My first destination was also my last - Hong Kong. In four and a half years it had changed a lot but I had become quite attached to it. Big things had been happening here and everyone in the world knew about it or thought they knew about it. China had promised nothing would change for fifty years but I doubt that many locals believed it. The Chinese government was already changing things. Local newspapers had begun censoring themselves long before, and the South China Morning Post dropped so much in quality I found it difficult to enjoy it any more. The provisional legislature passed laws which denied local people the right of free assembly and right of free speech. The soon-to-be-commander of the local PLA contingent arrived and tried to bully his way through border officials. Future Chief Executive Tung-Chee-Hwa made himself unpopular when he attempted to placate people by mouthing circular thoughts like “protests will be allowed as long as they are legal.”
About the beginning of June we suffered an invasion of foreign reporters desperately searching for seething unrest or impending natural disaster. Foreign business executives made self-serving speeches about Hong Kong’s brilliant future and attacked the Democratic Party for “destabilizing” Hong Kong. Usenet filled with silly questions about communism and visa restrictions, and hotel occupancy dropped as foreign tourists and small businessmen stayed away. Less silly local foreigners debated whether or not to celebrate the handover. To my mind it was a sad occasion. Something special was ending and we didn’t know what would replace it.
The night itself was as dramatic as one could hope, including a gigantic rainstorm. I watched on television as the Governor left his mansion and all kinds of people gave speeches. The Democratic Party staged a noisy protest at the legislative council, from which they were being evicted despite being elected to their positions by an overwhelming majority. Fireworks went off. A little after midnight I went down to the harbour and watched Prince Charles and the ex-Governor sail away on the royal yacht. The waterfront was very crowded and a group of noisy Indians cheered and jeered loudly at the departing British while scattering beer cans everywhere.
The People’s Liberation Army arrived early in the morning of July first, rolling across the border in tanks and armoured cars of the same kind which they had used in the Tiananmen Square massacre. The next day the Chinese fireworks show attracted a crowd which I estimated must have numbered over a million people. Then the celebrations ended and we all got back to business.
After I returned to Hong Kong in 1997, I had a headful of possibilities and conflicting ideas about all the things I could and might do next. For a few months I spent my time fruitlessly job-hunting. It had suddenly become difficult for foreign companies to hire foreigners to do many jobs, computer programming most notably. This cut my options greatly, but mainly my job hunt went slowly because I was doing it for the first time; although I had worked my way through University, people had always come looking for me to offer me work and this was the first time I really had to go out and join the mob of jobseekers. I had an interest in finance and had real prospects for various number-crunching jobs but soon realized that however much my abilities might suit me to these jobs, I didn’t want to do them. Looking back, it seems clearly ridiculous that I ever considered nine-to-five suit-wearing office jobs. Nevertheless, at that point in my life I had never tried one of those so I looked into them before consciously ruling them out. I think my job hunt also went slowly at that point because I wasn’t really sure I wanted to stay in Hong Kong. I had in mind staying long enough to see the handover, but after that was open to pretty much any option in the world.
As time wore on and I ran out of money, my job-hunting concerns became much more practical. Teaching was pleasant work, paid fairly well, and provided me with a visa, so I started to look at teaching jobs. Before too long I had a contract at an international school, teaching high school science. That fit the next part of my "master plan" quite well; I was set up with cash and in a place with lots of opportunity.
After that things went downhill for a while. What do you do when you finish a big adventure of the sort I’d just had? Answer: then the real adventure begins. I’d got a bit depressed when job hunting, but not much because my job concerns all seemed short-term and transitory. On a bigger scale the same was true of all I’d been doing for the five-odd years I spent travelling. Nothing that happened then ever bothered me much because I lived in a state of constant change, so I had no time for culture shock, and I had no serious worries because I had no serious commitments. My entire life then was an experiment.
In many ways my travels turned out to be a one-way trip...
What I’d enjoyed before didn’t work any more. I went back to Canada to visit family and friends, but as much as I enjoyed visiting home, I found after a couple weeks I got bored. Few of the people I knew shared many of the interests I’d developed with time. Small annoyances of Canadian life became very irritating; with perspective it was obvious how trivial and unnecessary they were. I took beach holidays in Bali and Cebu and found myself bored silly, wishing I’d gone somewhere wilder and at the same time not feeling the energy to get up and push through the tourist facade right there. A return visit to Newfoundland came closer but somehow still didn’t do it.
What I was doing then didn’t work much better. Once I’d committed myself to building my life in a certain direction, the details of what I did began to matter much more to me, so I felt more pressure and stress. For example, early in 1998 I split up with Jenny; we’d stayed together for years while I travelled, but when we no longer had the distraction of travel to regulate our relationship, it didn’t work. I met friends who lived the expat life, working for foreign companies and being paid outrageous salaries. Although we got along, we lived in different worlds and gradually drifted away from each other. This occurred all the faster after Hong Kong’s economy crashed in the general Asian bust of 1997; many of them simply lost their jobs and had to leave. At night I’d get bored and tell myself how much I was missing, then go out to enjoy the night life and mingle with Hong Kong’s high-living party animals. That wasn’t my scene either, all unrewarding and empty. Teaching science to kids didn’t suit me so well, and the stress from that wore me down. With all this, I found myself becoming gradually more depressed.
Since the past and present weren’t rewarding, I did what I’d always done in such spots and looked forward again. That wasn’t exactly a straight path. For years I varied from better to worse, while gradually various factors in my life sorted themselves out. Work progressed, from teaching science to teaching and managing computers, then to full-time computer consulting. New friends came and went. I tried marriage. It didn’t work and after a few years we gave it up and divorced. In the middle of that I finally made the big decision to move back to Canada. On visits home I’d come to pay less attention to the old things I knew and more to new things that were happening, and eventually Canada began to look like as good a base as anywhere overseas I might live. That move tossed my life into chaos again, but gradually practical problems disappeared and I found new interests and projects and life got steadily better.
What did I gain after that time spent travelling? Mostly what one expects; five years worth of fabulous memories and invaluable experiences, a better understanding of the world, and I hope a much stronger ability to see things reasonably without as many opinions coloured by the prejudices I grew up with. For example, although I come from a Christian culture my honest view of Muslims has been that generally they are more polite, better behaved and more thoughtful than most Christians I have met. In the last few years, there seems to have been an ugly surge of prejudice against Muslims, especially in the US and Canada. I am never tempted to join it or believe the large number of lies I hear, because I know better from personal experience. There are many such bits of commonly-accepted rubbish that I've come to see for what they are.
If my story does anything to shake people’s prejudices or to encourage them to see the world for themselves, that will have been enough reward for having written this. Thank you for taking the time to read what I had to say.
© 1997-2007 Stephen Bougerolle - all rights reserved