It’s the middle of typhoon season now. The rains come in waves. An interlude of muggy, sticky heat followed by another dousing of cat-and-dog rain…for weeks.
I’ve been kinda in and out these last few months. More out than in, I think. Perhaps I should run through a brief summary. At the beginning of the summer, I was facing the impending deadlines of my thesis submission, expiration of my student visa, end of the lease for the flat, and finding a job. Oh, and Goldie was packing up to live in Shanghai for two months and, all the while, trying to convince me to relocate to Shanghai permanently. By mid June, Goldie was gone and I was fretting over whether the thesis was really going to get done or not.
Then on the early morning of June 20 HK time, I got a phone call. My grandmother had just passed away suddenly and quite unexpectedly. The news didn’t register with me at first. I blindly tried to go on with my day as scheduled… until some point in the middle my train ride to school and it hit me, hard. By that evening, I had bought plane tickets back to South Dakota. And in just a little more than a day, I was heading up to the heavens. That flight was the first time in my life that I ever felt that sitting on an airplane for 18 hours was easier than getting off.
I spent two weeks with the family in South Dakota. There were a lot of tears, a lot of hugs, a lot of stories, and even a lot of laughing. The biggest reunion the family has probably ever had in years. But I just couldn’t believe that grandma wasn’t there. At every corner, I just kept expecting her to come out, arms outstretched to hug me and tears in her eyes saying, “Oh honey, you made it here!” I imagined that she would say that the story wasn’t true after all. She’d say that she just wanted to get me back for all those times that I scared her half to death over a fake spider or mouse.
But even as hard as it was, I was so happy that I could be back with the family. It couldn’t have been any other way. And it turned out that one night, a few weeks later back in Hong Kong, grandma finally did come out around the corner and give me a big hug with lots of happy tears. So it really was just a joke after all, she never did leave us.
And now it’s suddenly late summer. After I came back to Hong Kong last month, I applied for an extension on the thesis. Goldie told me that she was sick of Shanghai and is going to come back in September. So we’ve extended the lease on the flat. And a professor from the engineering department that I met several years ago emailed me out of the blue with a job offer. I’ve already signed a one-year contract to work as a research assistant in her lab doing work on speech recognition projects.
In fact, today was my first day on the job. After being a student for so long, it felt like an out of body experience. Perhaps that sounds a little ridiculous considering I’m still working at in the academic environment. But it was all the little things that shocked me. Like, having my own desk space and computer. Getting my own mug with the department logo. Being asked if there was any equipment that I needed, say, like a portable hard drive, faster desktop, a laptop… Oh, and I have so missed the efficiency of engineers. It’s almost as if you can move the world through email in a morning.
Yes, and now would be a good time to announce that I have stopped using the Internet (ahem, except for work, email, and blog posts). I had to take radical action last weekend when I realize that my Internet usage had gotten out of hand. I think it’s been almost the biggest life change I have made this summer. More to come on that, I suppose, and anyways I got other things to do now. Ah, the rain is back.
