The Passover

I remember when my family and I first moved my sister into her dorm on the outskirts of BC. As she was going through her residential orientation, I stayed back to listen to what the Res Leader had to say to my sister and her floor mates.

I could only recall one thing the RL said that day, “if you keep your dorm door open, people will pop by and you’ll have more friends.”

As I was organizing my dorm after arriving with my suitcases and other necessities, I kept my dorm door open. It was more of a meaningless act that was propagated by necessity – it was just so damn hot in my room - rather than a premeditated plan to gain more companions. One of my floor mates was passing through the hallway. He stopped at my open door. We chitchatted about where we were from, what brought us here, what each of our majors were, etc. He said at the end of our short, initial conversation, “Some of my buddies are going to go shop for supplies at around noon, want to join us?”

We went to a mall in Kow Loon Tong to get lunch and some bedding. We went to Mong Kok to look at phones. We went to the Lang Fan tower to get dinner. Within our group, we had people from Scotland, Florida, Ohio, France, and Dubai. A group of 8 of us were traveling and making Hong Kong our own.

Most likely, keeping the door open does not mean that one will have more friends – it just so happened that it worked out for me. I guess one thing that’s always been on my mind is this statement, “if you want to be found, do the things that make you be seen.” Maybe this time, keeping the door open let me be seen.