by Fred Hiatt
Escalators run up hills along sidewalks, and skyscrapers jostle each other as if they’re stretching to escape each other’s shadows. Even the buses and trolleys have two stories. And it’s all so noisy and jumbled and packed in that for me it was exhausting just to think about living there.
The harbor is crazily alive, with ferries zigging and zagging past each other, and hundreds of people jockeying to spring off as soon as each ferry docks. A mountain soars up from the harbor—the center of Hong Kong Island—and beyond that, hundreds of smaller islands, some tiny, some with perfect little beaches, some so green and tropical-feeling you can’t believe you’re in one of the most crowded city-states in the world.
Of course, I didn’t see all that at first. I was so worried about Ti-Anna’s mood that I didn’t notice much of anything.
It felt as though Ti-Anna had given up before we’d even started. She let me lead her through passport control and to the baggage carousel. She followed me through customs and out into the gleaming terminal, and just stood there while I tried to figure out the best way into the city.
The answer to that, by the way, is: subway. There’s a beautiful new system, and it whisks you into town.
But if you want to know how we went, the answer is: bus. The bus was a lot cheaper, and I was worried that my credit card might not work at ATMs in Hong Kong, or that there’d be some limit on how much I could withdraw before it froze up or sent an emergency message. Then even my absentminded mother, deep into her Geneva conference, might wonder who was using her card in Hong Kong.
The day before we’d left Washington I’d gone downtown and changed some U.S. money for Hong Kong money—theirs are called dollars too, but one U.S. dollar gets you about six of theirs—so I had enough to get us started. But I still didn’t want to spend more than we had to.
We took the A21 bus into town. When we alighted, I unfolded my map.
“According to the book, the cheapest places to stay are in one huge old building here,” I said, pointing to the map. “We’re here. I think we can walk.”
“Okay.” Ti-Anna shrugged, without so much as glancing down. She lifted her bag onto her shoulder and again just stood there, waiting for me to lead.
I didn’t say anything. I reminded myself she was still feeling terrible about the way she’d left her mom, and of course she was thinking about her father, too, and being in Hong Kong made that more scary. And it was morning in Hong Kong, and neither of us had slept much.
But still. I was beginning to wonder if she was letting me make all the decisions so that when things went wrong I would get all the blame. I couldn’t help remembering how sure she’d sounded when she’d said she could track her father down if only she got to Hong Kong. She didn’t look so confident now—and it wasn’t like I’d have the first clue where to start.
Okay, don’t get ahead of yourself, I thought. Sweat trickled down the small of my back. Even though it was Sunday, the street was so noisy you practically had to shout. I was so tired I thought I might fall asleep standing up.
Find a room with a couple of beds with nice clean sheets, I told myself. Take a cool shower. Everything will look better. Even to Ti-Anna.
Good advice. Except I wasn’t sure we would ever get there.
Chapter 13
We found the building after a hot, crowded walk up Nathan Road. It was about as peculiar as anything I’d ever seen.
You had to walk down a long, shadowy passageway with stores on either side selling cameras and calculators and a lot of junk you couldn’t imagine anyone would ever buy. Every now and then you’d pass a bank of elevators and a list of hotels, and you had to take an elevator to the one you’d chosen.
I figured the deeper in we went, the cheaper the hotels might get. We walked to the shaft labeled E and looked at the list.
“How about Rising Phoenix Guesthouse?” I said. “That sounds good.”
Ti-Anna looked at me as though I was a hopeless case, but she seemed past caring. We stepped into an elevator like a coffin, with one grayish fluorescent bulb flickering.
The doors did not open onto the cheerful lobby I’d been picturing. Instead we had to walk so far down a dim corridor that I began to have trouble breathing. What would happen in a fire?
Eventually we came to a high desk on the left. The clerk behind it was young and fat and looked bored. He eyed us disdainfully.
I waited for a moment, thinking that maybe Ti-Anna would pitch in here with her Chinese. But no. Nothing.
