Life Stories | On moving to the UK

“My business is your business, and your business is mine”

A street performer yells out to his audience as he prepares for his next trick, walking on a rope held taut by six volunteers, all male and all somewhat brutish in appearance. Despite this random assortment of manpower, the rope was still uneven, with left side held higher than the right.. What this street performer was proposing to accomplish seemed all too ambitious and a daunting task with a slim chance of actual success.

I found truth behind his words. Indeed, a street performer in London could not make any business without his audience, and the audience takes pleasure from the business of the street performer. However, it was not this that resounded with me on this particular scene on an unusually sunny day in Trafalgar Square, rather it was the reminder of an all too similar occasion in the middle of Times Square all the way back in Hong Kong.

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On the night of departure, the weather took shift to the worse as thunder and lightning threatened a delayed flight. The plane remained unscathed, possibly due to my excessive chanting of “Please don’t electrocute the plane..” whilst in the prayer position. Torrents of rain streamed against the oval windows as we soared away from a blurry Hong Kong, the nightlights still bright with all its magnificence blinking back at me as I flew off to begin my new life on the other side of the world.

Long haul plane journeys are always tedious, and I usually need to maneuver into at least 5 different positions in the vain hope of finding one comfortable enough to sleep in.  Luckily, the seat beside me was empty so I finally found my haven leaning against the window. I woke up to the sound of muffled laughter: my Dad watching a Cantonese movie on my left; and on my right, a peek of daylight seeped in through the window. Opening the blinds all the way up, I gazed down at an expanse of green fields bathed in warm sunshine. A far cry from the concrete city I had always known. This, as of now, is Home.

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Stalling for time, the street performer began describing his street theatre 'philosophy', along with the promise of old-school tricks with a daring twist. He had already pumped the crowd by catching a disc thrust several meters in the air behind his back, cycled on a unicycle around his makeshift arena without any legs on the pedals and pulled an impossible length of rope from inside his clothes. The street performers that had impressed me back in HK, now seemed amateur in comparison with this common London street entertainer. From this observation, I realised that all that I had been exposed to in my former HK existence will now come into question in this new daunting cultural environment. On the one hand, living in the UK will hold a sense of familiarity, but at the same time, it will not be exempt from a whole new set of challenges that will force me out of my Harbour city bubble to gain a more holistic picture of the world around me as well as further insight into myself as an individual and my impending future.

So as I watched the performer successfully walk across the rope.
Even if the path seems unachieveable, that doesn’t mean I can’t get thorugh it. Just need determination, practice and enthusiasm.