Long Distance
A year of separation, transition, and doubt, and the love that sustained me through the hardest of moments
Not far from our apartment in Beijing is Chaoyang Park. The 288-hectare park is an imposing piece of land in the middle of Beijing. For a time, you had to pay an entrance fee, but the pandemic came and now the park is free. It is designed with families in mind, from the amusement park at its center to the sledding hill during the winter. It is more whimsical.
On weekends, my husband likes to wake me up, drag me out of bed, and plead that we go on a run in the park. He will lure me with new heat gear, as he promises that the bitter cold of Beijing will feel like nothing in his latest well-researched purchase.
A year ago, I would be up there with him, darting past grandmas on the red five-kilometer path. But over the last year, I was less consistent with running, allowing my muscles to atrophy. My partner, on the other hand, threw himself into running over the last year, competing in long distance races across the hills that surround Beijing. He gracefully galloped away setting the pace. I could only look on.
We went on different journeys this year, another in the long history of separation that has become a perpetual theme in our relationship.
For the last year, I lived out of a suitcase, traveling over 70,000 miles across 10 countries. The same clothes followed me from winter to austral summer to spring to summer to fall. My pants so worn over these months that the threads came apart twice and needed to be re-sewn.
Throughout my travels, I was asked where home was. I would say it was to be confirmed. If pressed hard enough, I would say my things and my heart are in Beijing, but where I go next will be determined a few days before I arrive.
I was not quite a backpacker. I was not quite a vagabond. My itinerance was of a different sort. I was in search of something between a new home and salvation. I was looking for the place that would answer the most important question that my partner and I had raised the year before: where would we start our new life together?
This is the story of this journey, and the kindness and support that let it come to pass.
No More
We have spent almost half of our relationship apart. From jobs in different countries, to the challenge of the pandemic, and ultimately my move to a startup that found me sitting alone in a sparsely decorated apartment in Guangzhou over a thousand miles away, we survived on Skype calls and airline miles. It was a unique idiosyncrasy of our relationship that we were able to manage for so long while spending a great deal of time apart.
To those outside, I imagine, it was seen as our preference, our default. To us, it was the necessary inconvenience of a modern love, the sacrifice we made to be with each other. And we got good at it. We created three lives: his, mine, and ours. Our friend groups remained distinct; we guest starred in each other’s worlds only on occasion, even when we lived in the same city. Our life was a special place defined by the trips, adventures, and expeditions we went on together to places near and far. It was the intimacy of this private journey that always appealed to me most. It was just for us.
The pandemic interrupted this uneasy balance. It drained China of its expats, eroding the life that I had built in China. Our relationship transformed from being one of many pillars that kept me in China to being my only connection.
At first, I worried that this would be too much for him, for us. But the slow and steady sedimentation of our relationship over years allowed us to weather this rapid change, and soon we adapted. At the time, I had a demanding job that consumed all my time. He made sure that I had food to eat, our life at home secure, and every thought that I might have had was answered. He found us a new friend group of successful professional gays, many going through the surrogacy process. It led us to start the process as well. We had reinvented ourselves in short order.
We had high hopes for 2022 when I moved to a rocket ship of a startup, but life changed. Startups can get away from you. Next thing you know you are doing something far from where you started. But the pandemic was so consuming that I couldn’t assess how far it had taken me from what I cared about, from what I wanted.
Each day my goal was not to get locked down. It defined where I went during the day, if I got a Covid test, and whether I met a friend. Our decision to start the company in Hangzhou was under the assumption that flights back to Beijing would be frequent. For a time, flying to Beijing was a nightmare with quarantine on arrival and again back in Hangzhou a second time. When we moved our company from Hangzhou to Guangzhou, the distance grew and the flights dwindled. I ended up seeing my husband less and less that year. I neither had my own life nor ours.
After the Covid restrictions were finally lifted, it was as if I could finally see again. I realized how impossibly far away we were from each other. I thought about our future kids and their lives. Would we continue this long-distance? Would he move to Guangzhou? Why was I even in Guangzhou? Why was I in China if I wasn’t together with him?
