Bottom of the Iceberg

By Sharon Chang

Sharon Chang's life could easily be mistaken for a fable about the things money and success can't buy. Yet Bottom of the Iceberg is much more than that. Rebelling against her external identities-artist, designer, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist-Chang em

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dream Office of Imaginary Friends
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780999340523

Book preview

01

I Have No Childhood Memories

You know why I never give a clear answer to the question, ‘Where did you grow up?’ or, ‘Where are you from?’

I asked Micheline this, as the two of us slowly made our way up the Solstice Canyon trail on a sunny Saturday afternoon in the spring of 2018. I was on a routine work trip to Los Angeles with a packed schedule, still decompressing from a week of intense mind acrobatics that made me want to scoop my brain out and put it in the freezer to cool. This afternoon was the only downtime I had, and I was anxious to unload all of my problems to her.

Micheline and I met on a rainy yoga retreat in Mexico back in 2013. She was the master teacher who danced to the music of life, and I was the reluctant student who cared more about spending time in Mexico than practicing yoga.

Upon seeing her elegant poses radiate signals of wisdom, I knew this retreat would be unlike any other. Little did I know that the David Whyte and Mary Oliver poems she recited at the end of each class would change me profoundly. Her voice was far bigger than yoga. It carried a weight that anchored my restless mind. It was the voice of an artist and a sister: unique, critical, and empathetic at the same time. In that voice I recognized a muse and a kinship deeper than family.

When I asked her that question on our hike, Micheline responded, You enjoy being mysterious; that’s nothing new! Why are you bringing it up now?

She didn’t seem that interested. Hers was a well-founded response. Anyone who knows me well enough has given up on getting a straight answer from me if they even try asking about my private life.

You know how I always tell people that I traveled a lot while growing up? I continued, ignoring her question. And all those travels made it difficult to pinpoint where I spent my childhood?

Yes? She was somewhat intrigued now.

Well... I dragged out the word, then paused.

What? She turned toward me with eyebrows raised.

I took a deep breath, slowed down my pace considerably, and uttered words that I never thought would come out of my mouth: The truth is—

The truth? What truth? Her anticipation seemed to have turned into concern and she stopped walking to look me in the eyes.

I mustered all my courage to reveal what I considered to be the darkest secret of my life: I don’t remember my childhood at all. I don’t like answering those questions because I actually don’t have any answers. I honestly can’t remember where I grew up.

More puzzled than shocked, Micheline couldn’t quite grasp what it meant for me to share this piece of information, which I had carefully guarded for decades. She grew worried. Had I experienced some form of childhood trauma or abuse that blocked my memory? While I didn’t rule out the possibility of trauma, I knew my parents loved me deeply and couldn’t have intentionally harmed me in any way. For more than twenty-five years, I had imagined countless scenarios to explain my lack of childhood memories, yet none of them could be verified, nor did they make any sense.

Since turning forty in 2013, I had begun to feel uncomfortable with my routinely evasive answers to questions about my personal history and identity. Every time I heard myself talk about where I came from, I drifted farther away from knowing who I really was. I’d become tired of and often irritated by the need to keep track of all the stuff I had to constantly invent about my early years. I caught myself feeling jealous of those who had true and colorful stories to tell: going to summer camps with the bff who later became a sister-in-law; kicking and screaming on the way to visit crazy Grandma for Thanksgiving every year; getting caught skipping class to go to the hole-in-the-wall comic book store around the corner; winning a trophy for that nerve-racking performance in the after-school theater program. I yearned for such vivid memories full of real, living characters; for detailed personal experiences that enrich conversations, provide contexts, and build relationships.

The storybook of my childhood had nothing but blank pages, occasionally punctuated by a few events that seemed to have happened in a vacuum. There were so many blanks to fill that I found it extremely difficult to complete sentences about my childhood without cobbling things together from pure imagination. Every time I tried to look back in time, I struggled to find details to construct a believable world. This was because my experience of growing up seemed to contain no colors, no textures, no shapes, no sounds, no defined space, no sense of continuity. The harder I looked, the blurrier things got.

I was terrified to confront this punishing feeling that, for the first twelve years of my life, time didn’t travel in a linear way to give my memories any recognizable beginning, middle, or end. Instead, it wandered aimlessly like clumps of thin air attempting to form clouds without any water molecules, always dissipating into a vast and empty space: a void that had turned into a powerful antagonist in my life’s story.

