Red Oblivion

by Leslie Shimotakahara

  “I’m sorry I stopped coming over for Chinese New Year, all those years ago,” First Cousin manages to say at last.

  It never struck me as all that strange that he’d stopped coming over, because — let’s face it — my father’s not the most pleasant guy to be around. Lots of relatives have stopped coming over the years. Ba likes to play the patriarch at these occasions, doling out all kinds of advice no one’s asked for — telling folks that they’ve messed up their lives by studying the wrong things at school, ordering them to go back in this or that program, expressing surprise that his niece can afford a lavish vacation when she still has a mortgage to pay off, does she not? Not a year goes by when Ba doesn’t snap at some little kid for bad behaviour, then reprimand the parents. First Cousin’s certainly not the only one to skip out on these cheery occasions. These days, we’re lucky if half a dozen relatives show up.

  But Third Aunt’s eyes continue to bore into her son.

  Now First Cousin starts crying — really crying, knots of emotion distorting every inch of his ruddy skin. “I’m sorry,” he manages to say, wiping away mucousy tears. “After all you did to help me …”

  I’m embarrassed for the guy. More than anything, though, I’m confused.

  Sure, my father helped First Cousin out, along with that whole wing of the family. When Celeste and I were little, they still lived in Guangzhou. I must have been five or six when I met them for the first time. First Cousin came over on his own and Ba gave him a place to live and helped him get a job as an electrician’s apprentice. Then Third Aunt, Second Aunt, their husbands, and other kids followed. It was the early ’80s; the Cultural Revolution was over by then and the Party was back-pedalling and condemning the whole thing like it’d all been a big mistake, a social experiment gone awry. The peasants, it turned out, weren’t going to rise up and remake society as a beautiful utopian vision. Life over there was tough. Not surprisingly, plenty of people wanted to move to Hong Kong.

  “I should have done more to help you out over the years, Uncle,” First Cousin continues, trying to get hold of himself. He crouches down at my father’s bedside, so that he’s positioned below Ba.

  After a long moment, my father nods. It’s not clear whether he has accepted this strange apology or he’s simply agreeing that yes, First Cousin should have done more over the years. Or maybe he just wants everyone to leave. Ba looks away, as if to signal that the visit is over.

  “Would you like to go across the street for some lunch?” My words sound surreal and absurd after everything that’s just happened.

  “Not today, thank you,” my aunt says. “My son needs to get back to work.”

  “What the fuck was that all about?” I whisper, as we’re waiting for the elevator.

  Celeste laughs bitterly. “Ba finally got what he’s wanted all these years.”

  “What does First Cousin have to apologize for?”

  But the elevator arrives and we find ourselves crammed on opposite sides of a woman carrying a massive potted fern.

  Across the street at Fairwood, we stand in line to order our rice and pork bowl sets. It’s too noisy to talk, so I wait until we’re carrying our steaming trays into the bright-orange interior.

  “What does First Cousin have to be sorry about?”

  Celeste sits down and looks at me incredulously. “You really don’t know anything about this?”

  “About …?”

  “Why do you think he stopped coming over for Chinese New Year? Why do you think all contact with him suddenly dropped off?”

  “I assumed the guy was busy. He had his own life.”

  “Yeah. And that was the problem, from Ba’s perspective.”

  Celeste has always been much closer to that side of the family. First Cousin’s younger sister is the same age as her and they used to be almost like sisters, which made me jealous at the time.

  “Do you remember when Ba brought that side of the family over?” she continues. “We were just little.”

  “Yeah. First Cousin came on his own, at first.”

  “That’s right. Ba paid smugglers to bring the kid over, when he was only fifteen.”

  “What? Ba paid smugglers?”

  Celeste seems amused by my shocked reaction. “Well, what did you think? How did you think he made it over here?”

  “How should I know?” As a child, I didn’t give any thought to how our cousin managed to immigrate.

  “This is China we’re talking about. It’s not like anyone could just say, ‘Oh, I think I’ll up and leave now’ — particularly back then. So smugglers were the easiest route. After First Cousin had gotten on his feet in Hong Kong, the money he earned as an electrician went toward paying the smugglers to bring the rest of the family over. And Ba contributed the lion’s share, I’m sure, because the whole thing couldn’t have been cheap.”

  The light seems to have changed tone, ever so slightly, bathing the skin of all the strangers around me in a harsh, waxy veneer. My shock fades somewhat, though; stories of circuitous migrations are not at all uncommon in this city, so why should my own family be any different?

