Notes on a Close

Eventually all things come to an end. Eventually I will have to go back to the United States, finish my university degree, find my life, and establish my career. And I know that eventually will start to take place around noon on December 21, when I have to board a plane back to Los Angeles via San Francisco.

It all had to end eventually, I keep telling myself, but somehow it’s just not enough. I didn’t even come here that long ago. I now have just under three weeks left here and I arrived only fifteen weeks ago. Though I keep telling myself that I couldn’t’ve extended for a year, I know that my biggest piece of advice to others will be take the whole year—because now I wholeheartedly believe that it is.

I know that there are people who disagree with me. I’ll wait until they go back to their home countries and see if they still feel the same way, and if they do, so be it. I know I still feel like I’m learning every day, but I know some of the people I talk to remain close-minded and naïve. I guess I wouldn’t be the best to judge naïveté, but the fact that many of them haven’t made the slightest attempt (but a phrase or two) to learn Cantonese is a huge indicator.

I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side, though, as cliché as that is. I have one friend who attends Berkeley in the States but is studying abroad at HKU like me this semester because she felt like I do now. She filed to extend and was accepted, and now that she is staying, she’s not going home for the holidays, and she feels that she misses her family.

So the best thing to do is to reserve judgment I suppose. I’ll wait to get back home, I suppose. I’ll see the wide roads and giant cars (one of which I’ll likely be transported in), I suppose. I’ll see the wastefulness that Americans are so known for possessing and realize that people in Hong Kong aren’t all that different. Maybe by the time I get back, I’ll understand intuitively and subconsciously in addition to consciously that we are all just people, and that everything else really doesn’t matter.

I'm not ready just yet to go back—but then again, who is really ready for anything?

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.