Hong Kong

This wasn’t a trip. I moved to Hong Kong in July 2019 to build out an Asia-Pacific security role at work. The plan was three years. I lasted eight months.

I found an apartment on the 41st floor and settled in. The city was electric — bamboo scaffolding on skyscrapers, $300 business class flights to Taipei, $57 a month for gigabit fiber with HBO. I got my first bespoke suits fitted. I walked to and from work every day, about twenty minutes each way, with an evening walk at 8pm.

Then the protests started getting serious. One night on my evening walk I turned a corner and walked straight into a wall of riot police who’d just deployed tear gas. From my 41st floor window I could watch massive crowds take over the main roads below. The weekends became unpredictable, so I started flying somewhere nearby every weekend instead — Taipei, Manila, Cebu, Shanghai, Seoul.

I did the world’s highest commercial bungee jump at the Macau Tower. Four times. Sat in a bubble bath at the Grand Hyatt Taipei trying to figure out where else in the world to go. Ran into Jayson Tatum at my hotel in Doha. Went on a desert safari in Qatar where it was me and twelve US soldiers.

I flew home for Christmas 2019, then flew back to Hong Kong in January. Two weeks later I visited the DMZ in South Korea, two days before COVID hit Korea. By March, my company told me to come home. The three-year plan lasted eight months, but I packed more into those eight months than most people fit into a decade.