To the One

Last weekend I was in Palolem, for my sins – well, actually to visit an old friend who is teaching yoga over there, and after a lovely relaxing brunch in Little World – a hot, sultry tiny garden cafe run by a beautiful and equally hot and sultry couple, I dragged him off around the shops, for his sins, and ended up having my fortune told my an old Indian shopkeeper who was selling me a beautiful embroidered bikini top while my friend, Alan, patiently examined the array of trinkets cluttering the shelves.

“What would I do with these?” he asked pointing to a line of tiny elephants, “bury them” he answered himself – cluttering the shelves. Alan, you see, is renouncing all worldly possessions, including buying new t-shirts to replace the pink sweat-stained ones he’s been living in since I knew him back in Hong Kong; but I was, until Palolem broke me, still somewhat caught up in the excitement of lots of cheap hippy shit, Everywhere! I have since been cured of this, thanks largely to Alan’s example but also to the frustration of having young Indian guys keep trying to sell me the same hideous bikinis to replace the one that keeps getting washed off in the uber-waves. “No offense,” I tell them, “but you really have no idea.” Why won’t they listen? Are they secretly sporting these under their shirts? Somehow I doubt it.

“You have not been in good health lately,” the old Indian man said, “but you are getting stronger.” Humm, not bad, but perhaps self-evident from my slender frame and pale skin -black circles beneath my sunglasses from where I’ve been sleep-deprived by our early morning meditation practice all week. But I listen on; I’m working on my heart chakra after all, trying to keep myself open to every and all experiences and people I encounter.

“How old you?” he asks. “29. You will be married by the time you are 31.” Okay, interesting… “Your boyfriend he is very good man.” I hesitate. “You have boyfriend?” I nod. “What his name?” I tell him. “He is good man. Good family. You will be very happy, healthy. You will have big house. Two children. One girl, one boy. Girl look image of you. Boy him. You will have a big house, and a car -”

I stop him here. I have to. I cannot go along with this. Lovely though it may sound, sweet as he may think he is being in a bid to get another 200 rupees out of me, I am about to have a panic attack! Well, okay, not quite, but this does not sit right. Not only is the person in question no longer my boyfriend after having broken it off with him some three weeks ago, but I cannot and will not give myself over to the fantasy of the ultimate happily-ever-after marriage-plot ending, not with anyone. I’m just not sure I believe in that, not for me. Perhaps I did once upon a time, perhaps there was a time when I longed for it, actively sought to make it a reality, but not anymore.

If I’m wrong and in two years time I find myself married, living in a big house and with two kids and a great car, I’ll happily come back and give him his 200 rupees, but for now I’m jumping in a tuktuk and getting as far away as fast as possible, back to the peace and tranquility of Agonda, back to the beating of the waves against the shoreline that sends shockwaves though my entire body, that unnerves me as much as it thrills me, that beats harder and louder than my heart, shaking my whole being.

Because relationships. What is there to say about relationships? Too much it seems, a subject we cannot stop talking, thinking, obsessing about. Even when we have made the decision to end it, to walk away, we keep looking back over our shoulder, emailing, messaging, regretting….

Me? No, not this time. But perhaps I am different, or my situation is different. Because for the last six months, all I’ve had is email, text message and Skype communication. Words, words, words, as Hamlet famously says. And it is exhausting. Hardly a relationship at all, more a meta-relationship, a conversation about a relationship you wish you were having or once had or hope you will one day have again. Not a relationship, but an attempt not to lose the relationship you had, like two swimmers clinging on to each other to save themselves from drowning. Sweet but sad. Tragic.

Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t wish to melodramatise. I would wish we could simply be friends. Friends is easy, friends is cool. Like: “How are you?”  “Good, thanks. I ran a marathon today.” “Wow, that’s great. I went the library. The sun was shining.” Easy huh?

