Two Roads Diverged
in these strange blue woods.
It can be quite exhilarating, buying a one way ticket to somewhere, no plans for return on the immediate horizon.
As American expatriates, we’ve done it several times — moving to a foreign country without a return date, and therefore no return ticket. Our first time was as a family of three, heading to Tokyo with a newborn, and then coming back to California with a one year old. Later, as a family of four, we boarded a flight to Hong Kong without a firm idea of when or where we’d head next. Our current decade-long stint in Asia has seen us hopping from America to Macau to Shanghai to Hong Kong, using a trail of one way tickets as we go.
It’s been an adventure, one that has uniquely bonded the four of us together. As wildly different as each of us are, no one else on Earth has had this exact journey to these exact places at the exact same time. But now something big is changing and booking a one way ticket to a new place feels overwhelmingly sad.
I’m a sucker for any kind of personality test, like Meyers-Briggs (INFP), the Enneagram (Type 4), and the Gallup Organization’s StrengthFinders 2.0, recently rebranded as CliftonStrengths. The idea behind the last one is to focus not on the areas of our lives where we need to improve, but to lean into the areas where we have natural talents or strengths. It’s especially useful when working on teams or even in families, because when everyone is working from their strengths you can go so much further. I think it’s been the most helpful to me personally, as it revealed many of my quirks and idiosyncrasies aren’t a defect like I’d assumed, but are actually super powers.
My top strength is Input, which explains a little bit about where the name All Rose Knows comes from. According to CliftonStrengths:
People exceptionally talented in the Input theme have a need to collect and archive. They may accumulate information, ideas, artifacts or even relationships. You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect information -- words, facts, books, and quotations -- or you might collect tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, or sepia photographs. Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity.
It was a delightfully shocking moment when I realized my insatiable curiosity, enthusiastic desire to collect knowledge, facts, and stories, and the way I catalog my experiences through writing, was a strength, not just a character flaw which annoyed my parents, every single teacher I ever had, and a great number of total strangers! But the most eye-opening revelation was having a strength called Futuristic.
Many self help books and motivational speakers will tell you the best thing to do in life is to stay in the moment. I have found that to be an impossible and wholly pointless task. My mind is always dwelling somewhere in the future, taking in the information of what’s happening now and imagining hundreds of tiny steps in many directions which lead us to what will likely happen then.
A small, embarrassing example is how I always cry on the day we put up our Christmas tree. I love Christmas more than the average human, and when we put up the tree, I’m already existing in the space where we take the tree down, feeling all the accompanying feelings of sorrow and loss. And then on the day we finally do take the tree down, I’m filled with joy and hope, knowing this means Christmas will be on it’s way again soon! I privately thought this bizarre way of moving through life was shameful, and consistently struggled to hide it, feeling like there was something very wrong with me. But discovering it’s actually a really useful strength and pushing myself to use it for the greater good has been amazing.
CliftonStrengths describes Futuristic like this:
People exceptionally talented in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They energize others with their visions of the future. "Wouldn't it be great if..." You are the kind of person who loves to peer over the horizon. The future fascinates you. As if it were projected on the wall, you see in detail what the future might hold, and this detailed picture keeps pulling you forward, into tomorrow.
The biggest time this odd strength came into play was sixteen years ago, when we lived in Hong Kong the first time. Our firstborn son started Kindergarten here, but we discovered we would be moving back to America in the middle of the year. His birthdate fell within two weeks of the cut-off date to enter Kindergarten in the state of California. We had a choice to make. We could arrive in California and immediately enroll him in Kindergarten halfway through the start of the year. This would mean for his entire school career he would always be the youngest student in his class, and would graduate from high school six months before turning eighteen. Or, we could hold him back for the rest of the school year and let him start Kindergarten the following autumn, giving him a bonus year to grow and mature, and ensuring he’d graduate from high school and head off to university an independent adult at eighteen.
