Today – May 12 – I’ve been to the gym for the first time in months. Hong Kong is slowly emerging from its coronavirus restrictions. We’ve never been in lockdown, but we all pretty much took matters into our own hands. A protest forced the government to shut our borders and since then we’ve had strict quarantine, self-isolation, virus testing and temperature-taking rules.

We’ve had four deaths from the virus. In the meantime I watch agog as my home country, the UK, struggles to impose order on the chaos the virus brought. Eventually, it went into lockdown. Yesterday it even suggested wearing masks on public transport. You can still go to shops without having your temperature taken. The over-thinking and inability to learn from other countries has left me speechless. The need to be told what to do, while simultaneously shooting suggestions down in flames, has irritated me. The negativity in the media has depressed me.

The protests forced me to understand that Hong Kong isn’t my home. The peaceful One Million and Two Million marches on the streets of Hong Kong seem a lifetime ago; last autumn they gave way to small protest groups playing cat and mouse with the police all over the city. Tear gas, water cannons, fires, Molotov cocktails, rubber bullets, live rounds of fire, baton beatings, kickings, and untold damage to the transport system and the city’s top universities followed. We grew used to the news getting worse and worse.

Troubled times bring clarity.

It takes several months when you first move abroad to realise that real life is still going on around you. You’re the new girl or boy on the block and everything is an exciting mystery. Then routine settles in, and it dawns on you that you’re the foreigner on the block. For me, being an expat for the past 12 years has largely been about squaring who you are with where you have chosen to live.

The big difference between me and most Hongkongers? I hold a British passport and can leave here tomorrow and have somewhere to go. I don’t say that with pride, it is just a fact. I live in Hong Kong but it’s not technically my home. I apologise if that sounds brutal.

As I said, troubled times bring clarity.

As a Brit, if you live away from the UK for 15 years you lose the right to vote. This week I have voted by post for the upcoming British General Election, and that too has concentrated my mind about how long we’ve been abroad. I’ve been away for the entire Brexit saga.

I voted in the EU referendum three years ago and am told my face turned ashen when the result was announced. I was so out of touch that I’d assumed the UK would vote to stay in Europe. In my home county of Kent, which is spitting distance from France, 70 per cent voted to leave. I suddenly felt not only very un-English but also un-Kentish for the first time in my life. That feeling has still not left.

Troubled times bring clarity, which isn’t always welcome.

We’d lived in Dubai for a year when the financial crash struck in 2008. We were pretty much at home there by then, but we were never high-rolling Brits out to make our fortune. We were both on modest salaries on a local newspaper and considering buying a house.

Then the dramas began. People lost their jobs and had 30 days to leave the country. Cars were dumped, keys in the ignition, as expats fled the country to escape Dubai’s strict debtors’ laws. About half of the enormous building projects in the emirate stopped overnight.

Thousands of labourers, mostly Indians, were sent home, many in debt to the agencies that had brought them to Dubai. Change was everywhere. For me, it was never the “glittering metropolis to dustbowl” story told by foreign media, but then I lived there. We were deluged with details of hundreds of properties flooding the market.

Just before the crash, we had viewed a shoebox in a popular development. The owner’s brother greeted us. “You can buy his car and everything you see,” he told us when we remarked that a covered vehicle was gathering dust in the driveway. He’d fled, obviously, but still wanted as much for his tiny house as we’d paid for our more substantial home in England. We skedaddled, backed off from buying anything in Dubai, and have never discussed buying property abroad since.

Troubled times bring clarity.

I was living in Beijing when the pollution became so bad that China was put on red alert. Car travel was restricted, schools closed, children weren’t allowed out on the streets, and everyone got the “low mood” that comes with the choking smell and permanent night-time of heavy pollution.

The pollution reading at my office desk was so high that I worry to this day what the permanent damage to me will be, if any. I was just about to leave China to join Colin who had taken up a new job in Hong Kong. We were expats on the move and although I was happy to leave the pollution behind, for the first time I wondered how many more moves I had in me.

Troubled times bring clarity, which isn’t always welcome.

Wherever you live, at home or abroad, you will have health issues. In Dubai, Colin had a health scare that turned out to be dodgy test results leading to a false alarm. The country follows Sharia Law, so we made our possessions Sharia-compliant (put them in my name) amid stories of widows who couldn’t get access to what the law deemed to be their husband’s assets. We’ve had more X-rays in various countries than I deem safe or healthy, but if that’s what is required for your work/residency visa, it’s what you do.

It is now second nature to go to the doctor with a credit card, and when I needed surgery here in Hong Kong two years ago, the bill (paid by Colin’s health insurance) was a whopping £20,000. We’ve been treated by excellent doctors, and by charlatans. The have-nots have almost no access to decent healthcare in most places we’ve lived, and keeping the National Health Service at home is even more of a no-brainer to me than it’s ever been.

Troubled times when you’re far from home bring clarity.

And so we come to the weather. From 56C registering on my dashboard in Dubai one lunchtime, to the constantly changing “20 Seasons” of weather in China, our most extreme experience was living through Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018. Winds up to 250kph made this the most severe storm Hong Kong had suffered since records began.

Thousands of trees were uprooted, windows blew out of smart office blocks, bits fell off buildings everywhere, and 154 people died across the region. I’d watched plate glass windows being taped over for days and then came the day, September 16, when the streets emptied and buildings rocked. I worked on the podium floor of our apartment block, usually a quiet haven. As the day wore on, against an endless wailing of emergency vehicles, it filled with people from high floors feeling queasy as their home swayed on its foundations – which is how they survive in these conditions.

The mopping up was done with speed; a year later and the city’s gardeners have planted new trees and landscaped devastated areas. I felt scared all the time. Others crept outdoors for the adventure. I thought they had a death wish.

Troubled times sometimes bring clarity to what you miss about home.

Top photo: An early protest in Hong Kong’s Central district.

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