The Big Move

Emptying the nest all the way out

When I cradled my newborn son, Zachary, in a daze in Beijing in 2008, the idea of him as a young man seemed as remote as the planet Neptune. Babies are all-consuming in their baby-ness and it’s hard to imagine someone as an adult when they’re the size of a pineapple, can’t hold their own head up and merrily shit themselves. There is so much growing-up to come! Jesus, when he’s eighteen I’ll be…well, best to not think about that.

A thing about time is that if you wait long enough, even the remotest of deadlines will eventually arrive. Zach turned eighteen in March, which makes me…well, still best to not think about that. He graduated from high school two weeks ago and I am all the things you’d expect: proud, a little sad, mystified at how the years of his childhood seem to have compressed into a heartbeat. Relieved that I don’t have to change diapers at 2AM anymore.

Despite mostly growing up in California, Zach is obligated to return to Singapore for 22 months of national service starting this August. When he was born, my wife and I didn’t know whether we would return to Singapore, where she is from, or to the US. We hedged our bets and got him both passports. The Singapore passport was hand-delivered to our apartment by two young embassy staffers along with a national service obligation and, to cushion the blow, a delightful gift basket. A reasonable trade, I thought, as I ate the butter cookies in the basket. Somebody had to eat them, and Zach didn’t have any teeth yet.

Friends have asked me over the years if I couldn’t get Zach out of national service, but this misunderstands my feelings. I am fully NS-pilled and excited for him to do it! This is easy for me to say since I’m definitely not the one doing it. But, in hindsight, a couple of years of discipline before I showed up for university would have done me good. I sacrificed my freshman year on the altar of monster bong rips and two-liter Sapporo mini-kegs before my parents gave me The Talk.

Fortunately, Zach is a better student than I was and has no discernible interest in monster bong rips, which are frowned upon in Singapore, or Sapporo mini-kegs, which start good but finish flat, warm and pungent, like a road-killed tanuki in a Hokkaido summer. He’s grown up knowing that NS was coming and seems to accept it as the price of being half-Singaporean.

My wife and I have always planned to return to Asia while Zach is in NS. For a long time this was a distantly appealing prospect that we chatted about with other parents at playdates full of six year olds. It was a thing that would happen, you know, someday, like AARP membership or a prescription for statins.

Well, motherfucker, someday is here and now we have to move back across the Pacific. I also get regular AARP membership pitches in the mail, which makes me…honestly, best not to think about that.

My adult life is defined by three big international moves. In 1995, fresh out of grad school and glamorously penniless, I moved from San Francisco to Singapore to do an Internet games startup. This blew up spectacularly due to widely distributed incompetence, including my own, but I stayed in Singapore.

In 2004, recently married, I quit a perfectly good agency PR gig to go to Beijing for a summer language program, which was a way of getting myself there so I could look for a job. Amazingly, this stunt worked and Zach was born halfway through our eight-year stay in China.

In 2013, my then employer offered to move me back to Silicon Valley. Zach was about to turn five, and we had to decide where we wanted to raise and educate him. It was too good a deal to turn down. The company flew us back to the US business class and the flight crew invited Zach into the cockpit of the 747 before takeoff. He sat in the captain’s seat with his hands on the throttles and has been infatuated with aircraft ever since.

Hey, kid, easy on those throttles.

Back in the Bay Area, we crashed with my mom for a few months while I tried to prove to the credit rating agencies that I had not died mysteriously in West Virginia, which turns out to have zipcodes similar to a Singapore post code I had lived in. Once that uniquely American hex was lifted, we rented for a year or so and then bought a small house in a scruffy neighborhood in Redwood City, at the time one of the last semi-affordable parts of the San Francisco peninsula. We got into a bidding war, which ended with me taking on what the banks cheerfully describe as a “jumbo” mortgage and the man who sold me the house retiring to Maui to be a dive instructor. This is the house Zach grew up in, where we’ve lived for nearly twelve years.

The fundamental equation of suburban American living is this:

stuff = space x time

This, by the way, means that time is simply (stuff / space), which is big if true.

Even in a small house like ours there is still a garage, and an attic over the garage, and a shed in the garden, and various closets, and twelve years is a lot of time. Zach’s fish tank that last had a fish in it six or seven years ago? That can sit on a shelf in the garage until geological time swallows California. The Beijing-era Halloween stuff including an orange fright-wig that was uncomfortable even when I had hair? It can go into the attic. The three tubs of Asian bric-a-brac my in-laws sent after they retired and closed their stores in Singapore? They can sit in bins in my wife’s study, shrouded in bubble wrap and masking tape. You never know when you might need an old batik press.

We had twelve years of decisions like that, incrementally entombing ourselves in the consumer detritus of our lives; our personal, if modest, fossilized Pompeiian domus. It turns out you will never need an old batik press, and neither will anyone else.

