let lemons be angry

The nicest things i saw in hongkong and vietnam.

I couldn't have gone to two more different asian cities. Okay, i could have gone to Tokyo and Hanoi, but this comes almost as close. Two bustling cities, with entirely different hearts and heartbeats. Do you care for scenery, or shall i just summarize in words what it'd take a hundred photos to say?

Because photos can't tell you about the emptiness that comes from shopping for 8 hours a day in hongkong, or about the gentle ceaseless buzz of slow motorcycles in vietnam. What of smells and sounds, and paces, and memories. When you walk in a group with an agenda, you can't stop and adjust lighting and lens for that perfect picture that will tell a story. So this will have to do:

Outdoors, Hongkong smells of fried dough, cigarettes and air-conditioning. Indoors, the air is filled with tea, smoke and new plastic. Vietnam smells of cement, lacquer, and motorcycle emissions. But on a motorbike, one catches the top of the breeze which contains the sweetness of grilled meat.

I walked in both cities looking for things that i could take back home--pieces of me that i just hadn't collected yet. Not a part of my birth country, longing to have connections with both places, but finding myself only truly myself in airport lounges where i look into washroom mirrors and see that i don't blend into any room at all.

Maybe if i stay in one place long enough, curiosities will become common. Like the women squatting and waving on the floor-toilet in the ben thanh market, or the restlessness on hk escalators. Could i live a life of making dresses with sign language and doodles, or cramming myself into a fast train everyday?

Will my fascination with communist countries fade? Will my sentimental fixation with pasts and rusty badges become annoyance as i realise how irrelevant the past is to the people of today? And will i start to have eyes only for my own life again, which happens to all permanent citizens of familiar places?

Tomorrow i'll settle in my own skin again. And sort out what's mine and what will never be.