Heading Off, Heading Home, and Heading Onwards

TL;DR:

• I left Vancouver
• I returned to Hong Kong
• I wrote a bit about my decision to head to grad school

Life Update

After almost six years of living there, I bid farewell to Vancouver for what will likely be the last time in quite a while on the 23rd. While I do have plenty of thoughts on my departure, I’ve already said most of them in previous posts, so you won’t hear me talk much about it this week. That said, I’ll try and include a Reflection about my decision to leave in this post to contextuatize things a bit.

Since school doesn’t start in Manchester until mid-September, my first stop for now is my home of Hong Kong, where I landed on the 25th. This was after skipping the 24th almost entirely, which I accomplished by crossing the International Date Line during my trans-Pacific flight. I Hong Kong, I’ll mainly be visiting family and indulging myself, though I headed to Macau on the 28th to visit more family, where I’ll be staying for a few days before returning to Hong Kong.

As a bit of an apology for a shorter entry this week, have some snapshots from Hong Kong and Macau. My personal favourite are the chips in monochrome packaging I found sitting in an arcade claw machine, their lack of colour a byproduct of Japan’s naphtha shortage due to the Iran war. There’s also the Chinese version of Heated Rivalry I found in a bookstore, where it was apparently both a bestseller and had a ‘parental warning’ on it (could these two things be related, perhaps?). Canadian soft power at work, everyone.

Reflections

Even after gaining an offer to study at the Royal Northern College of Music, I sometimes still ask myself why I chose to go down such a challenging path, moving across continents yet again to pursue further studies. The short answer is that my new environment will be one of the best crucibles I can ask for to develop my talents, and hopefully make good progress on realizing my ambitions. The long answer is… a bit more complicated.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I never intended to be a music student, much less go down the path of a performer. Instead, the career I dedicated myself to pursuing for most of high school was engineering, since it appeared to offer better job prospects at the time (mind you, this was before the rise of generative AI). That didn’t mean I would give up music entirely; it would just be something I’d pursue as a simple hobby, free from the pressures of needing to make a living from it. While I did initially start university as an engineering student, and even got good grades, I quickly discovered that it wasn’t for me. Long story short, I then transferred schools and programmes, and the rest is history.

One of the first steps of this process involved choosing whether I would be a performance, education, or general studies major. Since the requirements for being a performance major were the most demanding, I put it as my first choice (and general studies as my second), reasoning that it would be easier to switch out from this position if I found it not to my liking. In a way, this sums up my reason for aiming high at almost every opportunity: if said venture pans out, I’d be one step closer to achieving my ambitions; if not, I’d at least get an idea of the level I was at, and either focus on improving myself or pivot to other goals entirely.

With music schools in the UK being some of the world’s most renowned, I decided to shoot my shot and apply for a few, especially since my other main option of US schools wasn’t tenable for obvious reasons. Despite knowing that it would be a bit of a long shot, I decided to try anyways, and I now have undeniable proof of how far I’ve come as a musician. Still, I know this is just the beginning of my next journey, and a lot can change over the course of two years, but I now have a better idea of what I can do and how much I can still hope to achieve.