Uncertified Fear

One of my biggest, yet perhaps unwarranted, fears in life is dealing with administrative friction, like losing a passport, filing the wrong tax documents, or getting stuck at the security checkpoint, etc. One with a cool head may think it is so silly to freak out over making a mistake in the paperwork, because if we take a bird’s-eye view of all these, they are just procedures, and the hiccups will eventually be resolved. I get the point, but I still feel super nervous each time I have to deal with the bureaucracy. Having lived in four countries and seven cities across three continents, I have already accumulated an unusual amount of hiccup experiences like that. Yet, quantity doesn’t help. I am still not good at it. Or, I am still not good at trusting administrative procedures.

Among the many big and small scary hiccups I can share with you, this one is fairly significant, as no other story can tell you how deeply the fear of bureaucracy runs in my blood. I was 20 or 21, and that date was exactly my birthday. I was an exchange student at Charles University in Prague and traveled to Istanbul alone. Like many other tourists in Istanbul, I went to one of the city’s bazaars. It was about 7 pm, dinner time. Outside the bazaar in the heavy rain, while I was taking the stairs down, someone out of nowhere pulled my shoulder bag away. I slipped and rolled all the way down the stairs, and all I could hear was my travel partner, a new acquaintance I met at the hostel, shouting at the thief. Things happened so quickly that I could not make sense of what had just happened. BUT, I do recall my only conscious thought at that moment was: PLEASE DON’T TAKE MY PASSPORT. Maybe the universe heard my prayer at the verge of this near-death moment, the thief dropped the bag, and all my things, including my passport, were there. And, very luckily, I did not hit my head; otherwise, I would no longer be able to write this now. My mum told me afterward, “It’s okay even if they take your passport; you can just give it to them. Safety first.” My body had said otherwise: an identity document in a foreign country felt more important than my life. It might be foolish, but it is just how my brain and body work naturally.

I think most of my friends do not have as many administrative hiccups, and if they do, they do not react as strongly to them as I do. I tried to ask ChatGPT why I seem to be particularly “unlucky.” Their answer is that my way of living is not so standardized, so in many administrative procedures that tend to categorize people into comprehensible types, I easily fall into a grey zone. ChatGPT supports this with examples I gave, like my TSA luggage re-check rate being almost 100%. One time, my luggage got pulled out because of a sharp tarot deck, another time because I had a lavender self-heating eye mask that they didn’t know what it was. Tarot decks and self-heating masks are not common items for TSA, the AI said. I only half-believe this answer because my partner has carried way more ridiculous things across borders, but his luggage has never been pulled aside.

Let me try to make up a beautiful explanation for my “fate.” Without needing to tell you my Chinese BaZi (Eight Characters), just looking at my lived histories, you would guess I am a person who is heavy with the water element—highly volatile, perceptive, naturally intuitive. On the less bright side, being too watery tends to lead to overthinking and fear without grounding—what I am trying to articulate here is one such fear. I have known myself for more than three decades now and can testify that I have a tendency to move around geographically and mentally at an unusual pace (just unusual to most other people; the pace makes perfect sense to me). And crossing borders is always risky and involves significant friction. The universe often places little stones in my stream of water to slow down—or, if you want to think of the universe as an always-productive force, smooth out—the flow. These rocks are very uncomfortable, and I always have to find ways to move around them. On a related note, according to Western astrology, I was born when Mercury was in Retrograde. Perhaps I am doomed to experience communication and technology issues. It is my fate.

I am now living in a country where most administrative systems are less efficient than those at home, and here in the United States, free guidance for paperwork filing is very limited. In comparison, while Hong Kong society in general is pretty stingy with personal creative and artistic freedom, the community—post office staff, district officers, the government, and companies—often offer generous administrative guidance to people at no or low cost. I miss all the lovely strangers and acquaintances who helped me with trivial businesses that could be seen as “none of their business” in the American context.

In the end, these administrative hiccups are all just little pebbles. I will move around them eventually.