Stuart Wolfendale

Between summer 1996 and New Year 2002 I had a home in Los Angeles; in Pasadena to be precise. Explaining why would be to no particular advantage except to say, maybe, that I was not running from the Handover. Unless you were in Poland in 1939 or Phnom Penh in 1975 where you could hear the tramping, there is not much point in second guessing the march of history.

 Wearied by ‘op-ed’ page speculation in the press and appalled by the arrival of thousands of foreign journalists like a plague of ignorance over the land, I had simply ceased to be bothered about the future of Hong Kong. I had been wandering in Indo- China since Christmas anyway. My partner was already in LA, I fancied the contrast so I buggered off there from Bangkok and stayed for 5 years.I have just been back for the first time since.  It was not exactly a mistake because I met up with old friends who rekindled that unmatchable warmth and hospitality which beams out of Americans on their home turf. But it wasn’t a triumph either. My companion and I decided that the expense of one hire car would cover our joint itinerary-until he developed urgent family priorities to be attended to and I could choose between tagging along or staying in the borrowed apartment. Over an area half the size of Belgium, there are no viable public transport alternatives. Buses show up when they want to for the old and the poor. Surface and subway rail systems are midget. Taxis require you to re-mortgage your apartment and are only available by phone.So, I spent a lot of time watching freeways go by, listening to the car aircon fight the 33deg C. heat of the San Gabriel Valley. LA’s cliché romance rests on its coastal strip, only 15 miles but 8 deg C lower. I wondered how I’d stood five years of this and why I was feeling glum looking at it until I remembered that your nostalgia is moments in time past not present geography.I just sat there, picking out which passing, guzzling SUV I would buy for the streets of Wanchai and cursing myself for not having held out there a year longer by which time the Pasadena apartment would have sold for US$100,000 more. With hindsight, I would not have had to do a stroke but just sit there like the Laotians with rice and listen to it grow.         

     

   

  

   

 

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