Their mother stands in her spot for a long time. Siu Sang imagines that she is looking at each girl’s face, judging what kind of wives and daughters-in-law they will become, speculating on how many sons lie dormant in their bodies. Her mother breathes heavily, her open lips wetly smacking together with every exhale. Siu Sang moves her eyes to look at her older sister. She will be leaving soon to be married to a man in Canada, but she lies there exactly as she always has, her left leg hanging down off the side of the bed, her eyelids slightly open, as if she is afraid she will miss something. Siu Sang watches her mother as she wipes her forehead with the silk handkerchief she keeps tucked in her belt. She shuts the door and turns to walk slowly back to her own bedroom.
Siu Sang waits for the sound of her mother’s door closing before she raises her head. From her bed, she can look straight out into the street and see the lights of Kowloon district. It is close to midnight, and she can still hear the shopkeepers selling chickens, noodles and paper money for offerings to household gods. She can see people moving about in the building across the street, their house lights flickering and weak. She fidgets underneath her sheet.
A girl laughs outside, her giggle skipping through the streets like a pebble. Siu Sang wonders if she is on a date, if she has slipped out of her bedroom to secretly meet a young man, if she is, like her, a teenager dreaming of love.
Tonight, Siu Sang transforms Hong Kong into something else, creates in her mind a mannered, well-dressed city where she and the laughing girl skip along the clean sidewalks carelessly. There are no just-slaughtered chickens hanging on hooks at the street market, no dirty old women selling cheap jewellery displayed on threadbare blankets at every corner, no men spitting on the sidewalk as the girls pass. Here, in this different Hong Kong, the air is pure and no one ever sweats. The only vendors on the street are clean, polite men who offer trinkets and novelties: paper fans, cookies wrapped in red paper, pet birds in gold cages.
Siu Sang and the laughing girl walk into a café, order a Western soda, sit in the window and watch the people walk by. Women in pastel day suits, men in hats, children with candy. As they walk home in the evening, the windows in the tall buildings of the financial district begin to light up, one by one, like thousands of little eyes, winking.
A man shouts outside Siu Sang’s window, and she looks out, blinking to clear her head. Across the street, on the sidewalk, a couple argues. The man has grabbed the woman’s arm and her body is half-turned, as if she is trying to run away. She wears only one high-heeled shoe, and even from this distance, Siu Sang can see that the heavy makeup around her eyes is running and her face is covered in black streaks. The man shouts, “You will do what I say!” The woman sobs and her body goes limp. She allows the man to walk her down the street, and they disappear around a corner.
Siu Sang lies back down on her damp pillows and turns on her side to face the room. Nothing ever changes here: the same rosewood chairs and table, the same scrolls hanging on the wall. She touches a bruise on her hip, the purple stain the exact shape of a table corner.
She watches as Yen Mei directs the driver how to pack her trunk and suitcases into the car. “Do you understand that soft luggage always goes on top? If you ruin my makeup bag, I’ll have nothing on the boat and I’ll look like a peasant girl.”
Everyone else said goodbye in the house. When Siu Sang asked her sister if she could follow her to the car and say goodbye in the street, Yen Mei just shrugged and said, “Whatever you want.”
She stands on one foot, enjoying the feeling of being slightly off balance yet strangely rooted to the concrete at the same time. The street in front of her is a blur.
“Well, I’m leaving.” Yen Mei stands in front of her, staring.
Siu Sang puts her foot down and pats Yen Mei on the shoulder. “Goodbye.”
“Is that it? I thought you had something special to tell me.” She looks annoyed.
“No. I just wanted to see you drive away, that’s all.”
Yen Mei shakes her head. “You’re a funny one. Well, goodbye.”
