We're All Looking for Harmony

“How do you like Hong Kong?” I asked my driver as we left the airport and got up to speed on the highway.

The sun was just starting to rise, and we were bound for the Sheraton Towers Hotel where I was staying for the week.

“Eh, every place have good and bad. I like better than New York,” he replied.

The driver told me his name was Steve, but I have my doubts.

“Yeah I don’t like New York much either. Did you work for the Sheraton there as well?”

“Oh no,” said Steve. “I was only there two or three month. I worked with apparel company that produced clothes in China and sold them to U.S. But now labor cost too high in China, so the manufacturing moved to Burma and Bangladesh, and I didn’t want to go there.”

As Steve and I talked about life, I sank into the form fitting back seat of the Mercedes. I stared out the window, watching the sun cast it’s first light on Hong Kong’s peaks and skyscrapers as we hummed down the empty highway.

Every minute or two, I turned my gaze to the rear view mirror and caught Steve’s eye as he spoke.

“So do you like this job better?” I asked.

“Eh, it’s closer to home. I’m not traveling every week like I used to.”

Steve didn’t seem to have a strong opinion either way – “every place have good and bad.”

Steve’s outlook reminded me of my landlord from years ago when I lived in Queens. His name was Robinson.

Robinson and Steve spoke with the same cadence, they were both Chinese, and they seemed to have similar views on life.

“Sometime you up here,” Robinson would say, holding his right hand at shoulder height.

“And sometime you down here,” he would quickly add, as he held his other hand down by his waist.

“But you want to be right here,” he would say as he moved both his hands to meet in the middle like a scale.

“You want hah-mo-nee.”

Harmony.

I think that’s what Steve was talking about too.

“When my daughter was eight,” Steve recalled, “I got a warning from her school principal. He told me, ‘It’s not good for a little girl to not see her father.’ And he was right. Work was keeping me away for about half the year. So now I do this.”

The rest of the ride passed in silence, except for some minor chatter about local food and tourist attractions.

As I looked out the window and got my first glimpses of a new world, I thought about the parallels between my life and Steve’s.

Fortunate wasn’t a strong enough word to describe my situation.

I was riding in the back seat of a luxury car taking in the Hong Kong sunrise on my way to my water front hotel.

Less than an hour earlier, I was sitting in a business class seat – a plane ticket that cost just shy of my monthly salary.

How many of my college classmates get to do these things? Probably few.

My high school classmates? Even fewer.

I’ve been handed the opportunity to travel the world and work in a relatively high paying career – probably much like Steve did before his family commitments called him home.

Steve and I are some 20 years and 8,000 miles apart, but we’re not that different from one another.

Like Steve, I’m spending my younger years traveling my home country and the world, making money and memories. And also like Steve, I’m doing it with a different future in mind: a short commute, time with family, doing the things that matter...harmony.

I don’t consider myself cultured, but with each visit abroad, I gain a little more perspective and a little more intellectual humility.

I’m learning that we’re all the same people. People looking for our own versions of harmony. Different in language and location, but similar at heart.