I was not alone in such a challenge. My colleagues had also left their families and even children in other cities. It was customary for grandparents to take care of kids in busy working households. Parents would go to make money to provide for their family. But that wasn’t what I wanted, that was not what we had imagined for our family. We wanted to raise our kids together in the same city. We wanted to be the primary caretakers. How was that going to work with this current arrangement?
I called up my partner at the time and told him “no more”. I was done being apart. He told me to come home.
I discussed the same with my co-founders who were saddened but understood. We agreed on a plan for me to take a step back slowly, leaving the door slightly ajar in case the situation shifted. I collected my things, went to the airport, and returned to Beijing.
There are various details I am glossing over about economic situation in China, about the decreased access to capital. I have alluded to the challenges related to language and conversation that proved larger than expected. All of these are true, just as it is true that I had enough of long distance. Indeed all of these factors coalesced to form not just the decision that I made but to define the choices that my partner and I would make going forward.
Interlude
My partner remains nameless and shapeless in all these reflections on purpose. Though he reads everything I write and approves what he is comfortable with, his only request is that he remain unnamed.
Whatever degree you might mold him into a live person is through the vague descriptions and presentations that I provide you. But even then, I play with your expectations. I like to lean into archetypes, presenting a flat persona only to give you a statement or an image that might make you wish you could meet him and find out how much depth might exist.
I want to make him feel mysterious and yet familiar. Someone that is a constant presence in my life, but your interpretation of his existence blends with your own biases. You might be convinced that he must look like this or must think like that. You first beg to want to get to know him, but then you soon realize you never wish to meet the real person, for fear that your own imagination of him might erode.
It adds a dynamic to this story that I think makes it more special, more intimate for both me and for you as the audience. But the real reason is far more practical. This is my story. It is less about who he is so much as it is about how his presence, how his patience, how the persistence of our love has led me on this circuitous route of life. And why I would choose him over everything else.
To America
We wrote down on paper all the things in life that we wanted and where we would go. What if we became vintners in Switzerland? Too expensive and too early for the life of retirees. What about the tech sector in Latin America? We could have the best life, but what would my partner do? Or we ran a restaurant in Athens? We could be with our friends, but what about our family. Our romantic imaginations gave way to the practicality of purpose. We haven’t reached our prime economic earning potential. Of the languages we speak, English is the one most in common. I am an American citizen.
We fell back down to Earth. If we were to move to a new country, the United States was the one place that would combine all our interests. It needed to provide a certain income to sustain our own family and his parents. It needed to be in a city with a direct flight back to Beijing (in an ideal post-pandemic world). It should be close to my family so we could see my sisters’ kids growing up. And it needed to have easy access to nature.
But we could not define our life by a spreadsheet, we needed to go. As China lifted the final restrictions on travel, we hunted for the cheapest flight we could take, traveling by high speed to train to Dalian, by plane to Tokyo and onward to Los Angeles.
Around pressing concerns with our surrogacy agency, we spent the days along Santa Monica Boardwalk or trips downtown to the City Market. We engorged on the imagination of our life as Angelenos. It was real, and it was good. We traveled East to see my family in Upstate New York, where we cooked Chinese New Year dinner. We began to suggest to everyone that this might be the beginning of something new, which gave my mother relief that perhaps I might be a little closer after 12 years away.
Our last stop was across the Northern border to Toronto, where my climate change doomerism has led me to wonder about moving ever northward. Sadly, a heavy snow shower inundated the city and its streets in mounds of snow and slush, rendering the Canadian route less attractive.
My partner’s journey had ended, mine was just beginning. I would leave from there to finish up a few remaining commitments for the startup in Brazil. Once I returned to the US, I would begin in earnest to find the position that would give us the life that we wanted.
He sent me away with one last thought. To not worry about what would come next. We knew it would take as much as a year before I would find something. He urged me to have resolve. He encouraged me to have faith. He believed in me.
And then, he left, and our long-distance adventure resumed.
