by Robert Daley
Hong Kong traffic got more intense every year. From time to time as they moved slowly along the streets, Koy murmured that this or that had changed. He spoke in Hakka, the language of their courtship, and she answered in Hakka. Although she also spoke Cantonese and Mandarin, she had never learned much English. She answered in monosyllables because it was best to avoid all risk. Perhaps he did not wish her to speak. She had no confidence in herself. In his presence at last she realized this. There was none left. Confidence was like a candle that had gone out. Only he could relight it. She could not give confidence to herself. No one could. It had to come from another. Sometimes she could feel him staring at her, and she kept her gaze averted because she was afraid she might see, mirrored in his eyes, the woman she was: one who still did not speak English, and who as a result could not move easily in the same circles he did; a woman now closer to fifty than forty. A certain Chinese proverb had been much in her mind lately: the husband will pick a plum blossom as his wife becomes a prune. Nothing could be more normal than that.
Beside her Koy did not trust himself to speak either, for to speak would be to betray how hard his heart was beating. He wanted to take her in his arms but couldn’t because of the presence of the chauffeur. Public displays of affection, to a Chinese, were the worst form of bad manners and he had no intention of losing face in front of a chauffeur he had never seen before this day.
Even after they had entered their house, a mansion on a hill overlooking Repulse Bay and the South China Sea, he was constrained to act correctly, distantly, for some time longer. It was nearly dusk by then. The house had once been owned by a Pan American vice president in the days when Pan Am owned the only long-range flying boats able to cross the Pacific, and the internal airline of China as well. The chauffeur had carried Koy’s bags upstairs to the room Orchid had ordered prepared for him. When they heard his footsteps pattering down the back stairs, Koy turned toward his wife and in the dim light of the hallway, a yard of air between them, took both her hands. But they gazed at each other like the strangers they had perhaps become.
They had been married when she was fifteen years old, and he two years older. Already speaking English, he had come back from Hong Kong to her village to claim her. He was the first boy in Orchid’s life and she the first girl in his, but from the traditional point of view it had been a bad marriage for both, for she was only a village shopkeeper’s daughter. The streets of her village were not even paved, and she brought him no dowry. His father totally disapproved, and as a result he had been obliged to leave Canton, to take his bride to Hong Kong to try to make his fortune there - the young couple would have been ostracized by both families and by most friends had they stayed. To the Chinese at that time, and still today, there were a number of good reasons to marry, but love was not among them. To be sincere in love, it was written, was to be grotesque.
But suppose he had married some other girl in the traditional way, one chosen by the two families, Koy sometimes asked himself. What might his career have been? Probably he would have become a banker in Canton like his father. Instead he had landed in Hong Kong with a frightened fifteen-year-old girl to take care of, still a boy himself, with no money and no prospects, and he had fought his way up the only path he had seen open before him. As a businessman he had achieved undreamed-of prosperity. He had wanted to be respectable too, but had never had time. Prosperity had been due principally, he believed, to the rules of conduct he had set himself, and to which he had adhered rigidly. He believed in li - which might be defined as the Tightness of things. What was not li was not done. He learned to extract small amounts of money from the many, rather than large amounts from the few, and thus avoided the making of devoted enemies. These amounts were always stipulated in advance, and never exceeded, and in exchange he gave his clients what they paid for. He provided the protection he promised - protection from street marauders, from rival entrepreneurs, and from the police. Whenever possible he shied away from violence, which he had identified from the first as a bad business technique. Only occasionally was it essential, and even then he ordered it reluctantly, being careful each time to keep it at two or three removes from himself. He left such assignments to those with a talent for it: Sergeant Hung here in Hong Kong, and in later years Nikki Han in New York.
Now in the dim hallway Koy had reached at last for both his wife’s hands. She seemed to give them up reluctantly, like small change she did not really want to part with, and there was no expression on her face that Koy could read. Her face was like a road with no traffic on it, which disconcerted him completely. There ought to have been something. He started to speak, but was interrupted by footsteps on the staircase and then by the appearance of a teenage boy who came down upon them, out of control, bounding like a loose soccer ball.
“My son,” said Koy.
The boy was seventeen, and he pulled up short to see his father. He was dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, the international teenage uniform.
But his manner was surly. He was not interested in Koy and he was in a hurry to get out. “Hi,” he said. “Will you be here long?”
His mother reached to straighten out the collar of his shirt. “He would not come to the airport to meet his father,” she chided. “He said he was too busy.”
Koy was trying to feel joy to see his son. This was the only son he had - the three children in New York were all girls. But the boy was so distant it was difficult to feel anything at all. “I expected to see you,” he said.
After a short silence the teenager said: “Perhaps I did not believe you were really coming. When you went away I was a child. Perhaps I did not believe you were still alive.”
“We’ll spend some time together now,” said Koy heartily, but he had been stung by his son’s words. “It was not my wish to leave you when I did, nor to stay away as long as I have.” He was trying to explain himself, he realized, not so much to the boy as to Orchid.
“I have to go,” his son said sullenly. When he was halfway through the door, he muttered “I’ll see you later.”