Siu Sang watches the long silver car pull into traffic and slowly make its way down the congested street. She wonders if Yen Mei really knows what Canada is like, or if she has only been making things up as she goes along, preferring to provide an answer than say nothing at all. When their younger sister asked Yen Mei if it might be a good idea to bring clothes besides all her silk dresses, Yen Mei had snorted and said, “My new husband and I will be so rich so fast, I’ll have no need for anything else. Besides, all the women in Canada wear silk all the time.” Listening, Siu Sang wasn’t so sure.
She watches until the car disappears and joins the traffic blur. As she turns to walk up the stairs, she looks back one more time and sees that Yen Mei has dropped one of her earrings on the street. It sits there, gleaming gold, its jade stone winking in the sunlight. A ragged woman, her pants held up with rope, bends to pick it up and laughs—a high, piercing cackle. Siu Sang thinks she should say something, but then decides that the earring will make this poor woman happy, at least for a while, and that Yen Mei will only blame the driver for the loss and then forget about it altogether.
Siu Sang sits quietly on an ottoman at her mother’s feet, staring straight ahead at her dimpled, well-fed knees. Her brothers have warned her, and she has been waiting for this talk.
“Siu Sang,” her mother says, “we have had another offer from a young man and his family.”
Her mind reels back to the boy with the big bum who has been following her around the city since she left school two years ago. Her stomach turns.
“Yen Mei’s husband has a friend. He lives in Canada.”
All her life she has been picturing herself the wife of a wealthy businessman, a man who will not expect her to do anything, a man who takes over his father’s shops and land in filial duty, only adding to the money and prestige that her father spent his whole life pursuing. It has never occurred to her to wish for anything else, to conceive of anything off the coast of Hong Kong. Canada has always been a foreign concept, and became even more so when she received her sister’s letters describing infinitely high trees, snow-covered mountains and a small, wild city.
In the time it takes Siu Sang to shift her mind over to this new possibility, her mother has finished telling her all the details: his family and hers have origins in neighbouring villages; he has great prospects in that vast and open country; he is handsome. She makes it clear that Siu Sang has a choice: she can marry one of the boys who have already approached the family and stay in Hong Kong, or she can go to Canada to begin something new, where her children will grow up never worried about China’s occupation and far away from the possibility of a new, energized Japan.
“He is not rich, but the family is prominent. When China takes over, who knows what will happen? You will be almost sixty then and could lose everything in your old age, when you need your money most. Canada is a free country with unlimited opportunity, as I often hear your brothers say. There is reason to hope that this boy will be rich one day.” She leans forward and touches Siu Sang on the cheek. “It is up to you.”
She reaches to her left, picks up an envelope from the polished teak side table and withdraws a small photograph. She hands it to her daughter. Siu Sang, still dizzy, takes the picture and looks at it, blinking furiously to clear her mind.
The young man is smiling, his lips full. His teeth are shining white, and his hair is slicked back in a way that is almost tough, but at the same time not. His eyes are big, limpid, full of naughty humour. He is sitting on a floral sofa with his arm draped along the back as if to say, “You would fit right here and we would laugh at this ugly sofa together.”
Siu Sang looks and looks. She puts her hand up to the back of her long neck to make sure that she is really here, that this is not one of her daydreams turned frighteningly real. She thinks to herself, Remain calm. This is only a photo. This is not the real man. But still.
It is in these thirt
y seconds that Siu Sang, with all her eighteen years, falls in love.
After all the arrangements have been made, her mother tells her she must not expect anything. When Siu Sang asks what she means, thinking she is, perhaps, talking about money or servants, her mother replies, “No one treats a daughter-in-law well.”
Siu Sang doesn’t quite understand and does not know what not well entails. Will she have to eat the last piece of chicken that no one wants? Will her mother-in-law insist on having her feet washed in scented water? Will someone beat her?
Her mother looks at Siu Sang with narrowed eyes and says, “They will expect things from you, and if you do not deliver, no one will protect you.”
