Written in transit between Bombay and Goa, India on Friday
November 15, 2013
Note: I’ve received a comment that this journal entry is
DEEP and HEAVY, perhaps too much for some readers. It is, however, a real
reflection of who I am and this journal is meant to be candid documentation of
my views. I’m just intense and sexy like that. Treat it as free press. Choose
to enjoy it, skim it, or discard it.
Here I am sitting in the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport
of Bombay en route to Goa. A Chinese Canadian in an Indian airport surrounded
by an ocean of Indians. I am overwhelmed by a feeling that I do not belong here.
In this present moment, more than ever, I find myself asking myself a long
unanswered burning question… where the heck do I belong in the world?
Only in recent human history do we live in a globally
nomadic society where most corners of the globe can be reached within 24 hours.
In the past couple days, I met an American who has only been back to the states
once in the past five years and a Taiwanese girl who has spent significant
amounts of time abroad since she was 16. Like me, they are exploring the world
to explore themselves.
This is my journal to document my journey home
The first entry in my journal is a long one to reflect on the blessed life I have lived, the places I have called (but haven’t necessarily felt at) home, and how I came to the point now where I find myself waking up every day next to the Arabian Sea.
My current seven month sabbatical isn’t the first epic
voyage I have ever embarked on. My first sabbatical comprised half a year
backpacking through Asia where I found peace with my Asian heritage and learned
to value experiences over materialism. My second journey entailed six weeks in
South America where I discovered my inner activist, anarchist and environmentalist.
Both of these pauses in life formed who I am today and have brought me closer
to my true self.
My current, and third, journey is to be the grand finale of
a trilogy that spans over a year of my life spent on the road living out of my beloved
65L Lowe Alpine backpack. How will this final expedition shape me for the rest
of my life? The real answer will come with time, but for now, I still find
myself asking… where is home?
I tell people that I was born in Hong Kong, my family is in
Calgary and my stuff is in Vancouver. My story nowhere near as confusing as
some of the truly global citizens of the world but I still have seldom felt a
sense of emotional belonging no matter where I was in the universe. The journey
of my life has taken to many stops, and there are surely many more to come, but
I can’t help but think of where my last stop will be. Let’s start at the beginning.
First stop: Hong Kong…
The Pearl of the Orient
The bustling semi-autonomous region of China where I was born. I always felt a sense of warmth and home in this city, despite having some major language and cultural differences to its people as a Canadian-raised Chinese. I really do love it. But its frenetic lifestyle and claustrophobic living spaces leave much to be desired as a place to raise children. My family emigrated from HK when I was two years old to…
Calgary, Canada…
The wealthy oil town of a wealthy country. Even growing up there, I never felt as though I actually belonged in Calgary. I always saw it as a small town comprising too many people with too limited of a view of the world. There are two economic sectors in this town: oil, and gas. Its populace is paid too much to contribute too little. Don’t get me wrong, there are discrete examples of amazing people in the city, but the cultural law of averages in the city work against my favour. As one can say Hong Kong is spatially claustrophobic for someone used to open spaces, Calgary is intellectually claustrophobic for someone used to open thinking.
Took a lot of HDR to make this city pretty
The wealthy oil town of a wealthy country. Even growing up there, I never felt as though I actually belonged in Calgary. I always saw it as a small town comprising too many people with too limited of a view of the world. There are two economic sectors in this town: oil, and gas. Its populace is paid too much to contribute too little. Don’t get me wrong, there are discrete examples of amazing people in the city, but the cultural law of averages in the city work against my favour. As one can say Hong Kong is spatially claustrophobic for someone used to open spaces, Calgary is intellectually claustrophobic for someone used to open thinking.
Needless to say, I felt incredibly lonely and misunderstood
growing up in this city. Luckily my family in Calgary is self-sufficient and
open to having me live anywhere in the world, giving me no obligations to stay.
