Homes I've Had: Amber Garden, Carmina Place, & Ching Sau Lane

I moved around a lot growing up, and lived in a lot of different houses; I started thinking about them recently, and what they all meant to me. If I were slightly more organized, I'd be doing this chronologically, but I guess I didn't really think that through, and I started with 1995. So I guess I'm not doing this chronologically.

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Amber Garden, 1987

For the first few weeks that we live in Hong Kong, our home is the Hilton Hotel. I eat room service in my school uniform and read Archie comics by the pool, and just as that starts to feel normal, we move into Amber Garden, a serviced apartment right in the middle of the city, a temporary base. My memories of Amber Garden are few, distilled to a cache of basic facts: my bedroom has twin beds. The dining room table is round. The building is tall, and our balcony narrow. You can stand on it at dusk and look out across Hong Kong, the people scurrying around like ants.

Carmina Place, 1987-1992

Before we move to Carmina Place, we pore over brochures for it. It's a brand-new complex, gleaming white; no-one has swung on the swings or swum in the pool. We are among the first to move in and at night the building is dark, just a handful of apartments lit up like a gap-toothed smile. But Carmina Place fills with young expat families like ours, and soon a community forms, the mothers pushing swings on the astroturfed playground, the dads alighting from taxis in the humid evenings, passing each other in the lobby as they come home from work. Whole gangs of kids fill the hallways on Halloween, the elevators jammed with ghosts in sheets, someone in her mother's heels. There are parties and cookouts, tennis tournaments, communal bulletin boards. Someone kisses someone else in the fitness room on a dare. We are the Burnses in 3C and we know everyone else this way: the Morgans in 9D, the Wilsons in 13A. Every Christmas morning, the courtyard is a milling mass of children on new rollerskates. When we move out, we are one of the last families to leave.

Ching Sau Lane, 1992-1994

Ching Sau Lane is a house, white with an orangey-red roof, further out from the center of Hong Kong. We have been used to living on top of each other and here we are in a cul-de-sac, a pool to ourselves, a garage. We have stairs now, three narrow floors of them, a roof deck, a gate, and our family has swelled from four to six. I have been at boarding school a year by the time we move in to Ching Sau Lane. Like a houseguest, I visit only a few times a year.