We had to be quick with the decision making, as holding him back meant we could enroll him in something called “Preppy-K” which is a little more than preschool but a little less than Kindergarten and they only had a couple spots at the local public school. I went back and forth, losing sleep over the decision. But not over Preppy-K. What was tripping me up was thinking of our son not as the four, almost five year old before us, but the seventeen or eighteen year old he would one day be. Did we want him to go off to university at only seventeen? What challenges might that bring, particularly if we were living abroad once again?
Would having him turn eighteen at the beginning of his last year of high school be a temptation for him to ditch or drop out because he would technically be an adult and have both of those things as an option? After all, I’d turned eighteen toward the beginning of my senior year and signing myself out of class was a habit I indulged in just a bit more than I should have. What would our son be like if he was in the same position? Where in the world might we be living at that point? Would that make a difference?
My husband grew deeply frustrated with me. After all, he said, we have a child -not a teenager- before us right now and couldn’t we base our decision on what he needed in this moment instead of a hypothetical moment years into the future? No. No we could not. Or at least I couldn’t. I just don’t work that way and it was frustrating to figure out why I couldn’t think the way my husband was thinking.
The decision we finally arrived at was exactly the right one for our son, who graduated from high school two years ago at age eighteen. Because he went on to attend schools in four other countries, giving him that extra year ended up being perfect for him to adjust to changes in culture and instruction around the globe and still be successful in learning.
And in the most beautiful bookend situation I couldn’t have planned if I’d tried, he began his education in a Hong Kong Kindergarten and then ended up graduating fourteen years later from a Hong Kong high school, with a whole lot of the rest of the world in between. On his graduation day I wasn’t thinking of the future, I was thinking of the past, the earlier version of me who had imagined standing in that exact moment.
Oddly, my futuristic thinking never went past what he would do beyond high school.
When my firstborn graduated, the city of Hong Kong was in turmoil. Protests over a controversial extradition law had erupted, changing the rhythm of life for all of us. The hub of the protests were centered on university campuses, involving students deeply concerned about the future of their hometown. Foreign families who had sent their children to Hong Kong from overseas pulled them from classes and brought them home. Campuses were closed down, and some schools actually left permanently, including the local campus of a major art school based in America.
My son, having gone to two years of high school at a local Chinese boarding school in Shanghai and two years of a British-curriculum international school in Hong Kong, needed to bridge some gaps by taking a diploma program in Foundation Art before he could start a degree program. He enrolled at Hong Kong University in a series of courses which can usually be finished in two semesters. As soon as he’d paid for his classes, the campus closed due to the protests. The classes kept being postponed for weeks at a time, until one semester and then two had passed. An art history lecture class moved forward online, so it felt like progress.
And then the pandemic hit and the protests subsided. Postponed classes restarted, and then were paused once again. Finishing the program, which involved live drawing with human models which must be done in person to truly be called live drawing, ultimately took six semesters to complete, with his final needed course only offered in Cantonese. The English option would have taken another semester to start, so he took the Cantonese one despite his lack of fluency so that he could be sure to finish sooner than even later.
Sadly, the school he’d planned to attend after the diploma program shuttered their campus for good after ten years in Hong Kong, a casualty of both protest and pandemic. There are other programs at other schools here, but in the middle of ongoing closures and delays when my husband was made redundant, we all realized our son shouldn’t make decisions which depended on us remaining here to provide visa and housing security in the most expensive city on the planet.
We started looking further afield at all possible options. His plan shifted toward attending a school in America, a place where he doesn’t need a visa and can easily enroll in classes offered in his native English. He could stay with family members willing to gently guide him through the experience of repatriating to a country he doesn’t remember living in. He warmed up to this idea, and the decision was made that as soon as he finished the Foundation Art program, he would head to the land of his birth to continue his education and get on with his adult life.
So two days ago I booked a single airline ticket, going from Hong Kong to America for our firstborn, one way.
