Vienna Song: Sunrise

Welcome to Hong Kong! I wrote the following on the plane. More about HK this weekend!

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. - Miriam Beard

Today is the beginning: the beginning of a dream — a collection of dreams, perhaps — dreams of seeing the world, of escaping my comfort zone, of learning how to reform my identity as a Westerner into that of a human being.

A year ago, if I could have chosen to go anywhere in the world, China would have been on the ‘Anywhere But’ list. So, in the spirit of pursuing the aforementioned dreams, I booked a flight for a ten-week study at SCAD – Hong Kong. Like most transformational events in my life, I plunged ahead at full speed without the slightest notion of what lay ahead, and already it is the most enriching experience yet.

Today, for the first time, I saw the sun rise twice. It first rose in Toronto, where, also for the first time, I descended from the plane not through a stuffy retractable tunnel into the airport, but on a small staircase, as if I were a World War II hero or Jackie O. I silently wished I were wearing nylons, a pencil skirt, and a scarf blowing in the wind as I waved to someone on the horizon. I would have pretended to were I not aiming to catch a flight to Hong Kong.

Hours later, as I sat on a second plane, eating noodles and pork to a soundtrack of Diana Krall, God introduced Himself to me as the Painter. Through the tiny window that would also serve as my pillow for the night, he showed me His icebergs, a la Jackson Pollock. He must have done them like Pollock, too, splattering the paint on the ground and later stretching the canvas, because you could see where the dried paint had cracked in the process.

When I woke from a fitful sleep, He had moved on to a Rothko sky: a color field painting entitled Cornflower, Coral, and Seal No. 7. It was more pure than Rothko, though; instead of paint, He had chosen soft pastels: a stroke of each color, then a single smear with His thumb. I know because he taught me that trick.

Chinese sunrise, a thousand times more beautiful in reality.

We’re flying over China now. The terrain below looks like those plaster handprints you force children to make so you can hang the fossil on a wall with their names carved in. Every river, every valley is a wrinkle: those wrinkles that grade school girls see when they pretend to read your palm and declare you’ll live a long life because the wrinkle goes all the way across your hand without stopping.

The sun is rising again. I didn’t know what it was at first: a tiny pool of fluorescent rainbow sherbet on the horizon. Then it rose, with an unparalleled beauty; the kind of beauty that burns your retinas because you can’t turn away no matter how much it hurts to look. As it casts an orange glow around men’s silhouettes across the plane, I’ve completely forgotten Toronto.

The rivers are more gnarly now, spelling cursive words like “Taurus” and “grasshopper.” A single large river swims over the land, and there is no explanation for its perfect curves but that God saved it for last, dragging a stick through the mud like a child. A passenger asks that I close the window, so this morning’s exhibition has come to an end and I’m left with a touch-screen television that stopped functioning correctly a third of the way into this fifteen-hour flight.

This afternoon, I will check into the Gold Coast Residences, which could likely be the most luxurious place I will ever live. And for that, SCAD, we thank you.

Hong Kong Gold Coast Residences

I usually discover God’s plans for me about a year or two after they begin to fall into place, and this trip is no different: every time I see a photograph of the Hong Kong skyline, I realize that my not being accepted at NYU three years ago wasn’t because I wasn’t ready for New York; it was because this way, I could have something ten times better.