In 2007, a series of unexpected events serendipitously
gave me purpose in leaving the city, leading me to…
Shanghai, China…
Known as the showpiece of modern day China, Shanghai is a
city I ran into by accident. My life turned around when I picked up the
traveller’s curse during my first major backpacking excursion across Asia in
2008. After 22 years of feeling like a social misfit and awkward guy, I finally
found a sense of peace and belonging cruising through the universe with the
many other free-living backpackers on the road. Despite my passion for
travelling, I always knew I couldn’t always float endlessly as I need to live a
life of purpose and contribution.
This photo of me symbolizes my journey: hope, mystery, vastness
I’m grateful fate brought me to Shanghai when my original
plan to teach English near Beijing fell through. I felt something in this city that
I had never felt before: a deep sense of purpose and belonging. I was
volunteering as an English teacher for a number of months and found great pride
in my work. I met fantastic people with the same purpose as myself. I learned a
lot about my Chinese culture and history. I sunk my teeth into the city and
made it my own. And needless to say, as with the best moments in any man’s
life, a girl was involved. It was a simple yet fulfilling life. I loved
Shanghai and was happy to call it home.
The iconic Pearl TV Tower looks phallic from this angle
The evolution I embraced over the months prior leading up to
an amazing experience in Shanghai brought me to levels of joy I never
experienced. I slept like a baby and woke up each morning elated to live my
happy life. I was enlightened, playful, generous and finally at peace with who
I was as a person. To this day, I believe my best and highest was the Henry found
in Shanghai during 2008. However…
All good things come to an end…
My fantasy globetrotting lifestyle came to an abrupt halt
when life as a prospective Chartered Accountant in Canada beckoned me back to
Calgary. I cried for hours as I left Shanghai. I remember staring out the
window of my train and watching the city I loved so much slip away from my
sight as I travelled to Beijing for my outbound flight. I remember crawling
into my train bunk, curling up and having to accept that the most incredible
time of my life was coming to its closure.
One could say that I was born again. I worked hard to keep
my optimism and new outlook in Calgary, making new friends and exploring what I
could around the city. However, the intellectual claustrophobia of the city ate
away at me and took away all that I had gained in 2008. I couldn’t relate to
any of the typical conversations about how the Calgary Flames were doing or
what macroeconomic factors were influencing oil prices. It took a lot of
pretending to socially integrate with the people and I myself only relating to
others who wanted to get out of the city. For any global thinker, the place was
suffocating. I kept telling myself that I should have stayed in Asia. Negativity
took over my life and, at times, I stopped sleeping.
I really fought my downward spiral and grew desperate in the
process. I was living in the past by looking at my old photos, listening to
music from a different time and even got into the wrong relationships just to
try and slow the decline. Many of the bad habits I have today came from that
time in my life: I was living in the past and fantasizing about the future in
order to avoid facing the reality of the present. Sadly, it worked, and the
band-aid solution of pretending my reality didn’t exist slowed the downfall.
This was a time when I stopped fully investing in everything around me –
friendships, relationships, knowledge – believing that all of it would become
obsolete when I could finally leave the city. In hindsight, I would have done
things different.
I was lost, empty, frustrated and demoralized. All but one
of my flames of passion were extinguished: travel, bringing me to…
Quito, Ecuador…
Colonial and volcanic
One of my last stops in South America, Quito is an eclectic
city nestled in middle of an extremely volcanic region. Strangely, I felt a
sense of home here. I stopped in the city for five full days, a record given
that I was covering seven countries in six weeks, and the pause in the city
felt reinvigorating. This trip was where I reaffirmed two things:
- I can’t travel just for the sake of travelling and I need to make a contribution to the world
- I felt alive again just to leave Calgary and I needed to distance myself from the city
When I returned to Calgary from my trip, I started firing on
all engines to move to a new city, which brought me to…
New beginnings in Vancouver, Canada…
My first night living in Vancouver's Yaletown
When the opportunity arose to move to Vancouver in 2011, a
place where I always thought I’d feel at home, I jumped right on it. It is truly
one of the best cities in the world. I created an insanely great life in
Vancouver. I have become friends with amazing people, grown exponentially in
areas I can’t even describe and have become a part of the pulse of the city. I
have extended family there and two cousins who I see as my little sisters. I’m
a high performer in the city’s top management consultancy. In the summertime, I
eat dinner while watching the sun set over the ocean from my balcony and I
spend most nights stargazing on the beach. My weekends and evenings are
eventful. I have so much that simply would have been impossible to have in
Calgary.