Koy, both perplexed and hurt, turned back to his wife, but she did not move to console him. “He’s running with a bad gang,” she said. “I told you that on the phone. I can’t reach him. You’re his father. You have to do something.”
There were a number of reasons why Koy had returned to Hong Kong at this time. This was one of them. “I’ll try,” he said. He frowned.
Koy was unusual among Chinese, and he knew this - he was a man who valued females. He thought females were, or could be important. This was contrary to the Chinese tradition. There were many adages and sayings which perhaps sounded comical to Westerners but which the Chinese took seriously. For instance “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.” Or, “When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls.” But Koy respected both his wives and valued all three daughters, whom he intended to educate in the best schools.
Nonetheless, he was not immune to the four thousand years of civilization that had formed him, and the firstborn son was special to every Chinese. This was especially true of Koy because the boy was so late in coming. He had thought for many years that Orchid could not have children - that he might die childless. When she had at last conceived she had wanted to go immediately to an astrologer to ask if the child would be a son, and Koy, wanting to know also, had not dissuaded her. But the astrologer after studying the stars had found only confusion, so she went to another seer who sought the answer in the entrails of a freshly killed duck. The answer there was confusion too, and they had had to wait eight more months to find out. His son’s birth had brought him great joy. The problem now was to decide how best to straighten the kid out. Could it be done here? Should Koy bring him to New York, enroll him in some tough school there?
“When are you going back?” Orchid asked.
“I can’t stay long in Hong Kong. Business-”
“Take him with you,” Orchid urged. “The boy ne
eds a father - badly.” After hesitating, she added, “Take me with you. I need a husband.” Her eyes dropped to the floor and she added almost inaudibly: “Badly.”
“Well,” said Koy, “it would not be suitable for you in New York. Still we’ll talk about it later, all right?”
Orchid, who was wearing a white linen suit cut in the Western style such as any woman might wear to meet her husband at the airport, excused herself. She wanted to change before dinner, she said. Left alone, Koy pushed through the scarlet satin curtains that hung in the doorway and entered the principal room, and to his surprise it was just as he remembered it. The cushions on the carved wooden chairs were covered with the same scarlet satin. The tables were blackwood, and the overhead beams were painted blue and red. Here and there stood statuettes of various household gods and goddesses, and these were the guardians of happiness, money, and long life. On the walls hung picture scrolls of landscapes brushed in black ink upon white silk. The air was sweet to his nose - sweet with perfumes of soaps and oils. The floor was of tile, and latticed windows opened onto a court and onto a round, lighted pool where goldfish swam, their sides flashing in the light like birds in the sun. He turned back into the room. There was a mantelpiece on which stood two high brass candlesticks. Between them hung a painting of the sacred mountain of Wu T’ai, and under it stood a pot of yellow orchids, the imperial color.
It was Orchid who had chosen this house, and its ownership was in her name. Secretly, knowing Koy would not approve, she had consulted a geomancer or feng-shui expert before deciding to buy it - she had told him this afterwards. The Chinese believed that the universe was based on the interaction of two opposing forces, Yin and Yang, negative and positive, and that good feng-shui - living in a place where the combination of natural forces was harmonious - brought good fortune to a family. And although Koy no longer believed in gods and goddesses, or Yin and Yang - or astrologers - still he was pleased that his wife, when choosing a home, had decided to take no risks that could be avoided.
Koy went through into the next room, which was a kind of chapel. There were a dais and altar at one end on which stood an incense burner with vases of flowers to either side. The wall above was nearly covered with red and gold tablets that commemorated the family dead. If the Chinese made poor colonizers, Koy thought, it was because the wandering souls of their ancestors kept calling them back to pray in front of ancestral tablets such as these.
That night Orchid wore a floor-length satin robe of imperial yellow embroidered with small pomegranate-red flowers. Into her still jet black hair she had set an exquisite piece of jewelry - a small flower of seed pearls that seemed to grow out of leaves of thin green jade. They sat at dinner a long time. Koy could not take his eyes off her. They talked of their son who had been expected to join them, but had not come home. Koy would have preferred a more neutral subject. There were too many problems in his life, and the only one he cared about tonight was this woman opposite him. Tomorrow would be time enough for the others.
The servants padded about on rope-soled shoes that were noiseless upon the tiles. There were eight courses, eight surprises, eight delicious rest periods in which to savor the preceding dish and to imagine whatever might come next. Orchid’s cook, in the best tradition of Chinese gastronomy, brought to this dinner the excitement of a sporting event. Each dish was a distinct contrast in color, texture and flavor from all the others, and each was cooked differently, for the first was stir-fried and the next braised, the ones after that steamed, lacquered, salt-baked. These were all rare dishes Koy had loved in the past, delicacies whose ingredients, for the most part, could not be found in New York, or could not be found fresh. Orchid was spoiling him, as she always had, and he remembered how, when they were adolescents, she had known how to find and bring to him the small, yellow-fleshed, sweet summer melons that grew on dung heaps in her village. She would search for them under the leaves, tapping them with her finger, for when ripe they sounded as hollow as a drum, and they would break them open and feast on them together.