Job Hunt
It was two weeks into my job hunt that I caught a fish. It was a job based in California working for a Chinese firm that wanted to pursue the original idea that my startup had explored. I knew the market intimately. I knew what you needed to do. And though I knew there were some limitations, I felt that a well-resourced firm could solve this in a way that a startup could not.
But as we went through final due diligence, I began to feel the company did not have a clear idea about what it wanted from me let alone how it planned to be effective. I didn’t want to take the first thing that came my way unless it was a slam dunk. I should be more prudent. I should test the market fully. It was the last offer I received for almost a half a year.
I intended to pursue the job search from the comfort of my parent’s house to save money and spend time with my sisters who were both pregnant. I would get a feel for where I was getting more interviews or conversations and spend a few days at a time on the road.
As I sent out close to a hundred resumes with a detailed tracker of each application and my performance, I hoped to figure out how ATSs were processing my applications to adapt my resume for better performance. I didn’t receive a single interview. I talked to friends throughout the tech and consumer goods industries, they said it was a rough market, maybe I should wait until the spring. When the spring came, they said maybe it would be hotter by the fall.
I needed to change tact. I stopped looking for jobs. I decided I wanted to only network. Most people I called suggested we meet in person, which was hard when I was in the Finger Lakes. Others asked that I go through their LinkedIn and ask for an introduction to anyone I wanted. I was looking for advice on what I would even be competitive for; I didn’t know with whom I should connect. There was a coldness about the process that surprised me. Maybe I had been gone for too long, or maybe this was how it was now. Either way, it became clear that I would not get much going from the seclusion of my parents’ home. I needed to pound the pavement.
A New Yorker
After long chats with my partner, we decided that I should focus my efforts on New York. I had wanted to live closer to my family, and I felt that my college friends and overall Columbia network might lead to a quicker response.
Once I arrived in New York, I sent messages to everyone I knew hoping to meet friends and contacts, following up with those that had asked me to tell them when I was in town. The typical response suggested a time a few weeks or months in the future. Or if our meeting was confirmed, they might cancel last minute. We would try to reschedule, but then I needed to hunt around for new housing, leading to a completely different struggle around how to pay for this entire experience while all my money was tied up in China in The Treasury, what my partner and I called our joint assets.
But then it became a concern about the return on investment. When I first thought about being in New York, I imagined that I would be busy from morning to night each week with conversations that would generate leads that would generate interviews.
Some weeks, I would never meet anyone new.
The domino effect that I had hoped would slowly come as I built momentum never arrived. I began to spend more time in social situations, thinking perhaps that going to dinners or meeting friends at bars might lead to unknown connections that might land somewhere. Moving from China was a capital-intensive project.
I felt cornered into the dark world of job hunting. I turned to the Chinese community of New York to find people who might know the companies I worked at and might value my experiences.
I contacted Chinese managers across tech and CPG companies, emailing or adding on LinkedIn anyone who might somewhat be interested in my experience in China. It proved to be the most fruitful tactic as I came to develop closer and more fulfilling relationships, including a senior manager at a large CPG firm that accepted my cold-email offer to meet for coffee.
We began a dalliance over the next few months that almost led to a few roles, but ultimately ended when I was a finalist for a position that was recalled. The cause? The troublesome economic situation in China that I had just left.
Writer’s Journey
I had so many feelings in these days that I didn’t know what to do with them. I met a friend, a published author, about turning the absurdity of my time in China into a book. As he burst out laughing at the sheer surrealism of my stories, he told me that I had to write it. He recommended that I write it as a novel, in large part to protect real-life people but also to free me from the constraints of what happened and more toward what it felt to live in China at that time.
I wrote the first chapter in a night, stealing the most memorable experience as a fascinating opening scene. From there, the book almost wrote itself. Writing became my primary profession. In between the few meetings that almost always went nowhere, I would sit in the apartment I rented and write at all hours, letting my ideas just burst onto the page.
The original conceit was something that would be funny and ludicrous, but soon the language that came out was as haunted and serious. I discovered that my voice reflected the tragedy, anger, hopelessness, and barely perceivable optimism that I had formed through all those years. The characters were pained by a life that they could no longer have, a world that was no more.