I truly lived a life I loved where I did not have anything
to complain about, yet despite everything I was grateful for, I didn’t feel a
sense of home in Vancouver. Nor did I
feel like I was moving forward in my life. Maybe I haven’t given the city
enough time yet, but I still felt frustrated and stuck. This is when I started
realizing that the problem wasn’t the environment I was in. The problem was within
me.
Sometimes, new beginnings are just more of the same old…
I returned to Shanghai in 2012 as part of a regular
three-week vacation and I expected my arrival to trigger an immense rush of
emotions that would instantly transform me back to the awesome Henry of 2008.
To my dismay, something was permanently lost within me.
Shanghai came across as an infinite expanse of structures
and people without any of the substance I used to feel for it, even as I visited
some of my favorite spots that used to mean so much to me. How is it that, in
four short years, such a special place had no more meaning to me?
I felt hollow on the inside and started a quest to
re-discover myself within the boundaries of Vancouver. I delved deeply into personal
transformation, taking courses such as Landmark and receiving mentorship from great
leaders in my life. I challenged myself through conquering deeply seeded fears
in relationships and dating. I even received counselling from both a
psychologist and psychiatrist. How could someone living such a fortunate life,
with all the mentors and inner-zen articles in the world, still end up in such
a dark place?
I worked hard to find answers but nothing I tried made an
impact. The more I sought peace, the more I found turbulence, leading me down a
very dark path. Every corner I turned unveiled more that I felt I needed to
fix. Cleaning up the bad habits and internal rot I had created over the years
came at a great price. I felt like the transformation came too little too late,
and my soul had already been lost. My psyche deteriorated and I became an
insomniac with a doctor-diagnosed clinical level of depression. Mind you, I was
a high performing, ass kicking, guns blazing depressed insomniac. I don’t let
much get in the way of my success and contribution to others, but that wasn’t a
sustainable way of life and I ran my health into the ground in the process. One
can only run on 3-4 hours of sleep a night before the body breaks down like an
engine without oil. I lived as a high achiever with a one way ticket on a
bullet train into a concrete wall.
Note: I have spent 2 weeks contemplating whether or not to
even publicize this journal because of the last paragraph. I believe that
societal stigmas around psychological illnesses has held many people back from
opening up and getting the treatment they need. It takes courage to facing
these challenges, but they are a huge part of what makes me who I am today.
Depression is like an emotional blindfold, and part of what gives me the
ability to go forth and live an amazing life is a detachment from emotional
outcomes. I plan on writing more about this in the future.
Then a glimmer of hope arrived. I came across an old travel
video I recorded of myself in Cambodia while I was volunteering for Habitat for
Humanity in 2008. The video was somewhere along the lines of “Dear future
Henry: after all you have seen and done in this impoverished country, don’t
live a life without purpose. Don’t settle for anything less than an amazing
life.” Tears ran down my eyes as I watched this video, realized how wise I used
to be, and how far the apple has fallen from the tree. Suddenly, everything
made sense to me: an amazing life doesn’t mean anything if it is lived without
purpose and intention. This moment, along with some brutally honest
conversations with many important people in my life, galvanized me into action
and led me to…
The place I call home today: Bombay, India…
A sprawling cultural and economic hub of Asia where I hope
to find spirituality and peace. For reasons I have been unable to explain,
India has always beckoned me. During my time here, I want to find the best
parts of me that I can sustain no matter where I live in the world. The
universe will be at my disposal over the next 7 months.
So what’s my life in Bombay like these days? Well, I am volunteering
at Dasra, a leading strategic philanthropy in India where I will apply my
skills in Finance and Strategy towards creating positive social change. I live
in a matchbox 250-300 sq ft studio in the city’s expat district with its own
kitchenette, laundry machine and washroom for $470/month. The studio is inside
another apartment with my own separate entrance, so I enjoy a combination of a
homestay and my own private pad. My landlord is awesome and claims to be a
Bollywood actor, although I haven’t been able to verify this on the internet.