Surrounded by piles of silk and linen, Siu Sang packs for her move to Canada and is having a hard time. In her letters to Yen Mei, she asked what she should prepare herself for. But her questions went unanswered. Instead, Yen Mei wrote on and on about how wonderful her new husband is, how nicely he treats her, how he has promised her a maid by the following year. Soon, Siu Sang stopped reading her letters altogether.
She is sure that her party dresses and thin jackets will be of little use, that there will likely be no servants. This confuses her. After all, she owns nothing else. Her mother has told her that there is no point in buying clothes in Hong Kong when she will not know what she needs until she arrives in Vancouver. She sifts through her slippery silks blankly. She begins to pack randomly; after all, no one can tell her otherwise. She will carry only one trunk with her on the boat; the rest will be shipped ahead and will wait, like ghosts of herself, in Yen Mei’s apartment.
Her younger sister has refused to help with the packing and has instead taken to spending all her time at the library and, as their mother says, “meeting who knows what.” Siu Sang misses her and wishes her dry humour and wicked grins were close by to temper all the seriousness. Her brothers are little help and only smile at her sheepishly and silently, as if they feel sorry for her but cannot say it.
She pulls her clothes out of her drawers and closet blindly, pushing things into her trunk in clumps. A gecko stares at her from his perch on the wall.
She plucks one novel from her shelf and places it carefully between layers of silk. On the cover is a beautiful young woman sitting at a precise angle that shows off her impressive bustline and tiny waist. She wears a tweed pencil skirt and blouse and looks lovely, but normal. A girl to fall in love with, a girl you wish you were.
Her mother has told her she will have no time for dreaming or reading, but Siu Sang doesn’t quite believe her. Surely washing dishes and serving her mother-in-law medicinal soups won’t take up all her time. She will steal a few moments: before sleep, in the tub, in the morning. Just one book, only one. She is sure it will be fine.
The night before she leaves, she lies in her bed and peers out her window. There, in the street, is the scene she knows, has fallen asleep to her whole life. She has always changed it in her dreams, made it pretty. But tonight is her last one here, so she stares at the street as it is, lets its roughness and dirt and movement impress itself on her brain. It hurts, she thinks, but she continues, letting the bright hotness and dirt and noise assault her. She watches until dawn and sees the sun rise through a crack in the buildings, turning everything, for a moment, the colour of gold.
She paces in her cabin, her trunk lying open on the floor by her narrow bed. Through a tiny round window she can see the dark water and the faint light reflected on its surface. She hears a low groaning noise rising from the bowels of the boat, and she feels light-headed.
For the first time, Siu Sang is really alone.
She has spent her whole life surrounded by her family, by her brothers and sisters, servants, the people on the street right outside her home. She shared her bedroom, walked to school with her sisters, went to the café with her friends. On rainy days she sat in her favourite spot by the window and dreamed while her mother hovered and wondered what her daughter could possibly be thinking about.
Here, the window offers nothing except shades of grey and blue, alternating textures of dark and light. She has no telephone, and has spent her first four meals on this boat alone. She thinks she is perhaps not pretty enough for the other young people on board and does not try to approach anyone. The pattern of the tablecloths in the dining room is burned forever on her brain.
She picks up her old novel and begins to read. She knows so much of it by heart that, two hours later, she finds herself looking at the last page and wondering what else she could possibly do. She sighs and stands up to open her cabin door.
She steps out into the hallway and sees another girl popping her head out of the door directly opposite. The girl looks up at Siu Sang and smiles, her grin more like a monkey’s than a person’s. She steps out and offers her hand.
“What’s your name?”
“Leung Siu Sang. And you?”
“My Western name is Susie. My mother said I have to start introducing myself that way so that I’ll be used to it by the time I arrive in Canada. Are you going to be married too?”
“How did you know?”
Susie laughs knowingly. “Oh, so many girls from my class at school were getting ready to go to Canada. There are a lot of boys there, you know, and no women at all, except old ones. But I think it’ll be a great adventure, really exciting. I heard they have eight-foot bears there. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about bears.” Siu Sang is confused.
