I would say later that I didn't know what I was thinking, but I did it deliberately and with ease and a sort of self-loathing. In Hong Kong, the long term trekkers watch the waves of expats come and go and they say the same thing of all of them and of themselves: That an expat comes because he is escaping from something, or he is running toward something. I was running toward nothing--an office job as an intern at an American magazine that paid $1800 dollars a month. But I was running away from something--my fear of a linear life. I had gotten a hint of a job offer in Washington D.C. But the idea of returning to that city and progressing through the same narrow sidewalks I had treaded on so many sad childhood walks back home, to a dark suburban house where the TV was playing, was terrible to me.

So it makes sense, then, that the first apartment I would ever live in, would ever really call my own, would be what it ended up being--as if I sought it for its very strangeness, though at the time, the ad I answered was only something like this: "Small room, top floor apartment, light-filled."