Kai Peter Chang, works at TED
I'll let you in on a little secret.
Every story in the world has a happy ending. It's just a matter of choosing the right moment to end the tale.
Contrawise, on a long enough time horizon, every story ends in tragedy.
Sometimes, the distance between tragedy and triumph is a matter of minutes. Sometimes it's measured in decades.
In the Autumn of 1999, the measure for me was a torrid and intoxicating nine months.
If I could choose the beginning and ending of this story, it would go something like this:
Once upon a time, I met a gorgeous, charismatic actress from Hong Kong at a hotel lobby in San Francisco, and she fell in love with me, and I with her.
Stop the story right there, freeze it in time, and it's tale of an against-all-odds romance that blossomed from a chance encounter that ended in bliss.
But alas, stories in the real world have a way of developing lives of their own, and rarely does fate cooperate with the perfect tale of happily ever after.
So I suppose I should back up and and explain.
Have you ever had the experience of getting a taste of a life light-years above your social class/station?
Perhaps it's being a guest at an extravagant $200,000 wedding thrown by a distant relative you barely know. All you can do is marvel at the gorgeous decor and decadent food you can never afford on your own.
Perhaps it's a wealthy uncle/friend-of-a-friend who inexplicably allowed you take his $120,000 sports car for a spin around the neighborhood. All you can do is pray you don't crash the car, or pop the clutch and embarrass yourself.
Perhaps you were summoned to an urgent work meeting that requires your presence thousands of miles away, and your employer authorized you to fly on the company jet (ordinarily reserved for its top executives). All you can do is fantasize about the day you're powerful/rich enough to use a private jet for all your travel.
TL;DR: it's like that - but involving the deepest part of sexuality and romance.
======================
As I touched on in my answer to Relationships: What's it like to have a sugar daddy/sugar momma? a number of years ago, I dated someone substantially "out of my league" for almost a year.
Her: a former Miss Hong Kong pageant winner/finalist (take your pick), B-list actress/model/TVB television personality. In her prime, she was courted and pursued by the super-Alpha kings of Hong Kong: A-list movie stars, million-record-selling musicians, property tycoons, CEOs and power brokers at the apex of Hong Kong society.
(not my ex. Just a visual representation of another MHK of equivalent beauty)
Me: At the time, a Mergers & Acquisitions Analyst at an investment-banking firm - an easily-replacable cog in a financial behemoth, four years her junior. During that period, I commanded a low five-digit net worth, and no status to speak of. A nobody.
She told me afterward that she gave me her number because she was amused by the fact that I clearly didn't recognize her; in Hong Kong, the only strangers who approach her are autograph-seekers and those who want to pose with her for a photo and I was utterly oblivious to her stature when I was flirting with her.
It is also helpful to note that during this time, I was at still in first blush of youth - a few years out of college, filled with brazen and unrealistic cocky ambition of what I can accomplish, arrogant to the point of delusion, and impervious to feedback/advice.
I was also insecure as hell, and in complete denial about it.
With all that backdrop, the question was how did it feel as the "lesser" partner?
It was flattering, thrilling and unnerving all at once.
On a visceral, competitive, cave-man level, it was thrilling to know that some of the most powerful, charismatic and wealthy men of Hong Kong desired her and courted her ... yet she refused their attentions; I was the one she invited to her bed when she craved the touch of a man, in her most vulnerable moments.
Dating far above my station gave me a glimpse of the life that exists at a completely different strata of society. Growing up a son of broke-ass immigrant parents and attending public schools my entire life surrounded by others of modest immigrant socioeconomic background, the first thing that stood out was her nearly-unlimited access to favors and accouterments of her elevated station.
When you socialize with people who own spare yachts, faraway luxury properties and infrequently-used personal jets, you can cobble together an impromptu exotic vacation with a few phone calls. It will end up costing you little more than the price of a full tank of jet/yacht fuel and the promise of reciprocity of access to your own toys/properties at some unspecified future date.
I, of course, had nothing to offer in these types of trades - and that knowledge was a source of gnawing insecurity; while I was stupidly confident that I was just a few years/career moves away from joining the company of Hong Kong aristocracy on my own, my immediate financial circumstances were far more modest and I flew Coach to visit her, while she flew First Class or via private jet to rendezvous with me.
The clandestine nature of our relationship (officially, she was the spoken-for consort of a powerful Hong Kong property tycoon two decades her senior and her lifestyle was bankrolled by his largesse) added a further element of illicit excitement; it was thrilling to be checking into hotels under fake names, arriving to locations at staggered times to avoid being seen together in public.
In retrospect, I now understand what she meant when, right before the first time we slept together, she whispered in my ear "Please don't fall in love with me."
She was wiser and more pragmatic than I; she knew, better than I did at the time, the ephemeral nature of our doomed fling. She was offering me her body, but she couldn't offer me her heart.
It was a glorious and intense as I could have fantasized, and she surrendered her body to me with enthusiasm.
After several months of our relationship - which consisted writing letters to each other (she has a gorgeous, calligraphic handwriting and a wry playful prose that was a delight to read) and time-zone-spanning international phone calls, interspersed with week-long face-to-face rendezvous where we exhausted ourselves in hotel rooms in various locations along the Pacific rim, she tearfully confessed "Do you remember what I said to you that first night? I'm having a hard time following my own advice."
It was as close as she could get to tell me she loved me, but it was clear that whatever we had would end someday.
I will be walking one day
Down a street far away
And see a face in the crowd and smile
Knowing how you made me laugh
Hearing sweet echoes of you from the past
I will remember you
Look in my eyes while you're near
Tell me what's happening here
See that I don't want to say goodbye
Our love is frozen in time
I'll be your champion and you will be mine
I will remember
I will remember you
Every story in the world has a happy ending. It's just a matter of choosing the right moment to end the tale.
