This means Hong Kong shuts down. So a nice break for us. We get to eat dinner as a family during the middle of the week. This never happens other than on weekends or holidays. This type of crazy schedule is not unusual here in HK and simply accepted as normal, and a typical example of the long hours in HK. Granted, Stephen's occupation means terrible hours, but his seem to top the list of most expat families I have met, unless one parent is doing something like working in Macau. And many expats are on the road traveling, so again, this too interferes with family time.
I realize that my childhood of 40 years prior of my father coming home in time for dinner at 5PM was most unusual. My father loved his job and was very committed, and works still now at the age of 76--active in his research and patient load, but people did eat dinner with their families.
Ever wonder how computers were supposed to make our lives better? How we were supposed to have more time for each other, for creativity, for simple contemplation of life? Nope. As the world gets faster, we require longer hours, destroyed labor unions, and have now convinced ourselves that work is our reason for living. It used to be living was our reason for work.
I had some students some years back telling me that their ambitions were to work for Google. Why, at Google, you could eat all of your meals there! I told them that the fact of the matter was this: sure you could, and this may be very convenient. But companies are not stupid. You can get and demand more from your employees if you provide such things. Now, you can stay all day at work. Eat a meal, and then work some more! Hooray! Woudn't it be better if you just knocked off from work at Google or wherever else you were working at 5PM? Arrived at 9AM? This was a cause of a bit of reflection and then one of the boys said to me, okay, you've now destroyed my dream job illusion. Glad I did. Hopefully he's smart enough not to get suckered into that and has a job that allows him to have another life OTHER than the company he works for.
Protests on Wall Street! I have to admit, I never thought I would see it happen. Well, hard to move the capitalist system, but I'm impressed.
Back to family time... What I find paradoxical is that this idea of the Asian family being of primary importance is rather mythic as opposed to a reality-based idea. For many in Hong Kong, work hours are so long that people are prohibited from having a "normal" family life and I read a year ago that the average father spends about 12 minutes per day with his child. For our family, such precious minutes occur in the hour before Stephen takes the 8:05AM ferry. While he gets ready for work, bathing, changing, shaving, Keohi and I eat breakfast on the little Korean style table on the floor of our bedroom. I found that this was the only way we could actually have some kind of time and interaction together as a family from Monday-Friday.
Family, in importance and how it is perceived in Hong Kong (not necessarily with us, but from what I can perceive in general here) is not about time spent with family, I'm beginning to think, but just a drive to survive or provide for your family. I see many people and hear people talk about family this or that, but the truth is, how much time is spent with family? Not a helluva lot if you count the hours. Then again, given the work hours this is maybe just how this is for expats and locals. I actually don't believe that the ideas of how we measure family priority can be really compared easily across cultures. There's a different way of framing family in terms of a network and an idea of the construction of a child's self. Not sure if HK people can brag that they are more family oriented though compared with Western countries. Family time or contact time here seems rather minimal for most. And children are folded into the idea of family in a different way, as part of the overall unit, not, as it is in the US, at the forefront of the family unit. My European friends tell me that this is very American. Perhaps. Anyway, this idea of how children are perceived would explain the lack of facilities for children here, like parks, gardens, and educational opportunities that are recreational.
Anyway, Typhoon Signal 8 was good for us. We ate dinner together. A family.
0 comments:
Post a Comment