We went to Garryvoe beach today during a rare Irish heat wave in early June. The sea water was quite warm but a cold breeze cut through us from the sea despite the brilliance of the sun and the cloudless blue skies. I happened to have finished reading a book called The Sea the night before and I was thinking over all the possible connections between memory and the sea as I reflected back on the beach visit. I had my face and nose lathered with sun screen and I wore a wide-brimmed hat as I held my son’s hand and walked him to the sea and the oncoming waves. He was holding a bucket of “beautiful stones” he’d collected from the shore. I remembered holding him up to the window of the Marco Polo on the night before we left staring across another sea saying Hong Kong Island over and over willing him to remember but now he recalls nothing. He was reluctant to go down to the waves and leave his mother alone up by the cars shivering under a fleece and a jacket with a towel wrapped around her shoulders as she sat on a blanket by the big boulders in front of the baking parked cars. I looked back up the shore occasionally and when my eyes found her I wondered would she ever be entirely comfortable in this climate. I remembered the anniversary we had today and the niggling reminder about writing something. Why should I do it? What’s the point? I’m away from it all now? But then another voice responded later that day. You’re never completely removed from it. Don’t you still think about your student in prison at least once a week? When they ask. When colleagues bring newspaper articles about Hong Kong. Don’t you flinch in a kind of rage when you accidentally surf to stories about new arrests on this day? And isn’t the image of your Hong Kong wife shivering on a beach in an Irish heat wave saying something to you about displacement? Don’t you feel it through her sometimes when you really stop and reflect. And you don’t stop and reflect on how she must be feeling that much. And then later on the day when you really tried to write something and you used your imagination and you felt the old muscle memory creaking into gear as you thought about the origins of this displacement and you let yourself go once again with all the creativity that city once allowed you and you remembered the sounds and the voices and the poets and the teachers you worked with and the community spirit you shared because of a belief in how young people should be allowed to be and with your imagination still only beginning to take flight you connected the image of your wife shivering in a certain kind of voluntary displacement on a windswept Irish beach with the displacement of all of those on the day we were asked to remember. Maybe one can trace a line in the sand between the two memories. Maybe it is not too contrived to do so. Especially when doing so still brings some of the old voices, the old faces back together in a collective effort online to remind ourselves despite all the calls on our time in our new lives why we need to sometimes reflect on days that once brought us together around shared hopes.
How to cite: O’Sullivan, Michael. “Just Another Day: Michael O’Sullivan.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/another-day-michael.
Michael O’Sullivan is a research associate and student counsellor at St Patrick’s College in Ireland. He has published more than ten books, including Academic Barbarism: Universities and Inequality and Cloneliness: On the Reproduction of Loneliness. He has also published poems in Cha, Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine 聲韻詩刊, Desde Hong Kong: Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz, Quixotica: Poems East of La Mancha, Asian Signature, and a personal essay in PEN Hong Kong‘s anthology, Hong Kong 20/20: Reflections on a Borrowed Place. He worked in Hong Kong for many years and has published Lockdown Lovers, a novel set in the city. A former Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Michael is a founding co-editor of Hong Kong Studies, the first peer-review and open access academic journal devoted entirely to the scholarly inquiry of Hong Kong. [Michael O’Sullivan and chajournal.blog.] [Cha staff]
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