On Leaving Home

As a student studying abroad, summer encompasses a special meaning for me. It reminds me of certain long-forgotten virtues which a capitalist society disapproves of: friendship, the love of family, and perhaps romantic love. It comes the time when my loneliness and nostalgia are finally consoled. In the intense heat of this summer, glancing upon the cloudless sky and the austere sun, I still recall the moment when I departed from Hong Kong in the previous summer. If leaving home is to have any profound psychological impact, it is perhaps because I am enforced to temporarily cut off my sentimental bond with what is familiar.

I woke up on the day of my departure, staring at the cloudy sky, dark clouds kept blowing in from the west, confronting me with a thunder which was about to tear through the sky. Depressed, I washed myself up in the bathroom and got dressed. Before I left my apartment, I wandered around it for the last time and farewelled to the familiar inanimate objects.

As my mother and I went downstairs, we took a taxi to the Airport Express station. During the fifteen minute trip to the station, the preponderance of conversational poverty, to my surprise, did not enforce a sense of loneliness. If silence were not directly linked to loneliness, it might be because we were all inwardly consoled by the presence of an analogous feeling. The fifteen minute of stillness would only often be punctuated by the occasional electronic command to turn right or left until the taxi reached glass-fronted building. It was the Air Express station.

It made me feel a bit optimistic towards the human race when the taxi driver summoned a long-forgotten virtue that scarcely exists among human beings and helped us pull the luggage out. It prompted me to think there was at least a portion of human beings caring to display the unusual friendliness and generosity. As we restored the value on our Octopus cards, after we passed through the gates, we decided to check in first. After checking in, I felt as if I had lifted off the burden on my shoulder so I could carry with a sense of lightness to travel to the airport, and ultimately, Houston.


However many material goods I had lifted off, my feet felt unbearably heavy as if my mind could not command with fluidity to articulate them towards the Airport Express. If I could not feel the slightest degree of lightness, it might be because material goods were extrinsic to my existence. At this precise moment, I felt like I had a sudden awakening that I finally realised why the French philosopher Rousseau history was regressive rather than progressive. In the technological and material civilisation of ours, we had unconsciously slipped away from the state of nature. We no longer cared for the love of family, friendship, the arts, compassion, and romantic love. Our tendency to latch onto material goods is the mere product of civilisation and commerce, suppressing human nature at its best.

My minimalist reflection perhaps urged me to study the setting of the station with a bit more imagination and attention. The setting gave weight to the feelings that it wished to provoke. It reminded me that life, aside from its material aspect, centred itself on psychological needs which our capacity to draw happiness was critically dependent upon, among them our longing for love and expression. How I wished I could stuff my backpack with the best moments being with my friends and family and the love they had been vigorously giving me.

Perhaps my biggest mistake was my inability to escape the bondage with my own self. I realised that my own existence was defined by my experience. My psychological dispositions were worn out by countless instances of grief and sorrows, with small intervals of happiness. However advanced our technology had become, it failed to console the core of my misfortunes and difficulties. While standing in front of the Airport Express awaiting its doors to be opened, I feel frustrated at the heaviness of inhabiting the same body and soul over and over again. How could we strike a balance between lightness and weight? How helpless a human being could be.


Seated in the train, looking at the small TV screen on the back of every seat, I heard of the announcement telling us we would arrive in twenty eight minutes. Though I was truly grateful of what technology had done for our civilisation, I could not help but wished the train could extend its travelling time perhaps up to an hour or more. During the trip to airport, there were often exchange of phone calls and texting messages. Never was a moment technology gave me so much warmth. I often glanced through the window and took in the passing scenery. All buildings passed by mercilessly. The sky was getting dark and seemingly seeking revenge of my leaving. It conspired to render me a sense of melancholy and a sad suspicion that happiness was not attainable.

In exactly twenty eight minutes, we arrived at the airport. If the airport were so different from other commercial buildings, it was perhaps because it was the centre of civilisation where freedom, tolerance, and diversity of cultures were brutally celebrated. People from across different continents were stuck in a long queue awaiting to get their boarding passes. Restaurants were filled with people having their last lunch before boarding the plane. My mother asked me whether I wanted to grab something to eat. I looked around and examined all the American fast food chain stores. After moments of contemplation, I sighed and replied no. What sort of restaurant I could set my feet on when these restaurants highly resembled those which I would encounter after twenty fours hours on a different continent.

