Raised beneath London’s grey, shifting skies, I grew up with a sense that home was never a single place. It was a city of brick terraces, school uniforms, wet pavements and quiet manners; but it was also the summer heat of Hong Kong, the clang of trams, the smell of cha chaan teng milk tea, the glow of Victoria Harbour, and the familiar voices of family waiting across the world. Later, Australia added another horizon: wider skies, quieter streets, and a different understanding of distance, adulthood, and return.

Hong Kong was not simply a destination I visited. It was a seasonal return, a second rhythm to childhood. Each summer, the city opened itself in fragments: taxi rides through dense streets, ferry crossings over the harbour, family meals, supermarket aisles, old buildings, new towers, and the strange comfort of recognising a place that I had never fully lived in. It was familiar, but never entirely mine; distant, yet deeply intimate.

My heritage, too, was never neatly contained by one city or one language. Hong Kong sat at its centre, but around it gathered quieter traces of elsewhere: southern Chinese roots, Japanese ancestry, and the wider crossings of Southeast Asia. They were not labels I carried like a family tree, but currents that shaped the way I listened, remembered, travelled, and understood belonging.

Growing up between Britain, Hong Kong, and Australia, I learnt early that belonging could be complicated. It was not always a matter of where one lived, what language one spoke, or which passport one carried. Sometimes it lived in food, in family habits, in accents, in old photographs, in the way a city smells after rain, or in the small ache of missing a place that has changed before one has fully understood it.

Englond is not a single book so much as a continuing collection of personal essays, reflections, and memoir fragments. It gathers several volumes of writing around cities, memory, family, culture, language, travel, and the quiet negotiations of identity. Some pieces return to Hong Kong; others remain in London; others carry the quieter distance of Australia. Many stand somewhere in between.

Together, they form a map of external and internal journeys: the places I have loved, the histories I have inherited, the cities that shaped me, and the questions that continue to follow me. This collection is not a travelogue in the usual sense. It is a record of belonging imperfectly, remembering selectively, and trying to understand how a life can be shaped by more than one home.

In that space between departure and return, between London, Hong Kong, and the wider world beyond them, between memory and change, Englond begins.