Back to Sunny Life (回到太陽大地) part 1: Hong Kong

Our journey started one evening in Kaohsiung, where you were born in a hot and humid room on the fourth floor, with red marble tiles for coolness and a soft yellow lime wall.

In the dead of that night, out of sheer relief and excitement, I hammered a homemade stork into the dry clay soil with all my might, so hard that your mother, who had given birth to you only hours earlier, gasped from the balcony: “What the hell are you doing? You’re waking up the whole neighbourhood!” That neighbourhood being the Sunny Life compound, at the time a place for expats and relatively well off Taiwanese.  “Someday, when you grow up, we’ll go back…” I said, “back to Sunny Life.”

Twenty-seven years later, we’re on our way, walking together on a Sunday morning in a dimly lit bus station at Hong Kong Central. Tomorrow we'll take the ferry to Lantau Island, where a colossal Buddha made of plaster sits on top of a hill covered in fog, its fake bronze paint so worn and vulnerable that "don't touch" signs are placed all around. In fact, it actually seems more like a giant garden gnome.

On the same island, a man will walk through a turnstile as he exits the metro station and, to both his and our astonishment, will inadvertently shatter the whole turning mechanism in his stride, which will clatter to the floor. The following morning we will hop on a boat to Cheung chau, a small fisher man’s island. In a few days, we'll be awakened by a fire alarm at 3:00 a.m. on the 22nd floor of the South Nest Hotel. Shaken and sleepy, we'll run down the stairs alone—not another hotel guest in sight—to greet an equally sleepy battalion of firefighters in the lobby and take selfies with them. False alarm... "Probably a wiring problem." On the same day, April 3rd, at 7:58 a.m., a 7.4 magnitude earthquake will strike the city of Hualien on Taiwan's east coast. That same day, we'll fly to Taipei and feel the aftershocks in the days that follow.