People send their children off to college and university and marriage and just plain ol’ life all the time, especially in Western Culture. We raised our children for more than half their lives in Asia, which has a different approach. Multi-generational cohabitation is not just the norm, but actually the ideal arrangement. A common question I’ve been asked over the last decade is why Americans leave home at eighteen instead of remaining in a place where their basic needs can be met so they can get ahead more easily in school and career. The more times this has been asked, the more times someone shared their story of being raised in a home with their parents and grandparents, generally in far tinier homes than even a modest house in America, the less I could answer why we think it’s just the way life should be. I can’t deny we are a product of this blend of cultures, and find ourselves with mixed feelings toward what comes next.
I’m neither unique nor special in any way as being yet another mother who will choke back a tear while saying goodbye to their child as they walk away, only to break down in sobs once they are out of sight. But even though I knew there would be a day both our kids would leave the nest, I never for a moment imagined it would be while a global pandemic still circles the earth. Or that he would move between two countries which have had vastly different approaches to Covid mitigation… going from an extraordinarily safe place with zero non-imported cases for months yet still under draconian measures of restriction, to one which has lowered or removed all restrictions while thousands of new cases and hundreds of deaths are announced daily.
It never occurred to me we wouldn’t be able to accompany him to the States as he gets settled in, because returning to Hong Kong presently involves a government-mandated 21-day hotel quarantine at our own cost (the cheapest option still costing more than a month’s rent in this astronomically expensive city). These are funds and time off we simply don’t have after six months of unemployment and being new to an active construction project that doesn’t have a work-from-home (or work-from-quarantine) option. We lack a month’s worth of vacation banked up to offset the total time required to be away from the office for even just a few days out of the country.
I never considered we would be saying goodbye to our firstborn child with absolutely no idea when we’ll see him next. No solid plans for his birthday, nor Christmas, nor for next summer. There’s not even a roughly penciled date to aim for, to look forward to. Just miles of question marks shared by most of the 7.5 million residents of Hong Kong still waiting to see what happens next after eighteen months of restrictions which have kept our cases practically non-existent, yet only seem to move one direction… tighter.
I admit for someone who has the strength of Futuristic, looking ahead is a terribly blue and lonely place at the moment.
Seeking solidarity from those outside Hong Kong while lamenting the unfortunate uniqueness of this situation has brought limited understanding and even less compassion. The oft-repeated, “Wow. There’s nothing that could ever stop me from taking my kid to college,” feels especially harsh when we’ve got so many legitimately insurmountable things stopping us.
We’re navigating something which has little precedent, even in the global expat community. Without much to set me off, I find myself pulling into a small, tight ball of protective defensiveness, a position I haven’t found myself in since we booked that first one way plane trip to Tokyo twenty years ago. Only back then the most oft repeated phrase I heard was, “Wow. There’s nothing that could compel me to take my parents’ brand new grandchild so far away from them.”
There’s a cost, a trade-off, to expat living. It’s not for everyone but honestly sometimes there’s no other choice. If it wasn’t still worth it because all the awesome opportunities this life provides dried up, or if we had even close to equally amazing alternative options back in America, we likely wouldn’t still be here. Today it is unequivocally the right fit for us. But my gosh, it can be a lonely and misunderstood path.
Our youngest son graduated high school yesterday, at age seventeen. His top choice for the future was to remain in Hong Kong, with or without us. Thankfully, my husband’s new project will indeed keep us here for many years to come. Our son’s plans include attending a local performing arts school, studying lighting design. He has already secured a job in his chosen field, with others in the industry expressing interest in working with him. His future seems solid and secure, and we look forward to having many more years with him nearby. This is amusing to me as his first sentence was I know it and his struggle for independence from the earliest age is legendary. As a tiny baby, he did not want to be rocked to sleep; he wanted you to put him in his crib and walk away so he could fall asleep on his own without your help. His unexpected continued proximity is a joy I didn’t know I would feel so strongly.
Another surprising joy: Thanks to the protests and pandemic, we got two extra years with our firstborn in our home and in our day-to-day life. Three, if you count the fact that we gave him that bonus year before jumping into American Kindergarten all those years ago. I myself left the family home hours after my high school graduation and never again moved back. My husband didn’t even make it to his graduation before he took a full time paying job with a theater company ten hours away from his parents’ home, a choice which led us to where we are today.
