Back to China

In 1994 I moved to China.  The first person is intentional.  My family came too, but they never really moved there - for them it was just a two-year stay, always looking back to America.  I don't recommend the mixture.

It was Hong Kong, actually, when HK wasn't legally China - under British law, in any event.  My beat was the PRC, plus the rest of East Asia.  Call it all China.  Really, it all is.

The family made it back, bless 'em.  As I've said here before, however, I died in Hong Kong in a typhoon in 1995.  Someone who looks like me did come back, and has played out this strange atonal coda for the last 15 years.

Though a set of coincidences I (or the guy who looks like me) is now going back, to Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, I hope Macau, then up to Changzhou and I hope Nanjing.  Nine days total, pretty much all business.  I'm told it will be different from the world I left behind, but I doubt it. All the promise was there in the '90's, just the buildings hadn't yet been built.  I think the smells will be overwhelmingly familiar, not strange.

And I'm sure the Star Ferry still runs.   When I dream, and live that life I never lived, I am usually on it, going back and forth, Kowloon to Honkers and back.  I keep leaving something on board that I fail to retrieve.