But we can’t stop there. Or few of us can. We want more, we want the emotional accompaniment of “I missed you. I wished you were there.” My boyfriend always said “if wishes were fishes we’d all be casting nets.” I never understood what this meant and it infuriated me. I still don’t know that I know. Something about how we’d all like to try and get what we want but we can’t? Yeah, I guess that’s true. But I’m a try-hard. Perhaps that’s part of my problem. I don’t want to just wish for things I can’t have. I either have to try for them or let them go. And that’s what I feel I’ve done: let it go. Not because I don’t care, but because I cannot go on giving my energy to a fantasy.

It all comes back to the yoga, to the need to be present in one’s body and mind, united in time and place (more or less). Lord knows I can daydream and fantasise like the best of them, but for and with myself, and to be able to bring your thoughts back, rein in your daydreams and distinguish them from real life; that seems important, not to be a fish – a wish – on the end of someone else’s line, kept dangling, kept just barely beneath the surface, not free to swim away but not wholly caught or secured either. A half life, half breathing half dying.

It is, I realise, my “fault” for letting this happen. Fault in inverted commas, because that is not really a game we want or need to play. Things happen: we fall in love, we care, we don’t want to hurt anyone (ourselves or the other), we try for things, we hope, we hold on… But at some point we realise we are hurting ourselves more. We are, to put it in the language of yoga, leaking prana – allowing our energy to be misdirected, expending so much time and thought and…well, energy thinking about, worrying about, hoping for, getting angry or frustrated or upset about a situation or a person which/who is not what or how we would like it to be and this brings us pain and suffering. We are trying to change things we cannot change, rather than accepting the situation, the person for what is, who they are and letting it go, making peace with that.

Hence, I let it go and immediately felt the energy shift within me, stir within me, and the realisation – stupid as it may sound – that I was responsible for myself, for my health and for my happiness. Instead of looking to and blaming or lamenting that my relationship, my boyfriend was not supporting me – not there to make me dinner at night when I was sh*t tired, not there to go to the cinema with me when there was a movie I wanted to watch, not here to take a walk in the park with on a Sunday, share a coffee, read the paper and have brunch… Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I felt empowered to wake up and start doing all those things for myself, just as I should have been doing all along. My health and happiness was in my hands and just like that I started to take ownership of it and have been cooking for and feeding myself ever since, with love and kindness and care: true attention to how I feel, what I need right here and now.

I can only hope my partner is doing the same, fulfilling his needs, desires, wants himself, instead of looking to me who, so far away and distant in time and space, caught up in her own issues, cannot give him the love or support he wants. Perhaps, for me, I will never be  in a place to be that person for another, but somehow I hope that is not true and suspect that once I have learnt to love myself, manage my energies and train my mind, love for others – for another – will come, just as it did before when, after a period of yoga and meditation in Bali I met him.

Until then, I stay strong to the belief that “we are on this journey, home to the one” – a one who is not the One of Hollywood movies, but a greater life force, the creator or spirit of us all, and it is not until we find and make peace with that One inside ourselves that we can truly meet with and be happy in the company of another, our other One.

Nursing a tiger

“Your flight to London is departing in less than 14 days,” Zuji writes to remind me. As if I could forget. Only last night I dreamt I was trying to fix the curtains in my flat when my sister, watching from her comfortable position reclining on the bed, informed me my flight was in fact departing in less than two hours and shouldn’t I be checking in already? Useful.

Stressful, more like.

It is perhaps hardly surprising then that, arriving in work horribly early this morning, putting on the kettle and returning five minutes later only to find my specialty Chai tea gone, stolen – and not even allowed to properly brew, god dammit! – by my sleepy colleague, put me in something of an end of the world panic, and not for the first time this week.

On Wednesday night I had been rudely awoken by rain and lightning crashing in through the windows. While my boyfriend slept peacefully on, I lay there in the darkness going over the events of the evening, feeling a storm brewing inside.

It is Hungry Ghost Festival here at the moment, the month in the Chinese calendar when the gates of Heaven and Hell are believed to open and the spirits of your dead ancestors come back to visit the living. Offerings of food, incense, paper money and goods (clothes, mobile phones, a new car – whatever you think your dead gran or granddad would most like or need) are made to appease their wrath and ease their suffering. Where I live on Lamma Island, these ritual burnings are a common enough and heartening sight. A practiced arsonist myself, I like nothing better than a good bonfire; we always had a fire glowing in the hearth back home and being able to make it was a rite of passage. But as we walked home on Wednesday from our long-looked-forward-to evening together, I gazed rather mournfully at the peanuts, oranges and crackers lying on the roadside, feeling a bit like a hungry ghost myself.

