I had a lot of time to think. I had a lot of time to think in general, traveling alone for at least half of my trip, but in Hong Kong I first tried to seriously edit the hundreds of photos I’d been taking, and reflect. Japan was clean, Korea was crazy fun, China was better than this Chinese-impaired Chinese American had hoped.

But what else was there to say? I needed something to place in that hungry caption box underneath my photos. But it felt - it feels - wrong somehow, to try to capture the emotion of a place in words, to capture some fleeting impressions and mold them into truths. I felt as though I was just visiting in other people’s lives, visiting attractions on the same streets that they’d grown up, riding buses past schools and homes where they’d done all the things we all do: learned, loved, yearned to leave.

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