(Repulse Bay, Hong Kong)
"Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
— Robert Frost
The most powerful word in our language, apart from love, is home.
You’re an astronaut walking on the moon. Earth, that tiny blue marble 238,855 miles away, is home.
You’re at a party being followed around by some guy who only wants to talk about golf. It’s time to go home.
For the first 25 years of my life, home was Indianapolis. For the next four decades, home was wherever my family was. Sure, it was also where my perfectly seasoned big black iron skillet and my broken-in leather wing chair were, but mainly it was the family thing.
In June, 1994, under a scary-heavy monsoon rain on an island off the coast of Malaysia, we learned that life was about to shift dramatically. We were homeward bound.
After all our years of living in Asia, America now sounded like a foreign country. Our ten-year-old son couldn’t even remember living in The States, which he had left at age two, but now he was going back. Now he was going home.
The three of us huddled in our hotel room on the island of Penang, and tried to wrap our minds around the enormous news. We finally took the easy way out and turned on a 24-hour news channel to show Christopher a slice of American life.
More on that in just a minute, but first, let’s back up eight years, to the beginning. We were packing to leave our New York City home for a brand-new one, far, far away.
Our toddler son couldn’t quite grasp the concept moving 12,000 miles to a place called Asia. Nor could he understand why his father was suddenly going to disappear and wouldn’t be seen again for more than two months.
Barbara tried to find the words to help him. Whenever they saw people they knew, Christopher would earnestly explain, “Daddy Hong Kong.” That said it all. As a future writer, he had already learned to be economical with his words.
Ten long weeks later they joined me at the Hilton Hotel. We overlooked the hustle-bustle of Hong Kong Harbour, festooned with junks, sampans and ferries.
It was not a normal family existence. Once, after a day of exploring, we made our way back through Hong Kong’s dense humanity. When Christopher caught sight of the Hilton sign, he pointed and said, simply, “Home!” We thought that was a little sad.
We weren’t dragging our feet. We were busy finding an apartment, buying furnishings, and arranging to make a new life.
My job required me to be able to roll out of bed and get to the Reuters office pretty quickly, so there was some emphasis on not living too far afield.
There was a nice high-rise neighborhood called Midlevels, where many of my colleagues lived. It had great harbor vistas, at least until somebody knocked down the building in front of you and built a taller one. Then, you invited your friends over and had a party to bid farewell to your view..
Another coveted neighborhood, called The Peak, was perched high atop a mountain. It had even more dramatic views, except for a couple of months a year when it was so shrouded in mist that you couldn’t see anything. All you could hear was the sound of your neighbors going mad when they couldn’t stand living in the foggy whiteness any longer.
Then there was the South Side of the island, with sort of a Malibu-type feel. Sandy beaches and winding bays. Living there was frowned upon, because the trip to the office could be bumper to bumper. However, a tunnel had been opened recently – they relocated a cemetery with 1,000 bodies to build it - so, gradually that was becoming more of an option.
On the very first morning after my family arrived, Christopher woke us up crying with an ear infection. We got the name of a pediatrician whose office happened to be on the South Side of the island.
As our taxi sped along, Barbara got a look at the scenery. A good enough look to announce that this was exactly where we were going to live.
“What do they call this place?” she asked.
“This is Repulse Bay.”
“Ewwwwwww!”
“It’s named after a British battleship that sank.”
“Oh. We can live with that.”
And so, for the next eight years, that is what we did.
(Aberdeen Harbour, Hong Kong)
Our final year in Hong Kong was a bit unsettling, as I waited for an appropriate position to open up somewhere. Turnover was a constant way of life in Hong Kong, and not just among Reuters folks. Christopher’s school had a big party every May for all the children who wouldn’t be coming back in September. That was the uncertainty people lived with.
A normal Reuters overseas posting was supposed to be three years, and mine had stretched to eight, so you can do the math.
(Christopher, first day of school)
Let’s get back to where we began this story, in our hotel room in Malaysia, overlooking the Andaman Sea.
In the midst of our remote getaway, the outside world caught up with me in the form of a message to call an editor in New York. Barbara and Christopher made their way through the pounding rain to an Italian restaurant, while I stayed back in our room to make the call.
I was being offered a great position, in The States, and they hoped I could be there soon. They always hoped you could be there soon, so it wasn’t really a compliment or anything.
When the call ended, I went down to the restaurant. My linguine was getting cold and my dry martini was getting warm.
Barbara and I exchanged glances. It was time for “the talk.” We told our son that our lives were about to change, in a good way. Lots of chatter about America, until it sounded a little like that song, in “West Side Story.”
Finally, we went back to our room and talked some more. When we were talked out, we switched on CNN to show Christopher what a typical day was like in The States.
Strangely, there was no normal programming, just live aerial footage of some kind of ridiculously slow-speed police chase, apparently involving this white Ford Bronco and a football player named O.J. Simpson.
Wtf? We tried to make some sense of it. How long could something like this go on, anyway?
What innocent babes we were. So naive. It was America, so, you know, the chase could end, and then there could be a sensational murder trial, and nobody would care about anything else but that, for months and months to come. When it was finally over, we could find ourselves saddled with the Kardashians, and maybe worse.
Welcome back to real life, Baslers.
It's interesting how similar journalist assignments overseas are to military deployments. Accompanied tours to Okinawa, Japan were three years, so there were constant comings and goings. When it was our turn to "rotate" back to CONUS, we had to get the youngins prepared also.
Not much changed in my civilian assignments - when I was on Guam, one of my friends mentioned that it was like being on a cruise ship - people showed up, became friends, saw each other every weekend and sometimes during the week, then people left. Some leave and you never heard from them again, some left with lifelong friendships.
The picture of Christopher on the bus is priceless!