It’s a feeling that’s been building all week. As I prepare to say goodbye to my students, colleagues and friends, tie up the last loose ends and send a few final boxes home, I am left dull, distracted, distant and distinctly without an appetite. My boyfriend is good to me, putting up with my silences, buying me lunch and encouraging me to stay positive; but I am torn – happy to be leaving for new pastures, sad to be leaving him, and stressed by all the things I have to do (pulling down curtains the very least of them).

Still, I go to my yoga classes, seeking peace and calm, an escape from my thoughts and a direction for my nervous energy. And for a while – a few fleeting minutes – I can stand back, see the murk settle and the clear water appear, can feel it washing over me. Then it’s over; it’s late; I eat supper, go to sleep and start the whole thing over again the next day. It’s not long before I am tired, ravenously hungry and demonic.

“It’s like dating a tiger,” my boyfriend jokes, trying to get a kiss in while I hurry to have breakfast before starting work.

“Well observed,” I retort. “Keep five paces back and do not attempt to come between me and food.”

It’s a common enough scenario between us to have gained me the reputation as a vicious, knife-wielding, unsharing eater. “Caring is sharing,” he tells me. But I’m vegetarian yogi and do not eat all the steak, burgers, ice cream and banoffee pie he does. I get tired after a long day at work in the city, come home voracious with hunger and the only thing I want to make love to is hummus. “Stealing,” I say, “is unfeeling,” proving that anyone can come up with a bad rhyme to conjure with. And I have one other disadvantage over him: where he can find comfort in food, I find none. In times of stress, I’m an emotional non-eater and then of course the tiger in the cage is even more unpredictable, to be approached only with the utmost caution. Which is the situation I found myself in on Wednesday evening and the reason I was awake at 3am caught up in self-recrimination and remorse.

I’d started off looking forward to the evening so much it barely mattered that I’d missed breakfast and had only a hurried bowl of cereal for lunch. We were going to The Peak for a romantic dinner. But after a long two hours’ drilling grammar, I was starving and anyone whose ever been through an eating disorder will know that the brain in starvation mode is not particularly effective at decision making. Desperate for nourishment of any kind – generally the fattier the better – it battles against the mind that wants control. Imagine, if you will the dialogue that goes on – the continual monkey chatter of the mind  – every time an anorexic quietly, fearfully peruses a menu. It’s like listening to Goldilocks on the Gwyneth Paltrow diet: “Hum, what shall I have… This? Too rich. What about this? No, too bland. Okay, then this? Are you crazy? Too oily. Well, we’re running out of options; you tell me. Which has the least calories? This one. Too boring. What about this then? But you just said I couldn’t have that. That’s right, I forgot; what about….? You know what, don’t bother. I give up.”

“So, hunny,” my boyfriend says, looking up endearingly at me. “Are you ready? What do you want?”

Words can hardly describe how patient he is, not only suffering me to change my mind several times, but us to change restaurants in the hope that the other place will have what my heart desires. It does not of course and whatever I order will be wrong, because even if I knew my heart’s desire I am incapable of following it. My mind has far too strong a hold on me. I cannot even concentrate properly on what my boyfriend is saying. The constant white noise of my neuroses drones on in the background, taunting me with the regret: “You should have stayed at the other place.”

“Oh, now you know what you want? Now you can make a decision? Now you feel guilty for dragging your boyfriend away from his beef bourguignon and being a complete pain in the ass all night?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, but…”

And so it goes on.

Well, having spent a sleepless night full of regret and self-loathing for having allowed myself to get into such a state of nervous paralysis in the first place, I make a promise: to feed the hungry ghost in me, to make it offerings and present it gifts as I would to a sick child. In short, to try to ride out the storm and get a little better (each and every time I do it) at working through this illness. Because it is an illness, one of the mind as much as the body, and as John Donne said: “of the diseases of the mind, there is no criterion, no canon, no rule, for our own taste and judgement should be the judge, and that is the disease itself…And still I vex myself with this, because if I know it not, no one can know it.”

