Fitting End

Two days. On Tuesday I get the special dispensation to pack up, sort out all my things, and become once again an exile in Her Majesties United Kingdom. I am hardly delighted at the prospect. Two reasons suffice. Firstly, I don’t like the UK and secondly, Hong Kong is home. I’m only going to focus on the first one.

I never settled into the UK, I just got used to it. It feels odd, constantly reminding myself of how different that which is me and mine is to the perspective prevalent in this place. It possesses an ethereal feeling of unrealness, some sort of waking dream while I walk through this landscape that is this blighted land, just working day after day, some good some bad, but none right. None truly, or perhaps very few, that feel like normal days, days where I feel I’m in the right place, doing the right thing at the right time. The sky is grey, the people grim, their demeanor dour, shrouded in darkest black. The trees are always dirty brown, the grass always dying. In summer, the sky is too bright, the stars to high and the color unreal. A stark sense of not belonging amplified by a world not worth belonging to.

I have never made a commitment to the UK, I do not want to belong there, and the more time I spend there, or even just contemplating ‘There’, the less and less I feel it is something that I want tainting me. In the few lessons I’ve learned, what it has in essence taught is to be even more insular and self focused, traits I already have in abundance. I find myself whole heartedly rejecting their views; I don’t buy into their cultural values, their societies, their economics or their politics. I don’t think they’re in the right place as a people, and I don’t think they’re going the right way. How does one be involved with an enterprise that feels at such a level to be wrong to you?

Oh sure, it is easy to say that I am taking this on the wrong scale, that it is about individual people, making individual people, and that outreach to individuals or even just seeing and dealing with the basic good that is in all people, will stave of this reaction. That I will find the normality in this web in time, and that I will understand its logic if I were to engage with it. Or rather, if I were willing to be seduced by it. But these individuals operate within a confined framework, they are constrained by a very specific world view.

I find this a country of martyrs, everyone drowning under a sea of problems, but none willing to take up the boats oars, expecting that someone else should be made to pay for an engine. This is a society which somehow defies the notions of an educated, responsible people that are the core of my world view. A people rich and complacent, wrapped up in their own small shell, requiring great tragedy or great effort to be roused. It is a reality that is so delusional, that I wish no truck or discourse with it. I have to be here to get an education, and that is exactly what I will do. But I am going to ensure that my learning is done somewhere else.

I will not sacrifice anything of myself to fit into a place in which I feel such sacrifice would be principle lost for convenience gained. Here in a society that seems to be governed by such sacrifice, I am especially unwilling.I do not want this societies cultural values, or its morality to ever come into contact with my own, and that requires my own eternal vigilance.