So I tried in English, asking if there was a room available. The clerk looked us over for a minute, as if he hadn’t heard a word, and then reached behind him without turning his head, grabbed a key attached to a big wooden knob and pushed it across the desk.
“Two hundred dollars,” he said, and not as though it were the beginning of a negotiation.
I gasped, then remembered he was talking about Hong Kong dollars. I reached for the key. He snatched it away, a lot faster than you might expect for a guy his size, and said, “Pay first.”
I counted out the colorful bills and reached for the key again, and again his big soft hand was quicker than mine. Obviously he enjoyed this little game.
“Passports,” he said.
We handed them over. He glanced at the photos, then at each of us, without apparent interest, and slowly, deliberately entered something from each passport into his computer. I was swaying with fatigue.
Finally, he slid the passports and key across the desk.
“Fourth door on left,” he said. “Showers last door on right. Fifty cents a shower. No music, no food, no smoking.”
In the shower? I wanted to ask. But I picked up the passports and key—he didn’t fight me for it this time—and we headed even deeper down the Corridor of Doom.
Nothing could be more depressing than this, I thought—until we found Room 23, managed in the gloom to work the key and banged open the door.
I fumbled for the switch, and a harsh overhead light flickered on. Two narrow beds filled the room. You could sidle between them, but there was no room to put a suitcase down. On each mattress were a couple of gray sheets and what was supposed to be a towel. A filthy window overlooked an air shaft. Splotches where people had flattened roaches and mosquitoes dotted the walls like acne.
I thought it might send Ti-Anna over the edge. She pushed in next to me, slung her duffel on a bed and unfolded a towel. It was about the size of a dinner napkin.
“Maybe it’s a diaper for the Rising Phoenix,” she said, and, to my astonishment, began to laugh. Her laughing got me laughing and, even though there was nothing very funny, in a minute we had fallen on the hard mattresses with tears rolling down our cheeks.
“So,” I finally said. “Do you think these hotels are all like this?”
“You mean, or did we just get lucky?” Ti-Anna said. And we started laughing again.
“I call first shower,” she said. The real Ti-Anna was back.
Chapter 14
I suppose you might be thinking that there could be worse things than sharing a hotel room with a beautiful girl in an exotic city a long, long way from your parents and (as far as we knew) from hers.
I suppose, if the situation had been different, I might have been thinking the same.
But I can promise you that if you’d been in this situation—scared, exhausted, overwhelmed by the foreignness of everything—romance would have been the last thing on your mind.
We each took a fifty-cent shower—I won’t even try to describe the showers—and collapsed on our beds without bothering to spread out the sheets. It took somewhere between five and seven seconds to fall into a dead sleep.
When I awoke I had no idea where I was. Then I saw the splotches on the wall.
I swung my feet into the narrow space between our beds. Ti-Anna was in fresh clothes, her hair brushed, smiling. She must have shaken me awake. Out the air shaft, you couldn’t tell whether it was morning, noon or night. Or winter or summer, for that matter.
“What time is it?” I asked groggily.
“Dinnertime,” she said. “C’mon, let’s go explore.”
After I brushed my teeth in the yellowing little sink in the corner, we stepped out and I locked the door. Before I could head to the elevator, Ti-Anna whispered, “Hold on.”
She yanked a strand of hair from her scalp and, kneeling, wound it around the door handle and then across to a nail that was poking out of the doorframe.
“What are—” I started, but she shook her head and shushed me.
The looming desk clerk stared suspiciously as we walked past him to the elevators. We waited again for forever, rode the coffin down and made our way back out to Nathan Road.
And somehow, everything felt different. We were rested, an evening breeze had cooled things off, the people around us weren’t in such a hurry. Ti-Anna seemed like herself again. Hong Kong felt like a magical place.