The cat, myself and I

“If I could find a real life place to make me feel like Tiffany’s, then I’d buy some furniture and give the cat a name!”

the real tiger in the flat

There are few things more depressing than clearing out and packing up ready to move. However, being stuck at home during a T8 with nothing better to do than to clear out and pack up with a cat who is equally climbing the walls is definitely one of them.

This was the situation this week as typhoon Utor struck its path through Hong Kong, bringing gale force winds and horizontal rain. To be honest, I’ve seen worse, and in order to justify being stranded on my island, forced to miss my favourite yoga class, I would want to see worse. But still, better safe than swept out to sea, and it did force me to finally tackle that pile of paperwork that’s been glaring at me from under the coffee table for the past few months. How many important documents I threw away in my haste, I am yet to discover, but the pile has been reduced, a small victory achieved. Next on the list: the stash of newspapers and shopping bags under the kitchen sink. Oh joy! How I can’t wait to be leaving!

“What about Audrey?” My mother asks, as the cat bolts back and forth between bedroom and lounge, desperately trying to exercise in the 500 sq ft of space we currently call home. “Is she looking forward to the move?”

“She doesn’t know it yet,” I say, “but she is. We both are. We need more space.”

Funnily enough, this had not been a consideration when I moved in. Light, bright and perfectly sized for one and a half, “It’s nice,” I thought, “but something is missing.”

Having never really intended to be in Hong Kong long term – certainly not three and a half years! – I’m used to living in sparsely furnished apartments, that sense of always having just moved in. But moving to rural Lamma last year – where a knowledge of Cantonese is helpful, a memory for ferry schedules essential and the number for the Snake Police imperative – made me feel all the more how frighteningly isolated single life could be. As anyone will tell you, I’m not usually one for wanting to share my space, but surely having someone there when you come home at night – someone whose capacity for conversation extended no further than ‘miaow’ – might help make you feel more at home?

Enter Audrey. An example of ask and the universe shall provide.

I can still hear my boss on the phone now imparting sympathy to a distressed parent. Perhaps because she does it every day, but this time it was different. A student was leaving to go to school in the UK and her parents were moving to a flat that did not allow pets. Their beloved cat Qu-Qu was facing eviction and could Liz give it a home? My ears pricked up. Having just suffered a similar fate and been rescued from imminent homelessness over Christmas, I was urged to repay my karmic debt and give a home (and a new name!) to Qu-Qu. It was either that or another unwanted soul for the RSPCA cull.

when you look up at me with those eyes…

So, several days later I found myself with a rather heavy Louis Vuitton bag with an enormous, frightened pair of eyes staring out at me. It was a small, very timid-looking Puss-in-Boots that slunk out of the bag that night to hide under the sofa, refusing to eat until she’d sniffed and rubbed herself over everything in the flat, but once that was achieved there was no stopping her.

Keeping me awake half the night mewing, scratching my yoga mat and biting whenever I tried to stroke her, I was soon led to conclude that Qu-Qu had not been half as beloved as her previous owners suggested, or trained out of such kittenish habits as not attacking people.

For my boyfriend, this was all fun and games. His flatmate was fostering two sick kittens and he liked nothing better than to romp around with them. “But Audrey’s a cat,” I moaned. “She’s not a kitten any longer. She shouldn’t be biting people.”

“If she bites me, I’ll bite her back,” my Mum, who over the years has to my knowledge sheltered no less than 6 cats, 3 dogs, 4 rabbits, 2 guinea pigs, 1 terrapin and innumerable hamsters and fish, warned, and that’s pretty much how I felt.

It upset me when she cowered and flinched, bit and scratched for no reason. We could be sitting there having a nice stroke one minute and the next she’d be spitting and hissing, baring her fangs and ready with her claws. But why am I using the past tense? Audrey is still like this. There are moments we occasionally share, usually when I am ill or reading in bed when she comes and nestles down beside me, nudging the book with her nose as if it is Austen or Tolstoy she wants strokes from, not me. And, sure enough, as soon as I start petting her, she looks at me with sufferance, if not downright contempt, and may allow me to carry on if she is in the mood, or bites me if she is not.

