. What cities do they live in now? Are they in college yet? And what about their career goals? I am always disturbed that I would often not know the most basic facts about their ever-changing lives. Almost a decade after we had spent our days battling the evil forces on campus, these friends and I would do all the things that best friends would on hot summer days, all the while attempting to see if we still knew one another as we once did. It was often as if we were trying to find in these twenty-year-olds the whining elementary kids we once knew, so we could catch up on all those lost years.

At the end of most summers, I would leave with the sense that my friends and I are virtual strangers, merely being polite to one another. They like music groups I had never heard of; study in schools with education systems that I do not understand; and sometimes speak with slangs or in accents I cannot comprehend.

Then, after the summer is over, we would go back to our schools in different countries, vowing that we would keep in touch. But once we go back to our separate lives with our own sets of friends and experiences, we would inevitably lose touch again, forgetting birthdays and misplacing phone numbers. Each of us would again look forward to the next summer, wondering how much more we would seem strangers to one another when we get together again.

Dawn Lee '01, an East Asian Studies concentrator in Leverett House, is interning at MSNBC Interactive this summer.