My two co-workers and I had lunch yesterday with our former head of APAC, the person who recruited me here 10 years ago. When she was asking about how is it with the new owner/parent company, all of our reactions were like this 😑.

Then we brought her to the new office and she spoke with some of the people who had worked with her and flew to HK for this week. The chats with them lasted for 1.5 hrs. After that, she was like, “none of the people I spoke with was happy.”

“What happened?! We were so happy in Bangkok,” she lamented, pertaining to the bureau chief meeting we had in 2019.

Shit happens all the time post-merger and acquisition.

Ironic.

She was happy where she is right now. After her short stint at a global PR firm (PR is not for everybody, she said), she decided to take up master in finance studies full-time. She said learning again is so exciting. Having more time for hobbies “is beautiful” and she is now pursuing baking and bird-watching. Now that the pool is open in their building, she now has the time to swim with her kids.

“I’ve got my life back,” she gushed.

I felt a twinge of envy. It’s nice to have somebody else in the family as the breadwinner. It’s nice to be able to get out of the rat race. I want to have a life outside this mess of a job.

She said she heard that the our owner is under investigation by xxx government because it was already highly leveraged when it was doing its shopping spree—and we were one of those buys. It kept on borrowing still, then slashed and burned and left the acquisitions down to the barebones. We were hardly recognizable from the companies we once were.

Now it is shopping again and kept borrowing…which may have prompted shareholders or creditors (or whoever) to alert regulators.

Stories like that seldom end well. How to deleverage? You do fire sales and the people who are directly under this chaos get the shorter end of the stick in these circumstances.

My bosses are all under pressure from above, which redounded to me. This is all too much.

I want my life back, too.

---

I tried fixing it but…I was able to tone down the blueness of the clouds since I had in my kit a tube of Holbein gouache but the foreground couldn’t be made less bright because I only had watercolors with me. Watercolors could not subdue gouache so I would have to wait until I come home.

I don’t want to work today but I have a pending story still in editing hell. I need to have this published today.

---

No more fog today. It helps that it’s sunny and clear because the meetings I had are all heavy. It drained me. The meeting I had with our APAC boss is not as bad as I thought it would be but it’s still…it sapped the life out of me.

My public speaking training, on the other hand, was lovely. My trainor is  very helpful and recognized my theater background that gave me good stage presence, confidence, and voice control. This same theater training was also the cause of some the things that detract me from being the best public speaker = my tendency to make myself “big” on stage. Hand gestures that go outside the “center of openness” (draw a circle around my torso, from my shoulders to the waist area), especially the high gestures, are a result of my training in theater-in-the-round. That is, the need to be seen by the people on the balcony. But in conferences, there is no orchestra nor balcony.

There are more pointers that are very useful. He said when he started doing this training for corporates, my trainor said he also was “big” but eventually unlearned it. He assured me I can unlearn it as well and be patient with myself as it takes time.

He did note that I have this tendency to lean on my left. I said I have scoliosis, so my right hip is higher than my left so I need to lean on that side to compensate for my uneven/S-curve spine. Then he said, nothing we can do about it, but at least I’m aware of that.

---

So here I am again, back to chasing people. Doing my Miss Universe thing in a conference.

Tired.

I still have a meeting in 30 mins here at the hotel lobby after a successful Q&A with an investor group in Vietnam.

Do I still have the energy to do this? Just this afternoon, one of my sources sent me an RSVP for coffee next month in Singapore. I still have two pending meetings there, which I have yet to set the date and time for. Still setting up more meetings.

I’m still at odds with myself over this, regarding my love-hate relationship for this job. I just finished a draft of a story this morning, still in editing limbo but at least I have a sense of accomplishment today. I dread my one-on-one session with my APAC head tomorrow though. I don’t know what to expect but at least this time I won’t feel trapped anymore because whatever happens, I know I have a plan.

---

Well umm, I did get two stories from that event but I’m tired. I went back to the hotel and dropped off my heavier stuff and joined co-workers for some Southeast Asian food.

The mango sticky rice from the Thai restaurant in my hometown was better than what I got here tonight.

After dinner, my co-workers and I went straight to a tiny bar that had an open-mic standup comedy. It was to support another co-worker who was doing the stand-up show.

It pains me that I had paid HKD 80 (PHP 570) for just one pint of this. 🫠 I won’t do it again.

I can barely see the sea. It was foggy all day and a bit chilly when we went out for dinner. Baguio-level chilly.

We had the public speaking workshop in the morning and in the afternoon was just all about collab with colleagues on stories. Time flew so fast and I just found myself wrapping up a draft at 6 pm.

