My people

I find them on escalators, walking up the left side. I find them in our building’s stairwell. I find them somewhere in the long, multi-level stairs of Hong Kong’s Central station, breathing a bit hard in the air-conditioned quiet. I find them in the Apple Store’s full floor stairs, a useful shortcut in Causeway Bay’s Hysan Place. I find them walking beside the travelators in NRT and HKG, in ZRH and HEL, intent on their destinations and the pace of their approach.

My people are an odd bunch. They are constantly fitting backpacks into overhead bins and below economy seats, traveling sans roller bags. They bicycle to dinners in Tokyo or Paris or Dongguan, and never rent cars unless on long road trips. They swim in the public pools of Hong Kong, remembering 5 HKD coins for the lockers. My people, they’re weirdos: they walk to the Lyft lines at LAX rather than wait 20 minutes for a shuttle bus because time is time with people. They know it’s possible to be in a friend’s downtown Taipei neighborhood one hour after landing via public transportation with preparation. These are my people: in public and prepared, they’re comfortable in so many places.

My people are at night markets in Bangkok and Taipei, they’re in multi-floor nightclubs in Osaka for someone’s birthday after a long factory visit, they’re wandering Wukang Lu in Shanghai late at night on a Tuesday, they’re comfortable in Beijing bar crawls and biking home from shows in London. My people have tickets to concerts in countries they don’t reside in.

If this sounds hard to imagine, if these people sound too foreign, consider the other parts instead. My people are Waldorf school parents, or graduates. They’re knitting transit card holders and sewing pants for mosquito-infested forest schools. They know how to raise sheep, at least theoretically, and how to use power tools, definitely. They cut each other’s hair and do baking projects on weekends. My people are comfortable in deep water, whether that be the ocean off a boat in Hong Kong or a lake in upstate New York, whether that be Boracay in the spring or Thailand in the fall. My people have swum the far side of Capri after a hike and a ferry ride, though their Italian is to be improved.

My people host parties when leaving a country so that their friends can take their belongings. My people spend hours reading about visas, spend weeks scouting neighborhoods in countries they don’t yet reside in, spend months wondering if their jobs will support these relocations. My people almost never live where they were born.

And yet when they do, or when they are temporarily, they’re happy and free. They are often busy, clearing driveways of snow and sidewalks of leaves. These people, my people, shop local regardless of location. In their home towns they go to farmer’s markets, chatting with vendors they’ve known for years. They visit stores they grew up supporting, glad to hear the proprietors plans for retirement. In foreign lands they seek out odd neighborhood shops and buy the produce or wine that the owners recommend. They’re excited to know the humans behind whatever counter, wherever they may be.

Mostly my people, as strange as it seems, are optimistic. They should be, given how far they’ve already gotten. Their curiosity has given them wings.