While it’s clean, cozy and makes a great place to rest my head, it is just
claustrophobic enough to force me outside and enjoy the city.
Whether Bombay likes it or not, I am making it home for the
next while. I struggled a bit initially while acclimatizing to heat strokes, a
case of bed bugs, different meal times, unfamiliar foods and germs: all the
stuff that comes with moving to a new place. For over a week now I have been
waking up with thick yellow eye crusties around my eyes from my body pushing
out the germs and pollution through my eye sockets. That’s totally too much information but it’s
important to note how much my body hates me right now.
However, I’m starting to embrace and enjoy the life here. Yes,
I got some pills for those eye-crusties. My daily life in Bombay is pretty much
as follows:
- Alarm. Blarrggghhh.
- Morning jog by the Arabian Sea or bodyweight workouts at the playground across the street from me (Rocky Balboa Eye of the Tiger style)
- Self-made western style breakfast at home
- Explain to a rickshaw driver, who speaks extremely limited English, how to get to Dasra. 20 minute ride to the office for about $1.00
- Get intercepted by Coconut Man who parks outside Dasra. Coconut Man doesn’t let me leave until I start my day with a fresh $0.50 coconut
- Regular day-job hours at Dasra. Save the world type stuff. I work with amazing people and have good conversations. Will post another entry in detail about Dasra later on
- Order in Indian lunch, usually around $1.50-$2. Someone at the office usually helps me with lunch suggestions and ordering
- Explain to another rickshaw driver how to get home
- Homemade Indian-style dinner from landlord’s wife for $1.50. So delicious. Seeking applications for future wives who can cook Indian food
- Light exploring in my neighbourhood or veg out
- Weekend expat events and likely some exploring with new friends around the city
Coconut Man: An unstoppable force of salesmanship
Dasra's digs. The big balcony is where we have lunch
Daily dinner made by my landlord's wife
My awesome studio
Bombay is a great city with plenty of hustle and bustle. Given the economic profile of the city where many still live in slums, I feel as though I’m truly living as one of the top 1% in the city. That’s saying a lot for a city of 20 million residents. I am truly blessed and grateful for what I have here.
I know I will have an amazing experience here but this is just
another part of the very long journey of my amazing life. So what’s next?
...(insert next place to call home here)…
There hasn’t been a day for the past five years of my life
where I haven’t thought, in one form or another… “what the hell am I doing
here? ” What the hell haven’t I gotten out of Calgary yet? Why did I move to
Vancouver? How did I end up at this airport surrounded by an ocean of Indians?
I have lived adrift ever since I picked up the travellers
curse and stepped onto a plane destined for Asia on December 31, 2007. Since
then, I have had no ties to any geographical location and a permanent feeling
that life can take me anywhere. My next stop can be Vancouver, New York City,
San Francisco, London, Singapore or any other destination in the world. I have
moved around so much that orientating myself in a new city, settling in and
making new friends has all but become but a routine for me. I have lived the
last six years of my life without an anchor or knowledge about where I’ll even
be in the next six months. It’s no wonder I feel so unsettled.
A trilogy implies that there is an ending, and while I will
enjoy every moment of my last great journey here in India, I can’t wait to put
my solo backpacking lifestyle behind me. I want to find a place where I belong.
Without that, I am a floater. A drifter. A nomad. Desperately seeking a time
and place that is worth stopping, rather than pausing, for. A place to put down
my bag and truly call… home.
So what have others thought of the idea of home and
belonging? Early in my 2008 backpacking journey, a woman told me “home is where
your backpack is”. I recently watched a TED talk on the topic and the speaker’s
adage was “home is where you grow”. The first view is underpinned by material belongings
while the second by an expectation of self-advancement. I can’t adopt either mindset.
Someone else said “home is where your heart is”. I love that
way of looking at it because, after doing so much to change my external
environment, I now believe a sense of belonging and purpose is found within.
Where does my heart belong? Well, that’s what I’m figuring out right now…
…(insert the last place to call home here)…