Contrawise, on a long enough time horizon, every story ends in tragedy.
Sometimes, the distance between tragedy and triumph is a matter of minutes. Sometimes it's measured in decades.
In the Autumn of 1999, the measure for me was a torrid and intoxicating nine months.
If I could choose the beginning and ending of this story, it would go something like this:
Once upon a time, I met a gorgeous, charismatic actress from Hong Kong at a hotel lobby in San Francisco, and she fell in love with me, and I with her.
Stop the story right there, freeze it in time, and it's tale of an against-all-odds romance that blossomed from a chance encounter that ended in bliss.
But alas, stories in the real world have a way of developing lives of their own, and rarely does fate cooperate with the perfect tale of happily ever after.
So I suppose I should back up and and explain.
Have you ever had the experience of getting a taste of a life light-years above your social class/station?
Perhaps it's being a guest at an extravagant $200,000 wedding thrown by a distant relative you barely know. All you can do is marvel at the gorgeous decor and decadent food you can never afford on your own.
Perhaps it's a wealthy uncle/friend-of-a-friend who inexplicably allowed you take his $120,000 sports car for a spin around the neighborhood. All you can do is pray you don't crash the car, or pop the clutch and embarrass yourself.
Perhaps you were summoned to an urgent work meeting that requires your presence thousands of miles away, and your employer authorized you to fly on the company jet (ordinarily reserved for its top executives). All you can do is fantasize about the day you're powerful/rich enough to use a private jet for all your travel.
TL;DR: it's like that - but involving the deepest part of sexuality and romance.
======================
As I touched on in my answer to Relationships: What's it like to have a sugar daddy/sugar momma? a number of years ago, I dated someone substantially "out of my league" for almost a year.
Her: a former Miss Hong Kong pageant winner/finalist (take your pick), B-list actress/model/TVB television personality. In her prime, she was courted and pursued by the super-Alpha kings of Hong Kong: A-list movie stars, million-record-selling musicians, property tycoons, CEOs and power brokers at the apex of Hong Kong society.
Me: At the time, a Mergers & Acquisitions Analyst at an investment-banking firm - an easily-replacable cog in a financial behemoth, four years her junior. During that period, I commanded a low five-digit net worth, and no status to speak of. A nobody.
She told me afterward that she gave me her number because she was amused by the fact that I clearly didn't recognize her; in Hong Kong, the only strangers who approach her are autograph-seekers and those who want to pose with her for a photo and I was utterly oblivious to her stature when I was flirting with her.
It is also helpful to note that during this time, I was at still in first blush of youth - a few years out of college, filled with brazen and unrealistic cocky ambition of what I can accomplish, arrogant to the point of delusion, and impervious to feedback/advice.
I was also insecure as hell, and in complete denial about it.
With all that backdrop, the question was how did it feel as the "lesser" partner?
It was flattering, thrilling and unnerving all at once.
On a visceral, competitive, cave-man level, it was thrilling to know that some of the most powerful, charismatic and wealthy men of Hong Kong desired her and courted her ... yet she refused their attentions; I was the one she invited to her bed when she craved the touch of a man, in her most vulnerable moments.
Dating far above my station gave me a glimpse of the life that exists at a completely different strata of society. Growing up a son of broke-ass immigrant parents and attending public schools my entire life surrounded by others of modest immigrant socioeconomic background, the first thing that stood out was her nearly-unlimited access to favors and accouterments of her elevated station.
When you socialize with people who own spare yachts, faraway luxury properties and infrequently-used personal jets, you can cobble together an impromptu exotic vacation with a few phone calls. It will end up costing you little more than the price of a full tank of jet/yacht fuel and the promise of reciprocity of access to your own toys/properties at some unspecified future date.
I, of course, had nothing to offer in these types of trades - and that knowledge was a source of gnawing insecurity; while I was stupidly confident that I was just a few years/career moves away from joining the company of Hong Kong aristocracy on my own, my immediate financial circumstances were far more modest and I flew Coach to visit her, while she flew First Class or via private jet to rendezvous with me.
The clandestine nature of our relationship (officially, she was the spoken-for consort of a powerful Hong Kong property tycoon two decades her senior and her lifestyle was bankrolled by his largesse) added a further element of illicit excitement; it was thrilling to be checking into hotels under fake names, arriving to locations at staggered times to avoid being seen together in public.
In retrospect, I now understand what she meant when, right before the first time we slept together, she whispered in my ear "Please don't fall in love with me."
She was wiser and more pragmatic than I; she knew, better than I did at the time, the ephemeral nature of our doomed fling. She was offering me her body, but she couldn't offer me her heart.
It was a glorious and intense as I could have fantasized, and she surrendered her body to me with enthusiasm.
After several months of our relationship - which consisted writing letters to each other (she has a gorgeous, calligraphic handwriting and a wry playful prose that was a delight to read) and time-zone-spanning international phone calls, interspersed with week-long face-to-face rendezvous where we exhausted ourselves in hotel rooms in various locations along the Pacific rim, she tearfully confessed "Do you remember what I said to you that first night? I'm having a hard time following my own advice."
It was as close as she could get to tell me she loved me, but it was clear that whatever we had would end someday.
I will be walking one day
Down a street far away
And see a face in the crowd and smile
Knowing how you made me laugh
Hearing sweet echoes of you from the past
I will remember you
Look in my eyes while you're near
Tell me what's happening here
See that I don't want to say goodbye
Our love is frozen in time
I'll be your champion and you will be mine
I will remember
I will remember you
About the Author
Kai Peter Chang
張敦楷 First of his Name, Warden of OaklandWorks at TED
Studied at University of California, San Diego
Lives in Oakland, CA2010-present
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