by Rebecca Lee
“Why?” The man raised his eyebrows.
“Why will this fish give us this knowledge?”
“Because a fish’s desire is be eaten, and this fish has waited all these years.” He seemed to have made this up on the spot.
“Seems counterintuitive,” Min said.
The man looked annoyed with us, so we moved on. I carried the fish. It did have a sort of sad, waiting look to it. I took a bite. The texture was webby, bristly. It had a layer of crystalline, almost invisible salt, and my throat tightened against it.
“Mmm,” I said to Min. “It’s working already. Have a bite.”
Min took a bite, and made a gagging noise. We sucked on it for a while, until an incredible thirst overtook us both. I didn’t want to throw it out uneaten, though, in case what the fish-seller had said was true. “Wrap it up,” Min said. “Send it to your sad Mr. Harrison. He’ll eat it.” I smiled and eventually set it down in the gutter for a stray cat.
We passed into the next street, which was, suddenly, a thoroughfare lined with marble-and-glass skyscrapers. The rest of the week would pass exactly like this—each street a small, soft shock. Because I was from the prairies, a city built on hills struck me as voluptuous, revealing. Beyond a row of gray shanties I could see a beautiful pink mansion on a hill, and beyond that another hill with a dark Catholic crucifix rising from it, and beyond that the Hindu monks crawling up a slope, tilling a small plot of berries. And every day I would see, here and there, the long silver barracks of the refugee camps, shining and surrounded by barbed wire.
I read in the Hong Kong Standard that Amnesty International had now declared conditions in the camps—erupting sewers, severe malnutrition, scant medical care—“deplorable.” Relief groups in the United States also criticized the British and Hong Kong governments, calling the camps “odious.” Even famously neutral Canada joined in. And when one of Margaret Thatcher’s attachés, the toady Mr. Olson, proposed a plan to send back some of the refugees as a message to other Vietnamese not to attempt the journey, the Pope, from his flowery balcony above Saint Peter’s, declared repatriation in this case “an assault on human dignity.”
DURING THAT FIRST WEEK we went to the Wednesday night races. We ate dinner in a glassy booth high above the track. It jutted out far above the bleachers and seemed to float there, unattached to anything. It was the British club. We sat at a table with one of Albert’s colleagues, a man named Kingsley, and his silent wife. He talked about the Vietnamese all night. “I do find it best,” he said at one point, “that we’ve decided to send them back.”
“We haven’t decided that,” Albert said. “In fact, I’m sure it won’t happen. If we send them back, some will surely be hurt.”
“No, no. We’ll get the Viet government to agree not to touch them.”
“The whole world is already against us. Even the Americans.”
“Let me tell you something about the Americans,” Kingsley said. “The only thing to remember is that, God bless them, they are vulgarians. The only thing they do reasonably well is entertain. They make amusing movies that the adult world indulges in for a few moments after dinner. But their political ideas? Worthless. They sympathize with the bastards? We have forty-seven thousand of them washing up on our shore, and the Americans have offered to take two hundred of them.” He looked at me. His face was covered in bristly gray hair. “Sorry,” he said to me. Later, when some bagpipe music came over the loudspeaker, Kingsley leaned back and I thought he might weep.
After dinner the betting began. In the little hovering booth the very idea of betting seemed conceptual. These were extremely wealthy people, and money moved through the room as if it were oxygen, or time—in such abundance it was no longer visible.
Later Min and I took the shaky elevator to the ground level. There I saw money. People carried it crumpled in their hands. The cement floor was littered with slips of paper. We watched the end of a race through an opening in the bleachers. From above, the horses had seemed to move effortlessly, but from here I could see the froth at their mouths, and their eyes filling with tears as they stepped off the track.
“Can you believe that Kingsley guy?” Min said, loosening his bow tie. Bells rang, marking the start of another race. Somebody released a bagful of white birds into the air, for luck.