I left it alone for some time, overwhelmed by the memories that came as I finished the book in less than 12 weeks. I was most troubled by a single idea. Would there be a happy ending? Would I have a happy ending?
Doubt
After six months apart, daily phone calls become less frequent, distracted by lives that begin to diverge more and more each day. A space forms even amongst the most supportive of couples. In its place, doubt begins to grow. Was it love that we had or mere hallucinations of love?
These doubts grew as I spent more and more time alone. The few calls and responses I got to my inquiries compounded my doubt. I would turn to walking and thinking, crossing a different bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan each day. Each day, these thoughts stewed more and more as sweat formed along my brow only to be parted by the brisk wind down the East River.
Then the greatest doubt formed, and once it started it would consume me completely. What if I could never move on from China until I moved on from him?
It was the reason my writing was so somber. It was why I didn’t apply to more jobs, why I didn’t hustle more. I was self-sabotaging because my heart was not in it, it was elsewhere. It was romantic and sanguine and good, until the thoughts began to invert themselves.
Perhaps if I stopped thinking about him, if I moved on, maybe only then would I find the strength to take a job that didn’t fit his preferences in terms of compensation and location. Maybe I could take a job a few rungs down but use the next few years to get back.
Of course, he found my increasingly ridiculous ideas not amusing. He told me he wouldn’t repeat himself but that his love for me was pure and never changing. I should slap myself out of it. But I had become too embroiled in this Kafkaesque struggle.
When he told me that he was able to take holiday in July and asked if I would come back to China, I reacted violently to the proposition. No. I can’t go back. I must only go forward. If I met him on neutral territory, we had options.
European Vacation
It was our first time back in Europe since the beginning of the pandemic, when we left for Europe the day that Wuhan’s airport closed. He returned on the last flight back before Europe cancelled flights to China. I went west to Mexico for work. We didn’t see each other for 10 months in 2020.
It was also our first time in Greece since our wedding. We choose it because of close friends. Or maybe the memories would somehow erase the chasm that began to form. I arrived a day earlier to get everything prepared. When I met him at the train station near our rented flat, we looked at each other like old classmates, familiar but foreign. As we met our friends and spent our days trying to escape from Athens’ penetrating heat, we spoke little, almost as if we didn’t know what to say. I worried that if I gave the space a name, it would force us to have a conversation that neither of us wanted to have.
Friends urged us to come with them to Amorgos, the furthest east of the Kyklades, with only one fast ferry available per day on a journey that would take almost six hours. We sat next to each other but our hearts still far apart. Was it just me? Or was he also closed off as well? I couldn’t tell.
After we checked into our rental in Chora, we walked through town until we arrived at the windmills that doted the scene. We looked out into the ocean and looked at each other and smiled. I still had not quite expunged all the evil spirits that floated around us, but we began to talk as we once talked, laugh as we once laughed, and shared in the adventure with our friends as if we discovered these lands for the first time.
There is a different sense of time on the Greek Islands, but especially the smaller ones like Amorgos that can only be reached by ferry. They are so disconnected from the world that life is defined by grumbles of the stomach or the amount of shade that you can find when the sun is at its strongest. The mountains that run through the middle of the island make it dangerous to traverse, but also means that the beaches that you find are majestic, carved into the side of cliffs in a way that renders the shoreline a crystalline turquoise.
The last few days on the island we moved to a new place near the primary port of Katapola. Our elegantly appointed studio came with quick access to the water that we took advantage of in morning dips while the sun was still low. My husband showed off his culinary skills, preparing a five-star meal on a George Foreman grill that we ate with coffee on the veranda as we wondered why we would be anywhere else?
From Amorgos, we returned to Athens and then onward to Budapest. There, we met friends from Beijing who showed us a version of the city that was far from the ruin bars of stag party fame. After a handful of days together, we made our way to the airport, our flights to different destinations. We went through security, finding refuge near his gate. He procured a series of miniature sparkling wine bottles that he snuck into my bag, urging me to have some on my flight or at least share it with our mutual friend that I would see in Oslo. It was his love language, saccharine and protective.
