In the 24 Minutes Home

The Hong Kong International Airport is a good half an hour away from the center of Hong Kong Island, even on the airport express, the direct train between the busy city and the busy airport. Whenever I come back from the States, after a semester of school and after a 15-hour flight back, I board that airport express, headed towards home. During the ride, I look out the window and glimpse the familiar scenes. There is the Tsing Ma Bridge with its suspending cables that twinkle at night, the cargo docks that operate even at the early hours when my flight lands, and right before the terminal stop, the station which a few of my friends live right above. When the train passes, I send a text to say “hi.”

It feels like I am back in my whole past world, a dazzling place that I have always known, as if the entire horizon is painted in a nostalgic mix of sepia tones. In fact, every time I come home, I do the things that I have always enjoyed doing: visit the restaurants that my mum and I love, play football (soccer) with my interclass team, hang out with friends in Causeway Bay, and stay up at sleepovers, squeezing every minute of the night into Alex Hunter’s FIFA career. At some moments, when I happen to forget about choosing classes on my.harvard.edu, logging on my college email, and checking the buzzing notifications from my friends in the United States, I almost feel like I have never left.

Don’t get me wrong — I enjoy my classes (not so much checking emails) and really appreciate the friends that I have gotten to know and rely on at Harvard. I do feel like I belong at this place. Maybe you think that I am still lonely on the inside and simply do not dare to admit it. But I know what it feels like to be at home, and I feel that way when I am at Harvard with my friends and in Hong Kong with my friends and family.

So what is this strange feeling that I cannot seem to shake off? On the first few nights back home, I always get jet-lagged at 3 or 4 a.m. As my phone lights up with messages from my U.S. friends, the city is softly asleep. I can stare out the window and see yellow street lights on empty roads, dark figures of highrises cast against the sky, and the occasional apartment light that stays on throughout the night. At that time, I feel the rift between two parts of my life, the two places that I call home. Like a secret agent, I live my double lives, with only so many insiders who are in on my secrets and can understand both worlds.

They say you get a chance to start anew at college, that no one knows who you were, so you get to press the reset button and reinvent yourself. Even the first prompt from the First-Year Experience Office’s Journal Project asked, “What parts of your pre-Harvard self do you choose to leave behind?” But why should I leave a part of myself behind? How can I distance myself from the past that has brought me to where I am, from the friends and family who have witnessed my baby steps and giant strides, and most of all, from my own self? And even if I choose not to leave behind parts of myself, how do I reconcile the new parts with the old?

It is no secret that Harvard “transforms” you, from the way you dress to the way you act and talk. But any experience, by definition, changes you. So I guess this feeling of change is just a natural occurrence that I should and will eventually get used to.

But even as I grow accustomed to Lyft’s designation of 945 Memorial Drive as “Home” and get closer to changing my Facebook cover photo, taken a few years ago when my friends and I sat by the reservoir after an afternoon of biking, I am still tightly holding onto the people and things I belong with and adapting to the distant parts of my life.

Justin Y. C. Wong ’22, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint Philosophy and Neuroscience concentrator in Dunster House.