ON MONDAY, I DISCOVERED that Min’s job would be downtown, at the office, but mine would be in the house. Early that morning I followed Albert as he limped through a series of hallways and up some stairs, until we were walking down a long moss-green hallway. At the end of it, Albert opened a large door and introduced me to my office. It had vaulted ceilings and enormous windows that looked out over the Pacific. The sun fell in as if it were aimed directly at this room, which contained a large desk, gilded, with tiny rubies encrusted at its edges. I smiled at this room, so pleasant and dramatic simultaneously. “It’s beautiful, Albert,” I said. “It’s so generous. I hope I won’t disappoint you.”
“Impossible,” he said. “When Min called me from America, he said he had found a woman as serious and as beautiful as his mother. I was skeptical at first, but I see you are a remarkable woman.”
I was silent at this. I had never received such a grand compliment, and I was deeply flattered. “Thank you,” I finally said.
“Have a seat,” he said, walking over to the desk and pulling out a chair, which was upholstered and intricately carved. I sat down. Albert sat on the edge of the desk. “As you know,” he said, “Min will be married in this next year.”
“That soon?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Has his wife been selected?”
“No. That is where you come in. You will be choosing the wife.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Albert, I am honored, I can’t tell you how honored, but I’m really not qualified to do that. I mean, after all, I’m a foreigner here.”
“You are his best friend. Who better to discover a wife?”
“Well, Min, for one.”
“Min is a fool in these matters, as was I, before Lada.”
“What if I choose the wrong person?”
“It’s not that simple. You will actually choose a woman, and I will approve her, and then Min will meet her. He will not be required to marry her. We have all summer before you return to America, so there is plenty of time to make this decision. It must be somebody the entire family agrees upon, and since you are Lada’s eyes for now, your vote will count to the same degree that hers would if she were alive.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head.
Albert looked worried. “Of course, Sarah, if you prefer not to do this, that is fine. Please stay as our guest anyway. I do not want to drive you away with this request. I want you to be happy here.”
This broke my heart. “Oh, I am,” I said. “Of course I will be pleased to help you. I just hope I won’t disappoint you.”
“That is quite impossible,” he said.
“Well, then,” I said, “when should I start?”
“Now would be perfect. The applications are in the desk.”
“Applications?”
“Yes. Letters and photos of different women. Some have recommended themselves; others have been recommended by their parents or friends. You will look at those, and narrow the field to perhaps fifty or one hundred that you can interview.”
“What about criteria?” I asked, and winced. All those years of feminist theory had led me here, to this little red-gem room, swathed in sunlight, me sitting at a desk, asking about criteria by which I should judge other women. Hands, eyes, heart.
“I trust your instinct. The only thing I ask is that you provide a description of each woman after you meet her.”
“All right.”
“My own mother, Min’s grandmother, sat at this same desk and determined that I would marry Lada. Her files are still in that cabinet. I’ve had them translated so that you can look through them.”
“All
right. Thank you.”
“No,” he said, “thank you, Sarah.” He closed the door behind him.
I opened the large drawer to my left. Inside were stacks and stacks of letters. Most had a photograph clipped to them. I picked up the first one. The woman had a friendly, shy smile, and curious eyes. I thought she looked smart. I wondered briefly if this would be the one, right here. What a coincidence that would be. I read her letter. “I am a chemistry student in Beijing. I have moments of beauty. I will work, if that is your wish, or not if it isn’t.”
Nah, I thought, too humble for Min. I placed her application on a small table behind me, which became from that moment on the place for discarded applications. As I reached to pick up the second application, I was suddenly horrified that I had slipped into this job so easily. I stood up and went over to inspect the cabinet where Min’s grandmother’s notes were kept. They were neatly organized. On the front of each woman’s file was Min’s grandmother’s assessment. She wrote in characters, and underneath, in parenthesis, somebody had translated them into English for me.
About the first woman the grandmother had written, “No, looks out of corner of eyes, suspicious and addicted to finding fault.”