We had weathered larger trials than these months apart, but it didn’t mean that they weren’t obstacles that we had to overcome. I was dealing with dual threat of denial and doubt. I needed him closer in my life. I knew that I couldn’t allow more than a few months to pass before I saw him again. My strength derived from our love. My confidence required it.
China Detour
I returned to the United States for the birth of my younger sister’s second child; I was lucky to be with my older sister for the birth of my nephew a few months before. I thought I would spend a few weeks with them, helping everyone adapt and being on call in case someone needed anything. I assumed I would head back to New York or maybe venture to another place to give it another go. But each time I tried to set up a meeting, the summertime vibes led others to ask if we could meet in September as holidays and short weeks made it hard to find time.
It was around that time that a Chinese headhunter approached me with some roles helping Chinese firms internationalize. I was skeptical about jumping back in the water, but I was feeling antsy. I justified if as good interview practice for when the job market would heat back up. My partner was at first flummoxed, wondering if my operating thesis on life had shifted. It hadn’t changed, but I began to feel my mental muscles dwindling and I felt more worried about doing nothing than picking the wrong thing at that time.
But the interviews confirmed most of my worst fears. Jobs that didn’t list Chinese language ability required interviews in Chinese. Interviews suggested that my role at the company might be different from what I first applied but then latter interviews reversed course. It was messy. It was not going to end well. But one company seemed different. After various interviews, I finally met with the Group VP with whom I had one of the best connections I had had in an interview setting.
Around this time, China ended the last restrictions on travel. With nothing planned and a top up from the Treasury required, I went back to China for the first time since I left that January. I had thoughts to give my clothes time to heal and to be with the one person whose support I needed most.
Surprised that I was in China, the good interview company wondered if I wouldn’t mind a trip to visit their office, expenses fully covered. I felt that if I was going to seriously consider this opportunity, I should get a feel for the office and the people that would be my colleagues, if even the posting would be primarily abroad. The conversation was pleasant, the experience seemed to confirm that I should closely considered the opportunity. I submitted my paperwork for reimbursement with glee. It would take over three months for the reimbursement to be paid, a comedy of errors demonstrating the awful bureaucracy in large Chinese firms.
Things began to deteriorate from there. I was told that I would receive an offer and congratulations was in order, but after weeks of waiting, still no news. I waited to buy my flight back to the US to go to a college friend’s wedding until I had more clarity if I should buy a one way or return flight. When I finally gave up and bought the ticket, the offer was still up in the air.
Over a month later, their offer finally came in. It was a more senior position but a much lower offer than I had earned at a peer company a few years earlier. Was this deflation? I politely declined the offer.
Perhaps I could have negotiated more. But the offer told me something important. I built a niche expertise in helping Chinese companies internationalize that didn’t have a market value. If I was hired purely for my resources or connections after having worked at a Google or an Amazon, I probably could have commanded a higher salary even if I had no experience working at a Chinese company or solving complicated cross-cultural business problems. How could I create a market for China internationalization experts?
I started to write again around that time. My focus was not the novel and the stories that carried me through the summer. It was to give color to my experiences in a way that my resume never could. It was to present how I built my expertise in Chinese tech and why it might be relevant for companies of varying stripes. It became this newsletter.
It has evolved from the initial script to cover more personal content as it seems to be preferred over my technical pieces. It was through here that I discovered how to tell stories, better and better.
I have since developed a very specific goal. To create immersive experiences that pull at you until you can’t believe how much time you spent reading one of my missives as an antidote to content that you gloss over. To lead you to slow down your life to read and to think.
Indeed, content in the future will come in many forms, but we will seek refuge in longer pieces not to give us news or updates but to give us worlds to imagine and language that resonates.
Home Stretch
When I returned to the US, I spent two weeks in the Bay Area trying to get closer to the tech ecosystem. It was clear very quickly that my story worked better there than it had in New York. I had become too stuck by the idea of choosing where I wanted to live that I didn’t realize my story played differently in different towns.
