Part 1: The Vision

In February, my wife and I spent Chinese New Year holidays (a month long) in Hong Kong. During that time, we explored the possibilities of moving to Hong Kong. The responses from the people we talked to were mixed:

"I think life is better up in Beijing. The pace is slower, and the work seems more relaxed."

"Yeah! Come back to Hong Kong, we all miss you!"

"You wouldn't want to live here, the rent is high and property prices are expensive."

"It's not safe up there, you don't know where your food is coming from."

Thankfully we didn't spend all of our time talking to others. It was important that we discussed it ourselves. I've always known that any reason for making such a major decision must come from a shared vision. And our vision is that we wanted to be relatively closer to our families. HK isn't any closer for me, but it is a much better place for my folks to travel to rather than to Beijing. Our vision includes raising our own family that is surrounded by our family and friends. We were able to envision that, despite knowing how hard it would be to find a job. Our vision includes personal and spiritual growth - and we both felt that we couldn't grow in Beijing. There was an opportunity to seize for academic growth, and also for spiritual growth. All these ideas formed our short and long term vision. The vision became our guiding light through the next phase that proved to be difficult and challenging.