“Ouch,” I said, flipping to the next file. Tough old broad, that grandmother. The next one said, “Possibility—Midnight-black hair, walk is like a leopard’s, carnal desires strong.” The next few were all rejections: “Silly, without dignity, spoils everything she touches.” “Monkey-woman, scurries through the day, loves confusion.” And under one name Min’s grandmother had written only “Pleases no one.”
I skimmed them all. There must have been close to fifty. On the very bottom of the pile I found a description of Lada. “Is not Chinese, but of lowland Himalayas. Has no wealth, but carries purple light. Seems like a cloud about to burst. Sleeps lightly, fond of gods.”
EARLY THAT EVENING, BEFORE dinner, I changed into my bathing suit and climbed the several stories of the house to spread open the large metal doors that led to the roof, into the swirling, hallucinatory light of sunset. There I found Min, sitting in a stone whirlpool, his head tilted back on the ledge, half sleeping after his first day of work.
I stared at him for a while, wondering what would happen if I offered myself as the bride. But then, as I slowly slipped into the warm water, I realized that the hundreds of hours I had spent with Min had, by the mysterious alchemy of friendship, distilled out any romance, like the stream rising all around us now, leaving us pure, fast friends.
Min’s eyes opened and he smiled lazily at me.
“Min,” I said, “do you have any idea what my job is?”
“I think so,” he said.
“I’m supposed to find you a wife.”
Min didn’t look surprised but just lay there, a relaxed, confident grin on his face. “It’s strange, isn’t it, how things work out?”
“Yes,” I said emphatically. “It’s very strange.”
My bedroom was next to Min’s. Later that night, after we had played a gentle, courteous game of Mah-Jongg with Albert, Min cried out in his sleep. I sat up straight in my bed. This was the second time that week. It was such a sad, childish yelping, and so deeply at odds with his personality, that it shocked me. I couldn’t help thinking of his mother. I was seized with a sudden desire that she be alive and that she take on this job of finding Min happiness, finding him a wife.
Sometime in those early weeks I first saw Rapti. I often went for walks around the neighborhood late in the afternoon. I found a little shop called Asia Foodstore at the foot of the neighborhood. It was pleasantly crowded in the afternoons, full of Filipino amahs and expats shopping after work. Rapti was an amah. When I saw her, she was carrying a very large blond baby in a cloth carrier. The baby rested on her chest, facing her.
I noticed her because she was singing a quiet syncopated song to the baby, full of clicking baby noises. She had black braids and was quite tall.
Earlier that day I had found a sheet of paper on which Min’s grandmother had written her definition of the “superior woman.” At the top of the page is said, “Formula for Woman, According to Dignity.” The formula was “Has excellent posture, which is two-thirds contentment and one-third desire.”
At first I thought this a bit arbitrary. But all day the idea had been passing through my mind like a mantra. I began to think, in this strange place—half kingdom, half city—that the grandmother’s formula caught the entire world in its tiny palm. Two-thirds contentment, one-third desire. Of course, I thought, as I spiraled my way through the trees to Asia Foodstore, that is the composition of the world. And so when I saw Rapti walking up and down the aisles, singing contentedly to the baby, letting him reach for and touch every last thing in the store, she seemed, suddenly, to embody this formula.
I ran into her almost every day after that, going up or down the hills. We nodded to each other at first, and later had small conversations. I discovered that she worked for a Canadian couple, toy-makers, who lived a block away from Min. They worked during the day and left their baby, Jack, with Rapti. “He is my best friend,” Rapti said, removing her left braid from his mouth. He liked to chew on her braids whenever he could.
When I told Rapti that I was staying with the Leung family, she frowned. “Really?” she said.
“Why do you frown?”
“I hear a lot about them.”
“Yes. This is a hard time for Mr. Leung and Min, his son.”
“I know who Min is,” she said. “I guess I don’t feel too sorry for them. I feel more sorry for the Vietnamese.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to quarrel with her.