Tonight the centerpiece dish was explosive fried lobster. The heat under the lobster and the flavored oils in which it cooked had been increased until the shells were almost red hot, whereupon a cup of cold sauce was poured over them. This caused a near explosion of the shells, allowing the flavored oils to penetrate the flesh, and at the same time creating a new and delectable sauce to which a lightly beaten egg was added in a thin stream. The flesh itself, enhanced and augmented by all of these flavors, was exquisite, and to suck the sauce from the shells was considered one of the peak delights of Cantonese cuisine.
But by the time the explosive lobster was served Koy and his wife had fallen silent. Neither was much interested in the food. They were concentrated on each other, and the remaining dishes went back to the kitchen largely uneaten.
When the last had been cleared away they sat in silence sipping tea. They could hear the servants trotting through the house making final preparations for the night.
Orchid went upstairs, there to bathe and perfume her body, taking special care of the seven orifices, as any Chinese woman would. Koy remained in the principal room studying the painted scrolls that hung on the walls: bamboo leaves that were delicately drawn against dark rocks, plum blossoms that mingled with chrysanthemums. The precision and delicacy of these paintings pleased him. They seemed to be related to his own life. A powerful painting, like a powerful man, must be informed and controlled from within. Then only may it be called genius.
When Koy went upstairs, he found his wife sitting in front of a dressing table. He watched as she unwound her long black hair and combed it out using a Chinese wooden comb perfumed with the fragrance of a cassia tree.
An hour later, calm at last, contented, they lay in the dark holding each other close.
“I had forgotten what it was like to have a husband,” Orchid murmured. This was as close as a proper Chinese woman could come to expressing any emotion related to sexual love. In all the Chinese dialects, the word for tradition and good manners was the same, and sex as a subject had always been proscribed. It could not be discussed between men and women, not even between couples who had been married many years.
“And I had forgotten how skilled you are,” said Koy, employing the Chinese euphemism for sexual intercourse, “at the game of clouds and rain.”
Orchid clung to him. “Don’t go away again,” she said. “Stay with me here. There is enough money. You know there is. You need never work again.”
This was true, but Koy did not work for money. Poor people worked for money. Rich people worked for something else, and Koy knew this. They accepted challenges. They challenged themselves. Koy himself worked for power and prestige, the gold and silver currency of the man who had everything. Both were ephemeral. Both, therefore, had to be exploited immediately, ruthlessly. He could not stay here in Hong Kong. In addition, he had another family in New York: a younger wife, three tiny children.
“I must go back to New York,” he told Orchid. “I can’t leave it.”
But he wished he had never got involved with any other woman than this one. If only he had not been so lonely. His conduct could be explained of course; it just couldn’t be explained away. If only he had not met Betty Eng who, being a fourth generation Chinese-American, had seemed to him an exotic creature such as he had never known before. She had caught him, obviously, in the classic middle-age crisis. She had made him remember his lost youth. He had experienced with her emotions and sensations he had thought he would never know again. His passion had become love - or at least it could no longer be distinguished from love. And all this time it had been impossible to bring Orchid to New York to join him, for the Corruption Commission held her passport, and financial holdings in her name had been blocked. In New York the inevitable had happened: marriage. But when he thought of it now, holding in his arms the first and truest love of his life, Koy felt ashamed.
Orchid’s hand lay over his heart. She said: “It
is said that contentment is best achieved by not running after it.”
“That’s true.”
“I don’t want to lose you again.”
“Nor I you,” said Koy, and he knew he meant it.
Orchid knew he meant it too, and in her elation sat bolt upright on the bed, her hair hanging to her breasts. “What will we do tomorrow?” she cried, as excited as a child. “What will you buy me tomorrow?”
The young girl he had married used to ask him to buy her the coarse sweets street vendors sold, the red sugar cakes, the sesame toffee, the rice-flour dumplings stuffed with sweet bean paste. They had stood in the dusty street eating the stuff. Orchid had spoken in the same voice then, employed even the same phrases, and beside her in the dark Koy laughed because he was so happy. “Tomorrow I’ll buy you anything that is in my power to buy you,” he said, and pulled her down to him.
OUTSIDE, a short distance up the darkened street, a surveillance truck was parked next to a telephone pole. Wires led from the truck to a junction box high up on the pole. The Chinese detective, who had been smoking a cigarette on the lee side of the truck, cigarette cupped carefully in his hand, ground the butt out underfoot and climbed back into the truck.
At Corruption Commission headquarters, Powers sat across the desk from Sir David.
“I’m told there have been no telephone calls in or out,” said Sir David. “I imagine they are tucked in for the night.”
“You can give your guys a rest. He’s with a wife he hasn’t seen for years. He won’t budge until morning.”
“My detectives are Chinese,” said Sir David. “There is no need to relieve them. The Chinese are very good at waiting.” He rose stretching, and stepped out from behind his desk. He was still wearing the bush jacket and the short pants. “But I agree with you, there’s no point in our staying on here. I think I shall go home to bed, and I suggest you do the same. I’ll have a car brought around to run you back to your hotel.”