We walked into a bookshop. I glanced over the familiar covers of magazines and decided to get a copy to read on the plane. After I got my copy of the magazine, I started to wonder why most airports everywhere in the world had to have bookshops and what precise aspect of their aeronautical identity would have been violated without them. If bookshops were important in airports, it might be because it served as a prelude to catastrophe. However modern technology amazed us, we would still be stripped of defences in front of the destructive forces of nature. Science was still unable to assure us absolute certainty in machines. At this moment of helplessness, we might as well take refuge in the wisdoms of philosopher and all the great religions. But this was where I find these bookshops puzzling. In spite of my prediction of the commercial future of books, the death of philosophy, literature, and holy scriptures were overly exaggerated. Because it was precisely these books allowed us to maintain dignity in the face of death and if we were lucky, what frame of mind we should possess when we fell back on Earth.


Yet the bookshop was just a prelude to the emotional climax of the day. It was time to set my feet on the restricted area. At this critical moment, what dignity should I possess, while my tears were reluctant to burst out, in order to neglect my hesitation and bring out my best courage to pass by two austere looking bodyguards to get my ID and fingerprints scanned. At this point, I started to think how airports prompted us to display the delicacy of our emotions at its best. They offered us unceasing chances to express our longing for love. They created moments where we were comfortable to expose our emotional vulnerability. They also put our minds at ease with the thought that there was actually someone who would give more than a minute's thought to our absence. So much hugging and weeping, it was almost as if the airports were designed to honour these activities. I then said goodbye to my mother and walked into the restricted area.


In the restricted area where I got my ID and fingerprints scanned, there were only a few counters dedicated to the traditional staff to assure us interaction with human beings in this technological world. I then got to the security line. I had to put my shoes, my belt, my jacket, and all my belongings into a plastic box in order to assure my lack of possession of explosives and weapons. Before crossing through the X-Ray machine, I had, for a moment, worried about my absence-mindedness whether I actually possessed weapons in my backpack or pleaded to serve the extreme Islamic terrorists months ago. Fortunately, the X-Ray machine restored my confidence in my memory.

After going through the security section, what was in front of me was a great variety of shops which suddenly made the airport a shopping centre. There were high-end fashion shops like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Chanel and the likes and duty-free shops that were composed of flasks of perfumes, bottles of wine, and packs of cigarettes. Aside from those, there were more bookshops and luggage shops. At this point, I recalled that there was a long-standing criticism against the dominance of consumerism at airports. If travelling through the sky rendered us susceptible to catastrophe, then perhaps we should spend the moment before boarding the plane as our last moment rather than shopping.


As I walked along, deriving pleasure from window shopping, I thought to myself whether shopping should really be severely condemned by the critics. On the face of it, shopping might only seem to satisfy our material longings. But on closer examination, our capacity to draw happiness from material goods was critically dependent upon our psychological needs. So what we shopped for did not merely just fulfil our vanity, but rather it was a material manifestation of what we loved. They helped to sustain our moods and reflect back to us certain ideals about what we might become, something that served as a silent protest against pure meditation on death and pessimism.


As I approached my gate, I was surprised to find Muji there. Muji was a Japanese chain store that articulated the ideal of minimalism by selling a variety of products such as furniture, food and drinks, stationary, home goods, and clothes. I walked in, urging to buy something, be it a drink or a travel kit. If I had an urge to buy something, it was because it provoked in me a sense of sentimental familiarity which reminded me of Hong Kong rather than Japan. Though there was nothing to buy, I got a drink which might help to mitigate my nostalgia.

I was announced that I was allowed to board the plane. Standing in line, waiting for the staff who worked for United Airline, who displayed no sign of friendliness, who spoke to me in English when they clearly knew how to speak Cantonese, to check my passport. After passing through a narrow corridor, I boarded the plane.


On the plane, before taking off, I made some of my last phone calls which on the other end all the familiar voices consoled me that another year would pass by quickly. Nevertheless, this moment on the plane conspired to generate anxiety and fear in me. If I felt anxious, it was because these phone calls were perhaps the last ones I could ever make. After saying perhaps the last goodbyes, I turned my mobile phone off mercilessly, wishing myself all the best. As the plane was projected up into the sky, I took my last glance at the city where I grew up in as if I was looking at it for the last time. From my backpack, I took my sleeping pills out. While upon looking at my neighbours, the way they read and watched movies reinforced a sense of self-pity on me and led me to admire the courage in them for they were able to fiercely confront darkness and surrendered themselves to our technological inventions which were susceptible to errors. I had witness human confidence at its best. For my part, I took one sleeping pill and determined to go to sleep. Because if any plane crash were to happen, I would not wish to wake up.

From our home all the way to the airport to boarding the plane, we should not forget what lessons departure has to offer.

W