Over the next month I discovered that she was the leader of a movement to unionize all the amahs from the Philippines. She was also a sort of unofficial consultant to other foreign-worker groups in Hong Kong. Often when I saw her, she and the baby had returned from a rally downtown or a protest outside the Regent. They returned by bus in the late afternoon to shop at Asia Foodstore and then walk with me up the hill. The baby often leaned back in the pouch and stared up at Rapti as she talked. I liked to imagine that baby’s future memories. The Canadian couple were planning on moving back home in a year, where the baby would grow up on some gentle, ordinary plain, in Alberta or Saskatchewan, and have exhilarating dreams of fantastic Asia, its red setting sun and soaring ginkgo trees, and of Rapti, too, her soft, intelligent voice, her tantalizing blue-black braids floating above.
AS THE DAYS PASSED, I slowly narrowed the list of candidates to a hundred that I would interview. I had tried to create different methods by which to sift fairly through the applications, but none was successful. Eventually I worked entirely by instinct, or, more accurately, by capricious reasoning—the tilt of her handwriting; the beauty of her name, Lily Chen, Mei-Mei Fai; or even an elaborate hairstyle I wanted to see in person.
Aside from this impossible task, I began to love my summer in Hong Kong. What had made me such a poor traveler in the past, getting no farther than Canada and once, briefly, Mexico, and disliking even that, was that I had a love of repetition and schedule. Perfect days, for me, began with identical food and drink and activity; not until dusk would I develop the restlessness that is supposed to mark people in their twenties, the desire for the day to flower, to reveal something or somebody never imagined. So in Hong Kong each weekday morning I went to the roof, sat in the whirlpool with Min, drank coffee as the sun exploded over the mountains, read the previous day’s New York Times and the present day’s Hong Kong Standard. We listened to BBC at eight-thirty, and when Min left for work with his father, I retired to my office to do my strange work. At noon I ate one cucumber sandwich, one bag of squid chips, and one pomelo. Then I worked until two o’clock. I spent the afternoons swimming in the pool, reading, buying groceries down at Asia Foodstore with Rapti.
Each night, though, was different from the last—horse races, restaurants that seemed carved out of pure blocks of ivory or bronze, meals of pastel lo
bsters as large as infants, psychedelic fireworks on the harbor. We also went to many gritty movies that were shot locally—Hong Kong Gigolo, Warrior of the Harbor—where in every single scene, even the most deeply romantic ones, something would explode.
But my favorite thing to do at night was to take a boat ride to the island Lantau, where we would hike in the dark jungle to a small monastery built on stone. There they served us thin soup that looked like water but tasted like the ocean—salty, warm, the smell a hint of every creature in the world—eel, fish, lizard, horse, human being—had at one time passed through it.
ALL SUMMER WE HEARD murmurs that the Hong Kong government, despite internal dissent, was actually going to attempt to repatriate some of the Vietnamese. The first group, we heard, would be sent back to Hanoi secretly and suddenly, in order to avoid riots. They would be awakened in the middle of the night and forced onto a boat or a plane.
The Vietnamese had publicly announced that they would use their homemade weapons against anybody who came for them. Relief workers and guards inside the camps reported that each night they fell asleep to the steady grinding sound of metal being sharpened into weapons.
One week in early July, Margaret Thatcher visited Hong Kong. The Vietnamese had asked that she come to the camps on her visit so that they could discuss their situation with her, but she had refused. Late on a Friday afternoon Albert took Min and me up in a small government jet to see what the Vietnamese had done to protest her refusal. The sky was cloudless, the sun a bright pink. We drank beer, circling, sweeping over the city. At first I didn’t see it when Albert pointed, but then it caught the sun and sparkled. Along the silver roofs was spelled out in white stones. “Thatcher has no heart.”
Albert shook his head sadly. From this distance you could see his entire problem mapped out. In the troubled, sun-gilded water surrounding Hong Kong hundreds of people were bobbing in small boats, waiting, begging Albert and his colleagues to let them in. But if he did, they would be held in the crowded camps as illegal immigrants and treated worse than prisoners.