  I hear myself say, sounding remarkably composed, “I still don’t understand why Ba and First Cousin had a falling out.”

  “In Ba’s eyes, the kid was indebted to him for the rest of his life. So whenever there’d be electrical problems at his building, he’d call First Cousin up out of the blue and expect him to drop everything and come over. He’d call late at night, on Sundays — it didn’t matter, when Ba wants it done, he wants it done now. You know how demanding he is. After running around like that for ten years, First Cousin had had enough. He was married by then, with a baby on the way. One day, he just stopped answering Ba’s calls.”

  “And Ba, being Ba, was furious.”

  “As far as I know, their visit today is the first time they’ve seen each other in over twenty years.”

  My brain’s gone woozy, overloaded by all this unwanted information. Celeste keeps looking at me like I’m even more out of it than she thought. Blinded by my hero worship of Ba.

  Yeah, okay, maybe I’ve been a bit slow on the uptake. But so what? “Ba did do a lot for that side of the family. If it weren’t for him, they’d all be —”

  “Oh, spare me. You sound so much like him it makes me sick!”

  “What are you talking about? I never —”

  “If Ba really wanted to help that side of the family, why didn’t he ask First Cousin to come live with us? A fifteen-year-old boy, all alone in a rooming house. Nice.”

  “Well, when Ba was fifteen he was already out working, supporting his entire family. That’s probably what he thought. And like you would’ve given up your bedroom for our cousin!”

  “I might have. Think about how Ba treated that kid — his own nephew. It’s no wonder someone’s sending dead mice in the mail.”

  I stare at my sister, her words settling heavily. She knows what I’m thinking, but she starts shaking her head. “No, First Cousin wouldn’t have sent the package. He’s a sweet, mild guy. Not vengeful.”

  “Not vengeful, because maybe deep down he’s grateful for all Ba did.”

  “All Ba did?” The scorn in my sister’s voice makes me back away from the table, from our cold meals. “He could’ve done a lot more, if he’d wanted to, but instead he preferred to let them all live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, in a tiny apartment that didn’t even have a toilet!”

  At least, here, I understand what Celeste’s referring to. We visited Second and Third Aunts and their families shortly after they’d all moved to Hong Kong. Their apartment was far away in the outskirts of Kowloon. The main thing I remember, like Celeste, is that their unit had no toilet. Mom had to take the two of us to a communal washroom shared by the entire floor. I wonder now why Ba didn’t do more to help them find better accommodations. Probably because my mother never liked that side of the family and Ba’s capital was tied up in his own ventures. And he’d just spent a shitload of money
paying off the smugglers.

  “You just don’t get it,” Celeste continues, “because you’ve always been Ba’s favourite.”

  “That is so not true.”

  “Ba’s always seen you as his heir apparent — he always put you in charge of the tea deliveries, Jill.”

  “Oh, right — the joy of lifting boxes!”

  When we were kids, she never wanted anything to do with Ba’s business. And for Christ’s sake, I didn’t want to do it, either. From time to time, when some restaurant or café would place a last-minute order for tea or juice, it was too minuscule to merit delivery by truck (or Ba was too cheap to pay for it). Instead, on Sunday afternoons, he’d expect me to drop everything and help out. He would drive us to the destination, jabbering on in his usual manner about currency fluctuations and new avenues for turning a profit, and when we’d get there, he’d bark at me to lift by bending at the knees to save my back from a lifetime of agony. If only we’d had a brother, then he’d have gotten stuck with this grunt work, but Ba had only me and Celeste, and she certainly wasn’t going to break a sweat for him, now was she?

  SEVEN

  Until now, I’ve been putting off seeing friends. Or to be more precise, my one friend. But after this latest screaming match with my sister, I’m ready for a stiff drink.

  I meet Terence at nine at The Upper House, in Admiralty. In this crowded city, it’s best to find secluded hotel bars, which hover, aerie-like, on the top floors of skyscrapers affording stunning views across the harbour. While in the elevator, my ears lightly popping, the sea of yellow umbrellas that went up outside on the pavement last year during Occupy flit into my mind and I feel uncomfortable — guilty, almost — about how much we’re about to blow on a few cocktails. But this place wasn’t my choice; Terence decides these things. And he let me know, on the one occasion we discussed Occupy, that he was right out there under those umbrellas, being part of history in the making. If it had gone on a lot longer, he’d have been as happy as anybody. The dip in the stock market worked to his advantage, allowing him to pick up stuff on the cheap. That’s democracy for you, Hong Kong–style. Terence talks jokingly, but it’s hard to tell if he means it. Conversations about politics tend to blur very quickly into chatter about the economy; people in this city are much more comfortable talking about money.