By now, that void had grown to the size of the universe itself, sitting right inside my body, radiating from my heart to eat away my flesh as I frantically tried to fight its grip by any means possible.

My most reliable coping mechanism had always been travel. While it’s 100 percent accurate to say that I traveled the world to entertain an insatiable curiosity, I suspect there was a much deeper, less conscious motivation—escape. I had been running from that void since it started growing in me like an invisible cancer. I didn’t realize that I was using travel as a tool of evasion—of myself, my life—until 2016, when I decided, as Christmas approached, to take a winter vacation in the desert around Marrakech. It was also (perhaps inevitably, I see now) during this trip that the concept of future architecture began to crystallize.

I departed for Morocco craving complete solitude, to quietly reflect on why I seemed to be getting more and more unhappy despite having a privileged life. To my surprise, my friend Rachael decided to come and join me at the last minute, as Marrakech was a quick flight from Paris for her, and we hadn’t seen each other in a while. I had a nagging feeling that, while I would be delighted to see her, what I desperately needed was some serious alone time, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Sure enough, Rachael and I had a wonderful time together, hiking in the Atlas Mountains and roaming the narrow streets of the Medina. Yet with each passing day, I sensed a growing anxiety that demanded I address something of critical importance, something that I couldn’t articulate but whose enormity overshadowed every happy moment we shared in this bustling old city.

A week in Morocco went by quickly. I had planned a short stop in Lisbon before going to Amsterdam for work in January, so when I woke up in my room at Palacete Chafariz D’El Rei, a nineteenth-century, neo-Moorish palace turned boutique hotel in the heart of Lisbon, I was determined to spend the next three days figuring it all out, after failing to do so in Marrakech.

The day before, my ninety-minute flight from Casablanca to Lisbon had taken longer than eleven hours, due to one of those no-explanation-given delays that are typical of Royal Air Maroc. Arriving late and hungry, I was too grumpy to pay attention to the spectacular formal dining room situated between my room and the hotel’s day-to-day casual dining area. The hotel staff were apologetic for not being able to provide dinner when I showed up after midnight, so as soon as I emerged the next morning, they offered me a private breakfast in that formal dining room. The space was long and narrow, with a dining table that comfortably seated twelve. I chose to sit at the head of the table, facing panels of ornate stained glass windows and an antique grandfather clock standing in the corner. Breakfast was delicious, and the room was so quiet I could hear my own breathing as I ate.

After devouring the last morsels, I realized that it was time to get to work. I still had no idea what the work was, but I told myself I would not leave my seat until I got it done.

The first fifteen minutes felt excruciatingly boring, as I sat there resisting the urge to post photos of this gorgeous room on Instagram.

A master of procrastination, I then decided I didn’t have the proper tools with me. I ran out of the hotel, in search of a local art supply store, to get some fancy pens, a beautiful new notebook, and a bunch of colorful sticky notes.

Two hours later, I was back in the dining room, sitting in the same seat, staring at the blank pages of this new notebook next to my old notebook, which still had plenty of blank pages.

I noticed rays of light filtering through the stained glass windows. They looked like slender columns of solid color crystals silently extruding toward me from a place of mystery. I felt a warm current traveling up and down my spine and a subtle feeling of luxury and indulgence as these crystals filled the room. It was like a piece of slow-motion theater, designed just for my viewing pleasure. In that slow motion, something intangible penetrated my body with incredible care, as if medicine was being delivered to cure ailments I couldn’t yet describe.

I relaxed into this unusual sensation, and without trying at all, I found myself in a peaceful, effortless meditation. I had no idea how much time had passed, until I felt my heart skip a beat—I was startled by the silence of the grandfather clock. I didn’t know one could be startled by the absence of sound, but my realization that the clock didn’t work could only be described as a sudden electric shock.

I panicked. I felt banished in this space without time. Time had been taken from me and would not return unless I committed to doing the work I had to do. It must have been how Alice felt falling down that rabbit hole.

An epiphany hit me. I watched my life unfold in front of these magnificent light crystals, with chapters neatly arranged in evenly distributed time intervals marked by the deaths of people I loved. The eerie pattern led me to believe that another death was just around the corner.

