This morning I got up at 4:15, so I could dive into coffee and a book before Oscar wakes for the day. The book that was lying on the dining room table amidst a smattering of Mr. Potato Head pieces–googly eyes and lurid red lips, big orange feet and wonky blue arms–was BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2006, which I picked up a couple of weeks ago at Green Apple. I chose to begin with a very short essay, so I’d have time to finish it before Oscar gets up. Kevin (the big boy) was working until midnight, so I’ll be on solo duty this morning when Oscar first comes running down the hall, singing the adulterated lyrics to some Death Cab for Cutie tune into his microphone hand. At any rate, the essay is Ken Chen’s City Out of Breath, from Manoa.

Samuel Johnson wrote that when one has tired of London, one has tired of life. But Hong Kong seems denser than any dream an American could have about London…Everywhere is crowded: the restaurant at two on a Wednesday afternoon, the train platform every few minutes, the sidewalks wet with people. This is the opposite of loneliness. It is the abundance of people that alienates us.

I remember feeling just such a sense of alienation in Hong Kong almost a decade ago, when I was living alone in an apartment in Kowloon, spending the weekdays in a downtown office with a man named Mr. Tong who used to say things like, “In America Viagra very cheap.” Mr. Tong had a lot of ideas about America, but his version of the American dream was a place where an average working man could get his fill of Viagra.

Mr. Tong was a co-worker into whose company I’d been thrown upon my arrival in Hong Kong, after I’d spent two months in Beijing. My boss, for whom I worked at the Empire State Building in New York, was never around, so it was just the two of us, me and the longing-filled Mr. Tong, alone in the tiny office. I had a typewriter to work on, and I never filled out the endless forms to his satisfaction, but instead of correcting me directly he would retype the whole thing himself. We used to have lunch together every day on the company–it was expected of me–and the couple of times I ventured off by myself to escape Mr. Tong’s suffocating presence, it was clear I’d breached a serious social code.

I used to ride to and from work on the bus, my head buried in a book, and the sense I had during that month was the sense Chen describes here, an alienation and loneliness borne of saturation, of the feeling of too many bodies in motion at all times.

My apartment had a view of the bay, but between me and the bay were a couple of enormous cranes working on a new skyscraper. Not too long after I left the city the new building must have been complete, so my old apartment in Whampoa Garden surely now has a view not of the passing ships but of another building teeming with interior life. From Hong Kong I returned home to New York City, which was an easier place to live than Hong Kong by virtue of the fact that I knew the language, but which, like Hong Kong, left me always with a sense of sadness. It was exciting but too crowded. I needed to breathe.

Not long after that Kevin was transferred to San Francisco. We’d been waiting a couple of years for it to happen, and I remember his telling me about the transfer as we were walking through Central Park near our apartment on 84th and Central Park West. We’ve been here, Kevin’s hometown, more than seven years now, and I am amazed daily by the way San Francisco is both city and not city, by the way its urban features recede behind the hills and oceans. When I look out our front window I see rows of other houses directly across the street, but from the same window I can see the wide green swatch of Golden Gate Park, stretching westward toward what appears, from this vantage point, to be the end of the earth. From the other end of the house I can see the Pacific, the soft steel blue of it stretching out beneath the fog.

I sat down to write about BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS and Hong Kong, but I have come back, as so often is the case, to San Francisco, my city, a city for breathing.

The Exercise:
Write about suffocation of the mental or physical variety OR write about a city you left behind.