TADIOTO

I was beginning to miss Hong Kong just before I left, especially as I was reading this peculiar passage from Austrian writer and filmmaker Roland Hangenberg from a book called “Words and Visuals”, published by Sin Sin Fine Art Gallery in Hong Kong: “In German, we have a word that does not exist in English: Fernweh – which is the opposite of homesick. In that sense, you could say distantsick – the painful longing for far away places you have sometimes never been to (fern meaning far and weh meaning pain). A feeling attaches itself to an island, a city, a secret valley in your mind where it does not want to let go and so it creates sad pleasures. A book can trigger it and a photo can capture it…”

Sad pleasures indeed. I have known those feelings: the smell of plumeria triggers it for me, or Kristin Scott Thomas’ facial and vocal expressions in a movie, or Gong Li’s face on the screen. A dream, a poem. But usually, I’m stuck with a more normal sense of nostalgia. I carry with me deep longings of places I have been to, homesick for the past, for places I may never see again. (It’s the difference, perhaps, between those who’ve left a place voluntarily, and those who were forced to leave a home, a place of birth.) Over the years, that particular longing has lessened for me with frequent trips to Viet Nam, and then with a move back to live in Ha Noi. These days, I long for cities I have lived in, or visited, I long for a moment in the past. A rare sunlit London afternoon, between Covent Garden and Soho, when I was in my 20s. An evening at a fish restaurant, one summer in New York, with Wayne Wang, who was contemplating a movie about Viet Nam. A Christmas snowfall in Paris, and of course, the morning fog of Essaouira, Morocco, and the ravens at Meiji Park in Tokyo. 

Hong Kong was like that. I liked being there tremendously, and found such great joy in re-discovering it after fifteen years. At the same time, I walked around the Central and Western areas, missing Shanghai and New York, and London and Tokyo, and a little of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Back in Ha Noi, the 100-degree heat has confined me to my study, under the air conditioner, or the shower. Le Hong Thai, one of Ha Noi’s more quiet painters, persuaded me to go out: we had dinner on the balcony at Lady Bird’s restaurant on Hang Buom, or Sail, Street. A mannequin across the street was tempting us, but we said no, and ended up at Bao Khanh, looking for Indian movies. We ran into the owner of Chim Sao, a popular restaurant in town, and together, ended up at café by the main church. The cops came soon enough, so we gave up the table on the sidewalk, and moved two feet back. The coffee shop owner moved our motorcycles, the 12 cops walked up and down yelling into their megaphones. Such a lot of people involved, for two feet of sidewalk space. 

I went home that night and read an article in the New York Times and found out the lack of tuna fish was driving sushi chefs to extremes. The next night, I repaired to Ha Noi’s Tokyo Sushi. It was a quiet affair, no cops came, and I had tuna. The New York Times article didn’t mention a shortage of sake, but I drank some, just in case.