There exists a sorrow so profound that it defies articulation: the knowledge that I can never truly return, coupled with the bitter accusation from those I love—“Why won’t you come back?” It is a sorrow that weighs heavily on my heart, a quiet grief that reverberates with every passing year.
Growing up in London with a multicultural background, Hong Kong was always more than just a distant place on a map. It was an intrinsic part of me, its presence woven into family stories, cultural traditions, and childhood visits. For years, it lingered in my mind as an anchor—familiar and steadfast, a refuge I believed I could always return to. But since 2019, that image has shattered. The Hong Kong I cherished feels irretrievably altered, cloaked in shadows of oppression and loss.
I did not walk the streets in protest, nor did I lend my voice to the chants for freedom. Yet, I felt the weight of it all as though I had. The images, the stories, the silences—they seeped into me, unbidden, and left me questioning the place that once represented so much. The Hong Kong I knew, or perhaps imagined, is no longer there. What remains is a city I struggle to recognise, let alone call home.
My relatives, steadfast in their lives there, cannot understand. To them, my reluctance to return is perplexing, perhaps even hurtful. They assure me life is still livable if I would only stop overthinking. “Things aren’t that bad,” they say, as if normality were a choice. But I cannot reconcile their acceptance with the reality I see. I cannot pretend that silence is safety or that compliance is freedom.
They think I have chosen comfort over connection, but they are wrong. Each day I wrestle with the weight of my decision—the absence, the growing distance, the ache of estrangement. I long to return—not to the place it has become, but to the Hong Kong I once loved. Yet that city exists only in memory: a mosaic of fleeting visits, familial warmth, and imagined belonging. To return now would mean confronting its loss, a grief I am not yet ready to bear.
And so, I remain caught between two worlds, anchored in neither. In England, I am restless, haunted by what I’ve left behind. In Hong Kong, I would be stifled, unable to ignore the weight of what has changed. My relatives cannot see this struggle. They continue to sleep, lulled by the rhythms of a life they’ve chosen to endure. If they refuse to wake, if they find solace in their illusions, what power do I have to change that?
This is the sadness I carry: the ache of separation, the frustration of being misunderstood, and the quiet acceptance that not all divides can be bridged. My leaving was not an act of betrayal but one of survival. To stay would have meant smothering the parts of me that demand freedom, truth, and dignity—the parts shaped by my life in the Western world, where I learned to question, to hope, and to dream. Yet leaving has brought no peace. Instead, it has left me mourning a home I can no longer claim.
Still, beneath the sadness, there is a flicker of hope. Perhaps, one day, the clouds will part, and the city I remember will re-emerge, its spirit unbroken. Perhaps the ties that bind me to my family will prove stronger than distance or difference. Until that day, I wait. Even if that day never comes, I will wait, carrying this sadness as both a burden and a testament to the love that fuels it.
The grief of not returning—it is not a refusal, but an impossibility. It is the ache of knowing I cannot go back, even as I long for those I love to see what I see. It is the melancholy of standing at a crossroads, tethered to a place I cannot reach, holding in my heart both its pain and its promise.
Yet perhaps the weight of this grief is also what makes it meaningful. It is the price of loving deeply, of caring for a home even when it no longer exists as you remember it. To carry this ache is to remain connected, however tenuously, to the dreams and truths that shaped you. It is a quiet resistance, a refusal to forget, and perhaps a hope that one day the road home will no longer feel so far.
In this bittersweet longing lies a paradox: the further I drift from the place I once called my second home, the more I cherish what it stood for. And though I cannot return, the echoes of its spirit remain with me—a reminder that even in loss, there is love, and even in impossibility, there is hope.
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