I had a powerful premonition that someone or something must die in 2017, in order to make way for my life to continue. But who? I didn’t think I had more people to lose. Perhaps I would die. Naturally, I didn’t like that idea, so I redirected my attention to focus on symbolic death. Perhaps it was time for me to say goodbye to my old self? In other words, would I need to kill my ego, or alter my identity?

How would I go about doing any of that? Was a near-death experience waiting to offer me a rite of passage? Could this be the opportunity for me to finally confront the demons I’d dressed up as angels?

Over the next two days, I made detailed plans to reorganize all of my projects so they would fit into a grand scheme derived from my epiphany. To be more specific, I gave myself the deadline of 2023—the year of my fiftieth birthday and another foresight of death—to bring to life the concept of future architecture, something I had been developing since 2015.

It felt like a calling from the divine. Everything seemed inevitable. Yet as exhilarating as the experience was, I also knew that no amount of meticulous planning would solve the still-to-be-named problem that stemmed from that all-encompassing void. As a trained architect, I would be worried if someone told me their building had no foundation. And yet, for decades I hadn’t been concerned about not having my own foundation of self. How could I have expected to build more and more elaborate structures on top of nothing?

After the magical and unsettling encounter in Lisbon, I became convinced that some sort of reset was on my horizon. I eagerly sought guidance on how to welcome the death of my old self in order to usher in a new birth; a beginning grounded by honesty and authenticity. Perhaps a life with a traceable history was waiting for me. Yet, as inspired as I felt, I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about my missing childhood memories. I thought I could quietly navigate the process of transformation on my own.

Three weeks later, my father died.

At the time, my relationship with my father was strained. I could easily qualify it as unofficial estrangement after not speaking to him for seven years. I didn’t feel much sadness about his death but was shaken by the timing of it and overcome by an irrational sense of guilt, as if I had willed him to death with the premonition I’d so viscerally felt in Lisbon.

His death brought confusion, too. My fragile commitment to doing some serious inner work on myself was met with a perfect excuse: the death I was anticipating had occurred—not mine, but my father’s. This triggered an emotional roller coaster, as I vacillated between feeling relieved and disappointed: relieved because, according to my own logic, I was no longer obligated to do the hard work of figuring out what was wrong with me; disappointed because I was most likely losing the opportunity to instigate a rebirth through my own symbolic death.

After a few sleepless nights, I recognized the absurdity of my loopy thoughts. Nothing in the content of my so-called epiphany was important. What mattered was how these events had helped to reveal my deepest feelings.

With growing certainty and conviction, I knew I had to stop running from the void. While I couldn’t even begin to fathom the feelings of embarrassment, fear, and shame associated with the true story of my past, and while I still didn’t believe that anyone could understand or care about my strange experience, I knew I must let the story out of my system in order to begin healing.

It took a grueling expedition to climb K2 in the fall of 2017, and almost a year of agonizing over a million what-ifs, before I was able to semi-casually blurt the truth to Micheline during our hike in LA.

"So, what do you remember? Anything?" Micheline’s voice showed more tenderness than curiosity.

Not really. Nothing aside from a few isolated memories with no context, and they don’t really add up to any real meaning, I shrugged, my spirit deflated. But I can tell you the facts that I think I do know. They are not memories; they are just things that I never acknowledged or shared with anyone.

I know it’s hard. But I am happy for you. It’s a big deal for you to open up.

Is it?

Of course, lovey. Of course. Micheline gave me a big hug.

I didn’t want to let go of that hug. I was not ready to confront so many things that I had no idea how to handle. All of a sudden, this whole thing felt mortifying and unnecessary. Who cares... I buried my head in her hair as she gently squeezed my overly tense body.

We both stayed quiet and resumed our hike. A torrent of conflicting thoughts were running through my head. I seriously considered retracting everything I had just told her. As the rocky path narrowed, I fell a few steps behind her and started paying attention to the sound of the canyon: silent heat encircling a patch of beautiful desert bloom, punctuated by a few busy bees buzzing around. I sensed the same vibration I had felt from those light crystals in Lisbon.

What I knew about my childhood was a straightforward chronology that I couldn’t openly share with anyone for reasons I never understood. But this time it simply felt inevitable to put the story together despite my