New Year's

The first day of this year, I was at home, with loved ones all around me; the last day, I was alone, surrounded by strangers in an enclosed metal tube hurtling through the sky.1 The first class I paid attention to at HKU2 was Buddhism 101, where I was reminded of impermanence, and perhaps that is the best word to describe this year.3

Hong Kong is known as a major food and finance city.4 It is less known for the world-class mountains that the rest of the buildings have grown up around & onto, which is perhaps more a testament to Hong Kong’s strength in other domains than a slight on its nature. For reference, North Carolinians will often proclaim with great pride that their state is the best one because they are an equidistant three-hour drive from both world-class beaches and world-class mountains. This is, to be fair to my school state (and state school), fairly impressive in America. Well, in Hong Kong, you get areas like this, roughly fifteen minutes from the city center.

![[repulse.png]] Beach AND mountains. Not pictured: you can hike to this beach directly from a mountain. Sorry, North Carolina

I begin with Hong Kong because I landed on January 1st, my second first day of 2026. Before I could navigate HKG, I met Herrick. Herrick is one of the smartest, kindest, and most thoughtful people I know. For starters, he agreed to host me while I was on the plane from Vancouver to Hong Kong. He once let me UberEats flowers on his account to give my girlfriend. Our senior year, I was chairing a Model UN committee, and after he agreed to help on late notice despite never having done the activity, he ended up chairing an entire session. Herrick is probably the reason I passed chemistry, mathematics, and high school.5 Study abroad is filled with conversations that skate on ice — where are you from, what’s your major, etc — and I enjoyed swimming with Herrick this time around. We also met up with Tanya, the only thing trumping this crossover in sheer glory being a guy at the waterfront who refused taking our photo. And so it began. And so shall we:

Customs prints you a landing slip each time you enter Hong Kong on a student visa. I marked the start of my time in Hong Kong by leaving a few times, enough to amass a little collection of these landing slips. I accompanied Herrick to the airport, somehow taking more time to check in for my own, shorter flight — finagled from a dubious interpretation of Aeroplan points booking terms and conditions; justly punished by Cathay Pacific not believing I had taken my flight from Vancouver to Hong Kong (physically standing in front of them in Hong Kong did not constitute sufficient evidence, but a receipt of purchasing wifi did) — to Taipei than Herrick did for his flight back to Toronto with multiple luggages.

For 16 hours, I ate dumplings with Chris & Charlie and hiked to hot springs and stressed over a much cheaper Taiwanese airport transfer website my Uber driver had told me about. I landed back in Hong Kong in time to sneak past Dua waiting in our hotel lobby. We extended outwards but often return to the same one mile radius in Central, discovering a new city and my new home, before we bought red, patriotic souvenirs in Guangzhou and exchanged stories of Austrian mountains. A few hours later, we took flights to Manila, where everyone seemed concerned with our wellbeing and unconcerned with a lack of inventory.

Dua left and I moved into my dorm. I visited the Wan Chai immigration building for the first time and marvelled at passport renewal being done through a self-service kiosk before having dinner with a visiting cousin, her parents, and her young daughter. This niece? little cousin? of mine and I exchanged exactly zero words, but we held great mutual understanding of our dynamic, as I gave her little gifts I needed help picking out and she quietly slipped away to play with them, only pausing to dutifully pose for pictures. My cousin, aunt, and uncle, for their part, exchanged more words with me over a few hotel breakfasts. In the one day they had before Disneyland, we managed to experience the lost & found services of a police station and many wholesome family pictures with the Hong Kong skyline. They laughed about how I’ve gotten more Chinese. My cousin encouraged me to date more.

As I slipped around the city and campus over the next few weeks, trying to get my bearings, a steady stream of visiting friends kept me company instead of dates. Raymond’s dad arranged for us to have dinner before I realised I had a flight, at which point, with great apology and trepidation, I asked what he was doing for lunch, at which point we realised we had overlapping appointments at the Wan Chai immigration building. My residence in Hong Kong, thus, also began with getting denied for a HKID while Raymond’s dad, flying back to China that evening, flaunted his new HKID with me. Jefferson and Rohin popped by and we scrolled upcoming Flighty plans while at a dai pai dong; I laughed with some mutual friends about “Chinese keto” — a diet that apparently allows for maotai — at the China Club. Nicole and MV and I took selfies at a late night dim sum place. Before I knew it, I was in Chongqing, I was in Japan, I was in Shanghai, I was with the Suris (again), and I was home.

And so it goes.

Footnotes

  1. Most notably, I was sitting next to a man who would promptly take his shoes off, put in his headphones, and go on to maintain conversations with six different women across three timezones over the next fourteen hours. I know this because for ~ten minutes on the tarmac, he talked to me like I was his seventh woman. What an introduction to Hong Kong. ↩

  2. Notably, different from the first class I took at HKU. ↩

  3. An equivalence is “ups and downs” which is prima facie less poetic but when considering the literal differences in elevation, even more (contrivedly) so. ↩

  4. To some of my American friends, it is also known as China. Not a political statement on their part, more of an American one. Americans never cease to amaze me. ↩

  5. For most of high school, I studied with Raymond and Herrick on these two subjects. I would predictably get one IB mark lower than Raymond and two IB marks lower than Herrick. The astute reader will observe this somewhat capped my maximum score in these two subjects, one of which I now major in. ↩