We have been gifted with getting to know this oldest son of ours as a young adult. To be able to give him so much freedom but still maintain a safety net. To have added years of gentle guidance and deep conversations are things I know will serve him and our relationship for decades to come. He’s had extra time to grow in confidence and maturity and figure things out. On the surface it appears that our expat life, and our choice of Hong Kong at this specific point in its history, has put him behind others his age due to factors beyond any of our control. But I can rest comfortably in the knowledge that our wild and winding path parenting him to this point has given him strength in areas yet to be revealed.
My third highest strength on the CliftonStrengths profile is Connectedness:
People exceptionally talented in the Connectedness theme have faith in the links among all things. They believe there are few coincidences and that almost every event has meaning. Certain of the unity of humankind, you are a bridge builder for people of different cultures. You gain confidence from knowing that we are not isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it.
A rough thing about expat life is how frequently people come and go. It’s brutal when someone you have intimately shared life with just up and leaves, sometimes quite abruptly. More than once a friend has moved away, leaving us both absolutely gutted that our location-specific activities are no more. But I know with full confidence and heaps of experience a change of address never has to be the end of a relationship. I often say that once you’re in my life, it will require a cease-and-desist letter if you want to get out. That sounds stalkerish, but really it is very rarely me who backs out of a friendship due to distance. From my point of view, even if we don’t talk every day (or week or even month), the link is still there. We can pick up right where we left off at any point without struggle.
I’m not immune to feeling the loss of someone’s physical presence however! Even as an introvert, this last year has been excruciating for me. Not being able to be in the same room as people I love, near or far, has been shockingly difficult for someone who usually thrives on solitude. It’s depressing to think the people of Hong Kong may be in this situation much longer than anyone else I know.
But my favorite quote, one which brought a great deal of comfort while my mother’s memory and then her life slowly slipped away, is everything changes, nothing is lost. Her death did not cancel the enormous amount of love she generously heaped on me, nor did it sever the deep bond we share. It has simply changed.
And so it is with putting my firstborn son on a plane with a one way ticket. No, I won’t be able to ask him to walk the dog or get dinner started or go for a casual bus ride to pick up a package at the post office with me. But he and I will always be just a text or call away until the day we’re once again in the same room together.
I have a friend who was visiting her adult daughter here in Hong Kong eighteen months ago, right as whispers about a virus in Wuhan began to circulate. We discussed, perhaps prophetically, what it would be like if any of us got stranded away from our partners or children, unable to get back together for a year or more. She told me she always reminds her children that if they ever find themselves alone or in trouble, they will still be able to hear her calming voice speaking wise words in their heads if they just pause to listen. That has really stuck with me, because even though I can never again call her on the phone, I find no difficultly in summoning my own mother’s voice, reassuring me when I’m really struggling.
I’m fairly high strung and wildly enthusiastic about everything I encounter, so maybe my sons won’t hear a calm voice in their heads if they imagine me speaking. And who knows if any significant nuggets of wisdom have gained any purchase in their brains. But there’s rarely been a day of their existence where I haven’t looked them directly in the eye and told them how much I love them. If nothing else, both my sons will be able to hold onto that as they move into ever higher levels of independent adulthood which don’t revolve around their parents.
I have no clue what life will look like five, ten, or twenty years from now, which is very uncomfortable to me. But there is no destination in time or space my children or I could arrive at which could break the link between us. It may stretch around the globe a thousand times if it needs to, but it will be there, intact.
In the meantime I’m working on preparing myself for this long-delayed, strange new chapter of parenting, over twenty years in the making: The rapidly approaching day when just one of us walks alone through passport control at the Hong Kong International Airport, clutching carefully to all our love, bright hopes for a beautiful future, plenty of hand sanitizer, and that single one way ticket.
Send strength.
Oh your Mom is proud of you from Heaven sweet girl.💕