We walked to the harbor. Huge neon signs made everything brighter than daytime. Across the water the skyscrapers were putting on a show—not merely lit up, but with colored patterns dancing up and down the buildings and then skittering toward us in the reflection in the water below.
“Is it a holiday?” I asked a girl leaning on the railing next to me.
She laughed. “No, it’s just Hong Kong,” she said. “It’s like this every night.”
I turned back to the harbor but noticed a minute later that the girl was still looking at us and giggling as her friend whispered in her ear.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“My friend was saying that even though your friend is not from here, she and I look like each other,” she said. “I said, no, your friend is prettier.” And she giggled some more.
There was some resemblance. The girl wore her hair like Ti-Anna’s and had the same longish face with high cheekbones and full lips.
“How do you know she’s not from here?” I challenged. At which both of them burst into laughter again.
The question apparently was so silly that the girl, who turned out to be called Wei, didn’t deign to reply.
“Is it your first time?” she asked.
We chatted with her and her friend Mai as we watched the Star Ferries come and go. They were high school kids like us, just hanging out, and we traded complaints about exams and homework and boring teachers. It felt good to be having a conversation about normal things.
Eventually we said we were hungry, and they told us they knew a great-but-cheap noodle restaurant. We tore ourselves away from the light show and let them lead us through a maze of streets so narrow that motor scooters were the biggest vehicles that could get through.
We came to a kind of outdoor café with two long, high tables with kerosene lanterns at each end. All along them young people perched on stools, chattering and slurping from huge, steaming bowls.
The girls installed us and helped us figure out the menu. They said they had to be home soon and couldn’t stay to eat, but they sat next to us and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave. Wei especially was a talker, asking lots of questions about America and excited at every answer. (We lived in Washington? Had we ever met the president?) All her questions ended in bubbly squeaks. All her statements ended with exclamation marks.
Finally, when our food came, Wei said they really, really had to go. They slid off their stools and left—only to return two minutes later.
“Oh!” Wei said, beaming proudly as she saw us eating. “I just wanted to make sure you could use chopsticks! You look like you’ve been doing it all your lives!”
This time, before leaving, she gave Ti-Anna her phone number and said to be sure to call if we had any trouble while we were in Hong Kong. And they were gone again, this time for good.
You can’t imagine our trouble, I thought. But still. We’d made a couple of new friends.
Ti-Anna as usual didn’t seem particularly hungry, but suddenly I was starving. Noodles with roasted pork had never tasted so good.
Only when we’d paid and were trying to find our way back through the maze to Nathan Road did I ask Ti-Anna about our hotel room door.
“A good-luck charm to keep the room safe?” I guessed.
“Not exactly,” she said. “Listen, I’ll be surprised if they don’t try to track us, maybe bug our hotel room.” It was that familiar “they” again. “The only question is how soon—if they’ve gone in already, we’ll have some idea of what we’re up against.”
I felt like maybe I’d been reading too much nonfiction. I should have picked up a few more spy novels. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“It’s not like my father and I didn’t talk about stuff,” she said.
“So if the hair is broken when we get back, it’ll be bad news.”
She nodded.
“And then?”
“Well,” she said, “I have an idea.”
She prodded me into something resembling a hardware store. The aisles were narrow and so crowded with junk that I could only follow her as she poked around. Eventually she settled on a couple of little knapsacks—the kind you might use if you were biking out to do a few errands—and air mattresses that folded down to almost nothing. I paid for them both.
Back on the street, she laid out what she had in mind. It sounded crazy, but I didn’t have a better idea. And when we got to the room, she knelt in front of our door and soundlessly showed me two strands of hair, one hanging from the nail, the other from the doorknob.
She held her fingers to her lips—it wouldn’t be safe to talk here anymore—and we went in to get some sleep.
The next day, we’d start looking for her father. And it seemed we might have company.
Day Two: Monday
Kowloon–Lamma Island–Hong Kong
Chapter 15
The mountainous desk clerk was still there in the morning when, following Ti-Anna’s instructions, I approached to ask if we could keep the room for a week.