If I had come to San Francisco in April, would I have found something faster? It is not as if anyone really has a great guide for “how to find a job when you are moving back from the second largest market on Earth but whose ecosystem is completely disentangled from the rest of the world?”
My articles about life in China, observations on Chinese tech companies, and these other musings began to take off. Conversations progressed and new leads emerged. A friend who read my work, thought of me when the CPO of a fast growth startup said he was looking for someone creative at growth. I cold messaged the guy, and soon the interview process was about to start. Both sides were quite excited, but then I had to unfortunately pause the process.
Since January, I started flirtations with a company about the possibility of a role. It was a tough time to start chatting, and so I was encouraged to be patient and to have coffee chats with as many people as I could. Throughout the year, I got to know them, and they got to know me. The aspirations of the team matched closely with what I know well, and I felt that I would learn a tremendous amount about how things work in the US from this firm. It was a great fit.
At times throughout the year, I had cancelled interviews or slowed down processes for the minute chance things would work out. But as the year dragged and my skepticism grew, I had written it off as not going to happen. After two months back in the US, traveling from West to East Coasts, I had depleted my coffers once again. I needed to fly back to China, tail between my legs, to regroup and reassess. Though things were in a better place than they were over the summer, I still didn’t have an offer in hand.
Two days before I was set to fly home, the offer came through.
There are many caveats not mentioned, many details I won’t offer at this time. Suffice to say I was eternally grateful that it came, though my first reaction was quite practical. So much about my experience in the US will be defined not by receiving an offer but what am I able to do with such providence.
Together
It was different seeing each other this time. I was different. Our conversations transitioned from the all-consuming job hunt to the enjoyment of living that had once been what we most shared. It was like the days that we first realized we loved each other over a decade before, long chats well past our bedtime. We sat in the stillness of the night, held each other’s hands, and talked excitedly about our days and the dreams we have for our future.
I had originally expected I needed to leave earlier for the US, but by luck, I discovered I could leave after the New Year. It meant that we could spend the 28th together.
There are many dates that form a couple. Our first meet. Our first date. Our first fight. When we made it official. Our first trip. Our first separation. Our second. His proposal. Our wedding party experience. All of these are our own memories, occasionally with a photograph or two, but almost always dates that we hold for ourselves. The only date that exists engraved in the ledgers of life is that of our marriage. 5 years ago, before my sister as officiant and my best friend as witness, we signed our marriage license and moved from a committed couple to a unit bound by a force far greater than both of us combined.
On our worst days, my husband reminds me of the sheer weight of that paper. It stands for something written in ink. It can be retracted through the signing of new papers, but it can never be forgotten. I chuckled at his archconservatism, but I found it endearing. Here we were, two men, probably far greater defenders of this archaic tradition than most folks out there.
When I suggested a year ago that I needed to go on this journey for our family, he didn’t flinch. He trusted me. He trusted the bond that we had built was stronger than Graphene.
Next week, I will leave again. Another year, another separation. When we decided to move to the US, we knew it was a destination without a fixed timeline. There would be milestones we would need to pass before the transition would be complete. The challenges of mixed-nationality couples are not as easy as picking up and going.
But as the next few days pass, as the last few days of this year evaporate into the ether, I will cherish the chance to feel your presence, allow it to bake into my memories and harden in my synapses. I will watch you gallop with glee, seeing you pull away from me, but I will find inside me another gear, one that has been lost for some time. Because on this next lap, it will be my turn to be there to help you adapt to a new life and a new world. I’ll be ready to welcome you.
Thank you, Keith, for your thoughtful writing and examination of your relationship and commitment to your husband. As a gay man who worked in China for 18+ years (commuting from SFO) with a husband left at home, I understand your challenges somewhat. Keep writing, sir. I look forward to hearing more of your story.
Resonant writing, Keith. I found your descriptions of building a niche expertise in helping Chinese companies & trying to figure out what the market value of that is, to the details of reuniting & reconnecting during a long-distance relationship deeply relatable to my own experience, and so thoughtfully expressed.