Moving back to Asia is an elegant forcing function. The house must be rented; it is easier to rent an empty house; therefore, the house must be emptied. Simple to write, a bundle of barbed wire up the ass to actually do. Some things will go to Singapore. Some things will be stored, but no more than necessary as every square foot of storage costs money. The rest we’ve been selling, donating or, as a last resort, tossing. There is no other option.

Thus began the Summer of Sales. Everything must go! (This is why I’ve not had much time for writing recently.) We put stuff on eBay and Facebook Marketplace. This revealed a possibly irreconcilable divide between me and my wife. We want different things from selling our possessions. I want to get rid of as much stuff as possible, as fast as possible. My wife, who embodies the Singaporean spirit of “kiasu,” wants to win. This means I have to pre-haggle with my wife on behalf of our notional buyers over the prices we should sell things for.

My wife [holding some random object]: What do you think we should sell this for?

Me: I don’t know. Ten bucks?

My wife [turning the object, studying it critically]: I was thinking $100.

Me: It cost, like, $50 new. Ten years ago.

My wife: OK. $80.

Me: …

My wife [hitting the “post” button]: Try, lah!

I love her for her optimism and her relentless aversion to booking a loss. In the dot com crash, she rode her modest stash of Enron stock down to zero.

But we’ve made progress! We got rid of the pair of filigreed Chinese bookshelves that were a magnet for cat litter dust and impossible to clean. A nice nonbinary kid from Burlingame jammed one into the back of their Prius and liked it so much they came back the next day for the second one. “My partner adores the shelves,” they said. Wait until you have to dust them, I thought, while I smiled beneficently.

We got rid of our bed frame, the Devourer of Shins in the Night. This frame was eight inches wider than the mattress in all directions and a fucking magnet for collisions. It was beautiful, but my wife and I had both grown to loathe it as we collected scars. Bam! Fuck! was our midnight serenade. A young couple disassembled the frame and threw it into the back of their colossal Rivian SUV. You paid $80,000 for a car, but you’re buying a used bed frame covered with mysterious bloodstains at shin level? Welcome to Silicon Valley! They seemed nice and I felt honor-bound to warn them of the shin thing. They took the frame anyway.

In a stroke of tremendous luck (for us), our neighbor across the street got tempestuously divorced from his stridently MAGA wife of two years and she took everything, leaving him with an empty house. We got rid of a couch, a bureau, two end-tables and an old Chinese chest, and he got his place refurnished on the cheap. Everybody wins!

A middle-aged Chinese guy showed up for the crate of old Peranakan pottery that my wife’s parents had sent along with the batik presses. He held each piece up to his ear and flicked it with a finger, listening to the ping! it made. “These are fake!” he declared. My wife wasn’t home to argue, so I said, “I’ll give you the whole bin for $100.” He took them all. Maybe they were real. Good riddance. He didn’t take the batik presses.

This has felt great. Every time we say goodbye to something I get a rush. No need for monster bong rips, I’m getting high on disposal. Maybe the Buddhist ascetics are right, and the path to bliss is renouncing all worldly possessions. Imagine the otherworldly glow when I get rid of the cars in a few weeks. I might levitate when I cancel the insurance!

But I still kept a lot of stuff, so I guess I haven’t quite attained enlightenment. At least it’s the stuff that I truly value, and not just the cruft of a decade of suburban inertia.

So much stuff…

The only part of this process that has been bittersweet is dealing with my son’s room. As he grew, he didn’t get rid of stuff so much as deposit new strata that created a geological record of his childhood. Thus the current photographocene of elaborate camera gear sits on top of the prior tweenozoic airplane layer, which itself rests on the Legolithic and, at the very deepest, the fossilized stuffed animals and plushies of his smallest, primordial boyhood.

Every layer we go through brings back a sense-memory of that stage of Zach’s life, of the evenings reading Dr. Seuss and Jules Verne to him, of the hours building Lego creations on the floor of his room or getting my ass thoroughly kicked at Monopoly, a game I find tedious but that for some reason lights his own kiasu fire. As he drifts inevitably away from us and closer to his buddies and girlfriend and adult life I feel the weight of not just him leaving the nest, but of us collectively emptying the nest and scattering its fibers to the wind.

But it is time. We’ve been anchored in place long enough for Zach to grow up in stability, which was a gift for him. His national service is the nominal reason for us to move back to Asia, but it’s also an excuse for me. I’ve been ready for a few years for the sloughing of possessions and routines, and for distance from the peculiar madness of America and Silicon Valley, at least for a while.

So my wife and I (and two unwilling cats who have cruelly been denied a vote in this matter) will follow Zach to Asia because it’s as good a reason to go as we could have. Then, in two years, when he heads back to the U.S., we’ll decide what comes next. Zach has already chosen a university on the east coast, which means less pull back to California.

The house is always there, waiting to refill according to the laws of suburban accumulation physics. But maybe we’ll stay abroad for a while longer. Two years would be a quick turn to bounce back across the Pacific, cats and all. Typically, I’d settle someplace for at least seven or eight years before getting itchy feet.

Of course, seven or eight years from now I’ll be…well, absolutely best not to think about that.