I work in Hong Kong, live in Manila

After spending a week back home, I realized that while I work in Hong Kong, I live in Manila.

I have this theory that you can’t really live in a country where you don’t speak the language. Where you walk around the streets like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. You’re this self-contained unit, observing everything from your own alien perspective. You can’t read the signs, you don’t know what the newspaper says, you don’t know where the streets lead to.

You are an island.

How can you live in a place where you don’t know what’s going on apart from what’s going on inside your head? Sure you can work there, earn a good a living, exist there, but you don’t really belong. The relationships you establish are artificial, your presence unnatural, assumed to be temporary.

I read somewhere that Muslim tort law is highly unfavorable to foreigners. It’s scandalously unfair but the logic is fairly simple: if the foreigner wasn’t around, there would be no tortious event. A foreigner is by definition an aberrant entity. So it must be his fault.

I like living in Asia more than North America because I don’t stand out. In Hong Kong, I gel into a crowd like a skilled assassin, but I open my mouth and I’m done for. Maybe I should learn how to sign.

Wait, I seem to have lost my point. What was I mulling over during lunch? The isolation… ok, found it.

When you’re a foreigner, you don’t just not understand anything, you don’t “get” anything. And “not getting” anything is worse. Nuance and usage is lost. You’re walking around like a badly translated Chinese movie.

Good comedy, a detached existence.