He swiveled to study his computer. Right, I thought, as if there’s a long line for that particular cell. But I held my tongue.
“Twelve hundred dollars,” he said.
That would give us a discount from the one-night rate, but not much of one, and Ti-Anna had told me to be sure to bargain. Easy for her to say: she was waiting in the room while the clerk glared at me. It was all I could do to keep from offering more than he’d asked for.
I counted out the bills. It about cleaned me out of Hong Kong money, but Ti-Anna had said, Pay in advance: we want them to be sure we’re staying put. So I did.
We packed our knapsacks wordlessly, like we’d agreed the night before. Toothbrush, air mattress, a change of clothes, Hong Kong map. Passports, of course. When Ti-Anna wasn’t looking, I slipped in my book, a biography of General MacArthur. The bags still looked small—as if we were heading out with guidebooks and cameras for a day of sightseeing.
We left everything else in the room, Ti-Anna’s duffel neatly repacked, my stuff spilling onto the bed—a lived-in look, I thought.
As we headed back down the Corridor of Doom and into the coffin elevator, I hoped we would make it back at least once. I hated to think what my brother would say if I came home without his backpack. But I knew it might be a while. I can’t say that I worried about missing the Rising Phoenix. I didn’t think our clerk would miss us.
We walked down Nathan Road with throngs of commuters, all talking into their Bluetooths. At the first ATM, I decided we’d better find out if we could get money. I didn’t like transmitting our location so soon, but it was that or go hungry. Going hungry is never a good option.
The screen was in Chinese, so I gave Ti-Anna the card and told her my password. We withdrew five hundred Hong Kong dollars and hoped we wouldn’t set off alarms.
As we ferried across the harbor, the sun sparkled off the waves. Dozens of junks, patrol boats, barges and ferries crisscrossed before us and behind us. Off to the right you could see a navy destroyer, though I couldn’t make out its flag.
We watched the ferrymen tie us to the dock and then stepped onto Hong Kong island. We were in Central, the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district, at the height of rush hour, and people in dark suits were rushing all around us, toting briefcases and looking anxious. For a minute we stood close to each other, overwhelmed.
“Let’s sit,” Ti-Anna said.
We found a bench near someone selling boxes of juice and soy milk and cut-up pieces of pineapple from a cart. The pineapple looked juicy and sweet, but Ti-Anna, of course, didn’t feel like eating.
“I know it’s crazy, but I keep looking at faces,” she said. “As if, if we sit here long enough, maybe he’ll just appear out of the crowd.”
“And spoil our fun?”
Ti-Anna smiled politely. We breathed in ocean smells and city fumes, listened to flags snapping and buses grinding their gears. People streamed past as if they all had someplace they had to be five minutes ago.
Our first stop, Ti-Anna had said the night before, would be Horace Kwan, one of her father’s oldest friends. I’d heard of him. For years he had been a leader of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp. While Hong Kong was a British colony, until 1996, he’d agitated for more self-rule. After Britain handed Hong Kong back to China, he’d kept on agitating for self-rule, only now his target was Beijing, not London.
“If my father was in Hong Kong, I’m sure he would have seen Horace,” Ti-Anna had said.
If? I’d thought. I’d never heard her doubt that her dad at least had started here.
Horace Kwan didn’t know we were coming, and we didn’t know if he’d even be in his office. He’d been on the legislative council—like Hong Kong’s Congress—but now he was semiretired from politics. He was still a lawyer, though, Ti-Anna had said, and a successful one. I figured the earlier we got there, the better the chance we’d find him before he went to court or somewhere else.
I took out the map once more, though I’d pored over it after dinner and was pretty sure which way to head. Ti-Anna quit examining the men passing before us. We walked past a couple of cool old buildings from colonial days and some great-looking palm trees—which I had never seen in real life—but mostly there were skyscrapers, each one sleeker and taller than the next.
