JustAGuyinHK

My first job out of university was working for a Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) named John Hastings. I wrote speeches, letters, press releases, emails and other small things. I didn’t learn anything other than that everything I wrote was bad, everything I did was wrong, but I was cheap, so they kept me. I never learned and didn’t grow. I would quit and go to school for a year, but I started volunteering at a different MPP’s office.

My boss there was different. He taught me how things worked – the reason why we sent out mailers, and the reason why we do things in the legislature to collect data on voters in a way that allows us to learn more about them and adjust. I would spend more and more time in the MPP’s office than I did in school. There was an election in Ontario in 1999, where I volunteered, and we won the seat and our political party won government. I would continue to learn and grow until I took a job at a different MPP as their Senior Advisor.

I applied what I learned and continued to grow. Working with my MPP, we passed legislation to strengthen the province's drinking and driving laws. I moved to different offices and learned with each move. It was amazing until stress arose. The polling showed the government would lose the next election, and I would be out of a job. For someone in politics, the only viable route is into government/public relations, or to remain in politics; however, the job is challenging, and the pay is not as good as in the private sector. I wanted to see the world, so I took a job as a teacher in Korea, which eventually led me here to Hong Kong.

Whenever I am back in Toronto, I always walk around Queen’s Park and wonder ‘what if?’ What if I stayed in politics, or if I only went to Korea for a year and returned, perhaps working in Ottawa when my party regained power there, or even back in Queen’s Park many years later, where my party also regained power? A lot of the regret is the time away from my mother and my father, who passed away in 2019. I wonder if my life would have been more settled earlier – would I be married in my 30s rather than dating someone long-term in my 50s?

I love my life in Hong Kong. I have travelled around the world and seen things I would never have seen if I had lived in Canada. I like to think I have helped thousands of students as their teacher and a few as their counsellor. There have been struggles abroad, but I have learned to accept who I am more so in the past decade than at any other time in my life. I have been lucky to find love a few times, only to lose it and find it again.

Still, every time I am in and around this building, what if?