As my mum would say, you get the pet you deserve. Like Paul and Toby.

Toby was a rescue dog. Not like Lassie, rather, neglected and left to starve all day by his previous owner, he had no off-switch as far as the hunt for food was concerned. Forever begging up at your with his enormous brown eyes and stealing food as soon as your back was turned (even when it was a craftily laid, chili-laced ploy to deter him from doing it again), we were all quite assertive enough to tell him to go and lie down when we’d had enough and wanted to be left alone to eat our dinners in peace. But not Paul. Kind-hearted, weak-willed, a complete push-over, Paul would softly, patiently ask Toby to please go away until, enraged and murderous, he wanted to stab him with his chopsticks. “He’s here to teach you assertiveness,” my mum would nod sagely. But in the end, Toby was just a dog and there’s only so much one ravenous mongrel can achieve in a lifetime.

curling up with the kitty

Audrey is, for me, equally symbolic and I persevere, defending her when my boyfriend tries to poke her pouchy belly, giving into her preference for Ocean Fish over Mackerel, and letting her alone to chase the geckos (which, FYI, usually escape with their lives, minus their tails). And for her part, she has learned not to scratch mummy’s yoga mat but now leaps around and over it, joining in alongside me for the occasional cat stretch. (Her downward-dog’s pretty good too.)

a natural yogi

I may have thought that taking on a cat was as simple as making a commitment to staying in Hong Kong and making a new home, at least for a little while longer (another 18 months, as it turned out); taking responsibility for something – someone – other than my little old self. Hence, the name. Looking every bit like Cat from Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it seemed only right that I “give the cat a name” – a proper name.

However, Audrey had more to teach me than just this. She came into my life around the same time my boyfriend, Jonny, did and has been a mirror to my own independence, solitude and intolerance. If I have had to work slowly and patiently to gain what little of her trust in humans is left (after being, I surmise, left alone most days with the domestic helpers, savaged and molested by small children and then ditched on me when they’d had enough), Jonny has had his work cut out getting through the hard shell of my insecurities, anxieties and neuroses. And I have had to learn to love and accept his – mainly, lovingness.

As he says, he’s the dog and I am the cat. He wants to sniff my butt and I want to scratch his face. But we’re getting there, slowly.

Call me Tiger

this is the life

I was up at the pool yesterday, enjoying a blissful lunchtime swim in the sunshine, when I was suddenly ambushed by a terrible thought: what if there is a very good reason why Tutti is like that with Phil?

I can only think that I owe this thought to the bikini top that was slipping down from under my armpits and threatening, as indeed Tutti’s had done at a water park at the weekend, to expose all. It was from the water park that I got by way of Proustian-style stream of unconscious thought, to the question of whether my friend’s tyrannical Chinese girlfriend was not quite right to needle, pressure and make demands on my pliant English friend, or whether I’m not right to think that a guy’s life (and his money) is his own and that he should be left – more or less – alone to get on with it.

But first perhaps I should explain one or two little details of Hong Kong life, its sexual and dating politics. First of all, think old-fashioned chivalry: holding doors open, letting the woman go first, carrying her handbag, paying for everything… At first I found this a little weird. Coming from England where chivalry would be considered an offence against female emancipation if those lazy arsed males could even be bothered to attempt it, I simply wasn’t used to such common courtesies as being given priority to exit a lift and could only think of that pearl of wisdom my friend, aged 15 at the time, shared with me that there is only one reason why a guy would want to hold the door open for you – to check out your ass as you walked through. To this day, this is all I can think about every time my boyfriend holds the door for me, or lets me climb the stairs first, and with him I do not doubt that this is precisely his motive. After all, he had the chivalry to warn me on our very first ‘date’ that he was lecherous and I had no reason not to believe him.