Then it was Cantonese food night!

One of the claypot rice dishes is bullfrog. My co-workers thought I would be squeamish but I told them I already tried crocodile in Palawan  Now it’s my co-workers’ turn to be squeamish.

One of then asked if these crocs were caught in rivers or in the sea. I said, they have crocodile farms for harvesting. “Whuuuut?!” she was clearly scandalized. “Yeah, they harvest crocs for meat and leather,” I said.

Now it sounds more icky than cooking bullfrogs in soy sauce.

My co-workers showed me how they wash the cups and utensils with hot tea in a bowl.

They said it’s just tradition, no special meaning to it. I guess their ancestors did it more for disinfection because the tea was piping hot.

Two of my co-workers from mainland China asked me about Filipinos’ perception of mainland Chinese. I tried to be evasive because I told them it’s not pretty. They insisted but I didn’t want to play into their bait. One of them sounded ultra-nationalist. I said, this conversation is not going to end well so let’s put it this way: The Scarborough shoal is just about 198 km (123 mi) west of Subic Bay—mainland Luzon. It’s within Philippines EEZ and The Hague already ruled on it. You have to understand why Filipinos don’t like mainlanders.

I ended it and changed the subject by talking about crocodiles. And snakes being gutted in a public market in Taipei, which I couldn’t stand together with stinky tofu. I said they couldn’t pay me to try those.

---

It took me 5 years because illnesses kept me from flying back to Hong Kong. First was Covid (2020-2022) and then Twin A was in the hospital last year so I cancelled all travel until October. Again I was asked to come back in November but I was iffy about it since my daughters just had amoebiasis, as well as my cats.

The last time I was here was Feb 2019, at the tailend of the spring festival/Lunar New Year celebrations. Timed it for Valentine’s Day and it was just that J needed to get out of the country for visa purposes. I created reasons to fly out here so he didn’t have to pay for hotel and food. I think we used my miles to keep the costs down.

Ah, the stupid things I did…

I overestimated my arrival at the airport this morning because I anticipated a long queue at ParkNFly. I also drove fast—it just took me an hour to get there.

When I checked in my baggage, the guy at the Cathay Pacific desk told me he can move me to the earlier flight since there was plenty of room and I could still make it. I did ask Immigrations to bypass the queue because I was bumped up to the earlier flight and it was already 20 mins before boarding.

I did make it, 10 mins before boarding. 🫠 I initially planned to sleep but the movie selection was too good to pass up.

I encountered this movie again, which was soul-crushing when I watched it in 2009 I think.

I remember being so heartbroken by this movie that I couldn’t help myself from blogging about it at 4 am. It really hurt me to the core.

Meanwhile, I chose Oppenheimer because I missed it in the theaters.

I was only halfway through the movie when plane passengers started to disembark. I’ll just finish this en route back to Manila on Saturday.

To make my life easier, I booked Klook online for Octopus card + 4G SIM. I also booked discounted rountrip Airport Express via my Cathay Pacific booking. The last time I was here, we had to search for Octopus cards, etc.

I’m not exactly sure whether this practice of camping out on streets and walkways was caused by the government’s effort to drive out people and keep them from assembling in public spaces like Victoria Park. Now Filipino domestic workers have nowhere to go to spend their day off. It’s costly to hang out in malls and every HKD counts—they have families to feed back home. I feel sad for them; they can’t have some dignity even on their days off, which are supposed to be a respite from the drudgery of everyday life as a servant.

---

I went to Mongkok for skincare shopping because that’s what my girls had been asking for since we don’t have Sasa in Manila. They’re very concerned about their pimples and frizzy hair (they took after their dad). I didn’t have that kind of problem when I was their age because I never had pimple breakouts and my hair was the super straight kind that I inherited from my Chinese forebears.

After Mongkok, I took a really hot bath because my plantar fasciitis was killing me. Once I entered my room, I never left.

I am just a frustrated artist who paints for therapy. My daughter, Twin A, on the other hand, has talent.

She sometimes disappears and comes back when the light is gone. She goes out to draw. She does this regularly. This is the best environment for her to pursue such hobbies because she can do her own thing without me having to drive her while still being safe.

She wanted to buy a drawing tablet with her savings so she can make digital art. She is still weighing her options.  I had enrolled her in an art workshop but she wasn’t happy with it. I think we need to go to Manila for more advanced ones.

Ah I need to pack since I would have to drive myself to the airport at 2:30 am tomorrow.

---

Meanwhile, my other daughter is getting ready to play football, a sport I have loved since high school and loving still from afar.