Jet lag early in the morning brings a distinct kind of disorientation.

And thoughts.

Just got to Lisbon for a short break with my kids. Couldn’t sleep much due to jet lag and the beatings from an intercontinental flight.

As the café downstairs finally opened in this slow Sunday morning. I rushed there for a caffeine shot.

Sitting al fresco, like I always do in Portugal, I started collecting some thoughts.

This exact café downstairs – called Banquisa – has operated since we first moved here in the 1980s.

Back then, my brother and I would rush over to buy drinks and gelato, hot and sweaty from playing football with the neighbourhood kids out in the streets.

Over forty years had passed since then.

Sitting there now, sipping my coffee, a strange paradox became clear.

The permanent temporary

For decades, our Lisbon apartment upstairs was just a temporary place.

My parents bought it in 1982 to serve as our summer anchor. For a single month over a year, this apartment roared to life for a happy family of four enjoying their summer break.

The other 11 months, the flat would go completely dormant. Silence would fill its empty rooms as nobody lived there. Lights stayed off, dust gathered, and time would hit pause.

Time Capsule

Because of this cycle, the flat resisted the natural entropy of domestic life.

In a normal home, spaces evolve to meet everyday needs. Furniture wears out, carpets get replaced, kitchen appliances are upgraded, and walls are repainted as tastes shift.

Normal houses move forward. This house didn’t.

Because it had so little active use, it remained largely untouched across the decades.

My old toys, my vintage comic books and childhood belongings, they all sit in the exact same place, left intact like museum pieces of my childhood.

The irony

Sitting with my coffee now, watching the morning unfold, the irony finally struck me.

We always treated this apartment as a temporary venue—a seasonal detour for a summer break once a year.

Yet, looking back, this temporary place has ended up being the repository of my most solid, enduring childhood memories.

While my actual life moved forward—growing up, moving across the world to live in several countries before finally settling in Macau—this flat stayed frozen in amber.

Life evolved naturally as adulthood took over, filled with the shifting addresses of a modern family.

But the apartment in Lisbon remained the one physical constant, the one we didn’t move out from, the one we kept forever.

An amalgamation of decades of unbroken summer routines turned a holiday flat into a bedrock of my own history.

I belong here. Too.

I’ve been connected to the streets here since 1982.

As I was telling my daughter how it was back in the days, pointing here and there, going through the changes, I could feel the people in the surrounding tables listening quietly.

Here was this Asian looking guy, who somehow speaks perfect Portuguese, giving a history lessson of the neighbourhood to his daughter.

Knowing more than they – the real locals?.. – know about the place.

I could feel them observing from the corners of their eyes. That’s when this strange feeling of authority hit me.

I belong here. Too.

Passing the Torch

I find comfort seeing my kids play with my old toys and read the very same comic books I thumbed through in the 1980s.

We haven’t visited Portugal every single year like I did when I was their age. Covid restrictions and modern life logistics come across.

But we return often enough for my children to know this flat’s rhythms.

And decades from now, I hope they look back at this dormant-then-awakening apartment as the quiet cornerstone of their own childhood memories too.

We can’t afford to be a foreigner in our birthplace and a foreigner in our own country as well. A strong sense of identity is imperative or else we will lose our footing.

We belong nowhere, we belong everywhere.

Amen.