But though I am continually lugging around enough kit to see me through a creative writing weekend at a yoga retreat in the Bahamas during rainy season, I am equally guarded about letting my boyfriend carry my possessions. “I’ll forget that you’ve got it,” I complain, taking back my laptop, gym bag and umbrella and handing him the 2kg sack of cat litter to carry instead. Because, of course, if a guy’s got muscles (and you don’t, and I certainly don’t), it is only sensible to make use of them. It saves you a fortune in neck massages and gives them the little ego boast they need. But I draw the line at having my boyfriend carry my handbag, for the simple reason that I know precisely the kinds of questions are flashing through everyone’s mind when they see a guy toting a pretty pink Prada or Louis Vuitton: “Is that his? Is he…?” and the relief when they realise: “Oh no, it’s hers. Phew.”

But of course, we are only scratching the surface here. Handbags and doors are only tip of the iceberg stuff. What about Valentine’s Day? That dreaded day when every girl in Hong Kong is competing for who can be seen clutching the biggest bouquet, teddy bear or box of chocolates, and every restaurant in Hong Kong for who can have the most ridiculously expensive set menu booked out months in advance. Because, let’s face it, there’s nothing more romantic than sitting in a small confined space with dozens of other press-ganged couples pretending to be more in love with each other today than they are on any other day of the year. Which is why I tell my boyfriend not to bother, and why his credit card takes an annual sigh of relief. But now the question occurs to me: am I letting him off the hook too easily? Is there a reason Tutti insists that Phil book that top Valentine’s table the before the fizz has settled on their New Year’s champagne brunch; that her handbag is self-consciously swinging from his hand (other than because the Rolex he bought her for Christmas already weighs a ton)? Does she know something about men that I don’t?

One of the things my boyfriend told me – nay, demanded – early on in our relationship was that I never let him get away with anything. This did rather unnerve me, but my response, being brought up in the tolerant, freedom-minded West, was “I’m not your mother. Just don’t try to get away with anything and we’ll be alright.” And happily we seem to agree on pretty much most things. For example, that line in the movie One Fine Day “love your man like a little boy and he’ll grow into a man”? Yeah, that had us both cringing with embarrassment, groaning with outrage and condemning it as one of the worst, most outdated pieces of advice ever given – patronising to men and degrading to women, to be ignored at all costs! Phew, I sigh, wiping the sweat from my brow. Thus far I am pleased to own such an enlightened, equal opportunities partner. But what if…What if there is a very good reason to take his “don’t let me get away with anything” seriously?

In Hong Kong, it is not uncommon for children to live with their parents until they marry, which these days could be anything into their mid-thirties. Rents are high, the family sacrosanct and … I don’t know. I just can’t see it myself, but apparently it works for many. It works for my boyfriend. “Didn’t he move out?” my friend groaned at me just the other day. “Yes,” I said, “but he moved back in.” “Ugh! He is too comfortable.” And I fear she may be right, in which case, I am in big trouble and need to rethink my whole policy. Here’s why.

In England and the West, I believe it could be quite easy to get comfortable living at home with one’s parents. I have seen it happen to many, but particularly to men: my friends’ brothers, my sister’s boyfriends…These males would happily sit on the sofa in front of the TV while their mothers cooked them dinner and washed their clothes. Hell! I even knew a guy who’d moved out of home but took his washing back with him when he visited – on the train! from London to Leek! Which, in case you are wondering, is 220km or 136 miles. “She likes doing it,” he’d say, as if a) that could ever be true and b) a good enough excuse even if it was. Yet, where mothers are doting, pliant and downtrodden, you can see how easy it would be for sons to take advantage and continue to be loved like a little boy until they failed to grow into a man. But what if your mother’s a tiger mum? What if she wakes you up at six in the morning to help her send an email? What then? If my boyfriend’s “too comfortable” living at home with a veritable (I hesitate/regret to abuse anyone, but in the words of her own family) Kim Jong-il, aren’t I gonna have to rethink my policy if I ever want him to move out of home and (God forbid!) in with me anytime before we get married?

Perhaps I should start taking a few lessons out of Tutti’s book and write my Christmas wish list now. Let me see… should a trip to Bali come top of the list or that Tiffany’s diamante wristwatch? Oh, I think I could get used to this.