“Me neither, but that’s the fun part. Do you want to get a soda with me? They have snacks in the dining room between meals.”
They walk together to the dining room, Siu Sang listening while Susie talks. After their snack, Susie wonders if they can trick the other passengers and crew into thinking they are twins. Siu Sang thinks this is impossible and says, “But I am much taller, and our faces are completely different.”
Susie laughs again. “Don’t you see? That’s the challenge. There’s no fun in doing something if it’s too easy.”
Siu Sang doesn’t see.
Together, they walk around the deck, engaging in conversation with as many people as possible. Susie, Siu Sang soon learns, has been taking English lessons in preparation for her marriage and is eager to use it.
“We’re twins, born at the same time. We are going to Canada to marry two brothers. We look alike, yes?” Most people simply nod and agree. Siu Sang stands to the side, chewing on her fingers, hoping that no one will figure out this lie and punish them somehow.
The captain, a British man from Brighton, calls them Sue and Susie. “Like two peas in a pod,” he says. “You can’t even tell them apart.”
The motion of the boat now seems a part of Siu Sang’s body, the gentle rocking like the pulse of her blood. When she sleeps, she floats through her dreams fluidly, down and then up again, where she wakes, gasping for air.
In between visits with Susie (although they are hardly visits, more like explorations during which Susie inevitably drags her to an obscure corner of the ship, where they are chased out by men who seem not quite angry but not quite happy, either), Siu Sang has had a lot of time to think. This trip is like an extended twilight, the in-between time after leaving and before arriving. An afterlife that isn’t quite death.
Her mother frightened her with cryptic warnings, and her voice never quite leaves Siu Sang’s head. Her mother-in-law, a woman she has never met, never written a letter to, never even seen a photograph of, looms like a giant in her mind. Although her older sister is now married, she has said little about her own mother-in-law, who still lives in a small village in China. Siu Sang will be living with her future husband’s parents and does not have the comfort of distance to help her.
She thinks little of her husband, and when she does, she drifts off, her mind repeating, over and over again, the image of his face in the photos they sent and the nice things he wrote in his letters. “You are very beautiful,” he wrote, “and I miss you before I have ev
en met you.”
When she has been thinking too much (as her mother always told her she did), she tries to tell herself that she is only making herself more frightened than she needs to be. Her husband’s family are only human, after all, and cannot do anything that bad to her. She convinces herself of this for a couple of hours, maybe an entire afternoon, but that creeping, almost-dark feeling always returns, and she is left exactly where she started.
Sometimes, she feels like a pawn. There have always been other people who decided what she should do or where she should go. She thinks she should resent this, but does not. It is easier this way, and less trouble for everyone.
On the second-to-last day of their trip, Susie trims her toenails at the foot of Siu Sang’s bed, cursing as she tries to steady her hands against the sway of the ocean. It’s no use; unlike Siu Sang, she’s a round girl, built solid, with stiff, heavy-footed legs. She is unable to throw her body into the movement of the waves. Susie tosses the clippers aside and picks up a nail file instead.
Siu Sang has the covers pulled up to her small nose, her knees drawn up to her chest underneath. A driving rain has forced most of the passengers to stay in their rooms. The men play cards in the dining room. The women are mostly unseen. Last week, the captain told Susie to watch out for the rain, a sure sign that Vancouver isn’t far away. “I don’t know how the people who live there can survive. They must be a city of water rats,” he said as he strode away on the deck.
Siu Sang turns the idea over in her mind—a city teeming with dripping rats, moving like one furry ocean across sidewalks and concrete, through puddles whose muddy, opaque water splashes up and clings to their fur. She shakes her head and feels the warmth of the blankets around her like the heat of Hong Kong—slightly musty, humid, pervasive.
She hears Susie whisper.
“Susie, did you say something?” Siu Sang sits up and sees Susie hunched over her knees, her head hidden.
End of East, The Page 10