Part of my travel experience was crossing the International Dateline multiple times, gaining or losing a day in the process, reliving a date on the calendar or missing it altogether. One year, for example, I missed my birthday as I was fast-forwarded from the day before to the day after.
That experience certainly helped me empathize with those born on Leap Day. But it also is the closest to time travel I’ve ever achieved.
Another memory of travel is days and nights spent walking around foreign cities in Europe, Asia and South America, usually with a new acquaintance as my guide. It would not be a far stretch to imagine I could have fallen in love on one of those walks, say in Brussels, Paris, Taipei, Madrid, London, Kuala Lampur, Singapore, Amsterdam or Tokyo; perhaps on occasion that actually happened.
But since my memory is fickle and it flickers rather than illuminates, any reality it contains has merged with a healthy sense of imagination. That's why a certain kind of film resonates so deeply with me. One example is the 2015 film "Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong," featuring lovely performances by Jamie Chung and Bryan Greenberg.
Chung is a San Francisco girl who graduated from Lowell High School in 2001. Her family immigrated from Korea before she was born. Greenberg is from Omaha.
And, according to Wikipedia, they are now married.
The film is set in Hong Kong, which is one of the many cities where I have also walked around several times. It depicts how the pair meet as strangers and fall for each other during two random encounters a year apart. It is sweet, sensitive, subtle and hopeful.
And it will remind some of "The Before Trilogy," set in Europe in 1995, 2004 and 2013. In the second of those films, a couple spends the entire film walking around Paris, talking and (re)falling in love in the process.
Both the Hong Kong and the Before stories are about human connection through conversation in the middle of being lost. Travel is often lonely; international travel especially so. Being alone in an American city is one experience; but being alone overseas is entirely different. You truly can feel lost and you need somebody to help you feel found.
Maybe it is when we are at our most vulnerable that we succumb to temptation or perhaps when we find our true selves. Both could be true, or neither. Of one thing I am sure. It is at such times that we sometimes can turn into each other's angels.
(I published an earlier version of this essay in 2021.)
HEADLINES:
Putin saw an existential threat in Navalny, the opposition leader whose name he dared not mention (CNN)
Russia claims full control of Avdiivka, says Ukrainian troops still in town (Al Jazeera)
NASA is looking for volunteers to live in its Mars simulation for a year (Engadget)
Netanyahu Says He Won’t Bow to Pressure to Call Off Rafah Invasion (NYT)
Gaza ceasefire hopes fade as Netanyahu rejects calls to halt Rafah offensive (Gaza)
Large Antigovernment Protest Returns to Tel Aviv, as Criticism of Netanyahu Mounts (NYT)
Donald Trump’s Russia ties remain a national security risk (Philadelphia Inquirer)
As DEI gets more divisive, companies are ditching their teams (WP)
2 officers, 1 paramedic killed in Minnesota (CBS)
A shallow lake in Canada could point to the origin of life on Earth (CNN)
OpenAI’s Sora Is a Total Mystery (Atlantic)
Google’s Chess Experiments Reveal How to Boost the Power of AI (Wired)
Report: Thinking About Way You Look All The Time Burns 5,000 Calories An Hour (The Onion)
No comments:
Post a Comment