Memory Map

Spaces change once they become parts of our past. They become landmarked by the moments we remember them for, rather than the signposts and structures we relied on at the time.

Like the tips of skyscrapers peeking through clouds or church steeples stood out above village rooftops, my landmarks are littered across the places I have called home.

Hong Kong’s three-week quarantine mandate spat me out at 7 a.m. on a Saturday in October 2021 dazed, fragile and even more susceptible to sunburn. My partner, Nadége, and I had spent the past 504 hours confined to a double bed, the one-metre gap around its edges and the short walk to the bathroom. Ideally, we had the next 36 hours to find and move into an apartment before work on Monday. We had neither the money nor the inclination to go back to another hotel.

We spent the first few weeks locating the best coffees in our neighbourhood and the cheapest places to eat. We memorised the MTR exit that took us closer to home and what alleyways connected which roads. Over weekends, we sat by the water in West Kowloon Art Park and walked through the high streets in Central. We took the ferry to Lantau and Lamma and, as the number of landmarks we visited grew, so did the city.

Now, a year and a half later, the city is so big I need reminding that those 21 days in quarantine ever happened.

My most recent landmarks are in Vietnam, which I left in 2021 after four years spent living and working in Hanoi. The city is a patchwork of all the cafes and coffees I loved.

At Café Mia, overlooking Westlake, I sat drinking cà phê cốt dừa watching the sun come up as the sounds of the city rumbled into action. Then, later, would sit in the same spot drinking Bia Saigon as the sun set, the streetlamps flickered on and the city wound back down.

Our lazy statues lie on the rooftop terrace of a four-storey house. On warm afternoons, I would come up to find a different member of the house, including the cat, asleep in the hammock, and that another neglected plant had wilted and died.

In Ba Vi, a large willow looms over the mountains where we danced amid the tireless flicker of strobe lights and there’s a swimming pool in which we spent an hour searching for a house key, only for Harriet to reveal that it had been hidden in her hand the whole time.

There are truck stops up and down Vietnam that stand in our name. Empty warehouses and corrugated iron sheds where we’d stop to eat bowls of pho and fried food, to rest on metal chairs and plastic stools, and to beat each other at cards and pool.

At 22, and for only a year, I moved to South Korea.

I longboarded home on highways under a halo of streetlights. Ate bulgogi and udon under wide blue tents. And got drunk with friends under stadium floodlights.

In Daegu, there’s a wooden floor in an empty flat where Nadége and I would sit into the early hours of the morning, falling in love. On a street corner in Seoul, there is a monument to where I first told her that I loved her, and our footprints are set in the alleys we ran down when her stunned response was to burst into tears, turn and run away.

In my suburban hometown in northwest England, my ‘city centre’ is a small bakery beside a main road. As I grew up, so too did my meetings outside the Greggs at the bottom of my road.

At 10 years old, Greggs is where my friends and I would meet before going to the local swimming pool on a Saturday morning. By 14, from here we were catching buses to Stockport to go shopping or to the cinema. When I was 17, I would wait opposite the bakery on cold mornings to be picked up by Kaney, Kenners, Luke, or Meadows on the way to college and at 18 (but, really, before 18) it is where we would all meet before walking to the train station for nights out in Manchester.

Spreading out from that ‘city centre’, the landmarks of my hometown are scattered among parks where I drank bottles of cider and ran from police on Friday nights. The rug we danced on in the dining room after dinner. My first kiss towers next to a dimly lit street lamp in Romiley, and an amphitheatre stands on the rec where we played football to the passengers on the 383 bus that drove by on its route.

In Rome, where I was born, my landmarks have worn with time. They are the twisting roots of a formidable garden tree that sent me over the handlebars of the first bike I learnt to ride and its ragged trunk that, in a separate confrontation, I attempted to clamber up only to slip, and slide back down, leaving my tummy red-raw.

As for Hong Kong, I arrived with a girlfriend and, when I leave, will do so with a wife. I will remember here for the busy Kowloon streets we walked down, plotting our next adventure. Between the dwindling number of neon lights, cats sat guarding store fronts and people trundling metal trolleys up and down pavements.

At a dim sum table in Prince Edward, our English and South African families will meet for the first time and navigate the challenges of using chopsticks and understanding each others’ accents.

There is a rock on a cliff overlooking the ocean where I sat eating cake on the first birthday spent with my sister in seven years. And there could well be wherever it is I am sitting, with whatever it is I am eating, when I turn 30 and remember the spaces and the people who were with me for birthdays gone by.

And somewhere, perhaps less prominent, will be the twenty-first-floor window in which I sat for 21 days. Watching the sky change colour, the clouds sweep from right to left, and the lights blinking in apartment windows as I imagined what Hong Kong was going to be like.