  The hostess leads me into the dimly lit interior, toward the continuous bank of greyish-blue upholstered benches winding like a snake across the length of the venue, Kowloon’s skyline sparkling on the other side of the harbour. Terence is nestled against a pillow, holding the house specialty, an Earl Grey martini.

  The guy looks the way he always does. A tad glum, gaunt through the face, dressed all in black, his jeans not quite as fitted as they used to be, now that he’s relaxing into the ease of middle age. His hair is shorter and more geometric than when I last saw him in February. His expression is blank, lost in thought, though it flickers to life when he catches sight of me.

  We embrace and he towers a head above, stooping slightly. I sit down and order a vodka martini, craving familiarity more than novelty.

  When he asks about my father, I decide to give the short, sanitized version for now: Ba’s recovering as well as can be expected. Terence doesn’t press, sensing that I’m more in the mood to escape from my problems than rehash them at the moment. Enough alcohol may reverse this, however.

  “So how’s business?” I ask.

  Terence owns a yakitori bar. It’s good, very authentic — a noisy, crowded joint like the kind they have in Tokyo. Walls covered in tatami. The grill behind the bar fuelled by coal, not gas. The sauces are homemade and you come out with your clothes smelling like you’ve spent the night in front of a bonfire.

  “Business is okay.” He says this like it could mean any number of things, none of which is okay exactly, cryptic as always.

  I wonder if he’s bored. Terence is a smart guy. When he first moved back to Hong Kong after his degree at Columbia, he worked for a few years as a fund manager, but he burned out or lost interest or something. He went on a long backpacking trip in Nepal and, at the end of it all, decided to fall back on the family business. His folks own quite a few restaurants and bars across the city. Terence helps manage them, while taking care of the family’s investment portfolio.

  They’ve got hostess bars and gambling dens, too, I’ve heard through the grapevine. Terence never talks about that end of the business, which his older brother handles. Celeste once told me that the Fok family has gangster ties. Or had gangster ties, back in the father’s day. Terence — in his well-tailored jackets, with his penchant for watching Gordon Ramsay cooking classes on YouTube for hours — strikes me as a far cry from any gangster.

  “I’m thinking of opening a sake bar in the space above my restaurant. A late-night venue. Intimate and cozy, jazz music. The kind of place you’d take a girl on a cool first date.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for an architect …?”

  “I thought you loved your job in Toronto.”

  “Oh, sure.” I hesitate, surprised by the excitement stirring inside me. “But I’m never too busy to do an interesting project on the side.”

  “So you are thinking of setting up your own practice. It’s in your blood, after all.”

  I make a face. “One project, Terence. A small project. I can handle that without uprooting my entire life.”

  “Looks like it’s been uprooted already. Did they give you a leave of absence?”

  “They weren’t thrilled about it, naturally.”

  We order more drinks. The alcohol works its way into my bloodstream, soothing me into pleasant numbness.

  “Are things any easier this time around?” Terence says, referring to the last time I was here for an extended period, when my mother was dying.

  “Oh, it’s just different. Mom was practically dead by the time I got here. She wasn’t a fighter, she didn’t fight to hang on. The complete opposite of my dad.”

  “You’re not going to be able to go home anytime soon, then?”

  Is that a hint of hopefulness I detect? “Probably not.”

  Home. Wherever that is.

  I ask Terence about how things are going with his girlfriend, Julianne. An air of remoteness drifts over him. The same air that always takes over whenever he talks about women, even when things are supposedly going well, which isn’t the case right now. He and Julianne haven’t seen each other in almost a month; she’s been travelling a lot on business. Or maybe just pretending to travel, in order to dodge his calls. “I’ve been ready to end this thing for ages, but I can’t if I can’t get hold of her.”

  “Guess that’s why she’s been avoiding you.”

  “I wouldn’t dump her. I’d let her dump me. That’s the gentlemanly thing to do. Less guilt, less blowback.”

  I snicker.

  “Well, wouldn’t you rather do the dumping?” he says.

  “I’d rather the guy grew some balls and told me what’s on his mind.”

  But that was Nick’s approach. In the end, he was the one who pulled the plug. And that was a shitty feeling, too.

  “Women in this city are too high maintenance,” Terence continues. “I’m not up to dating anymore.”

  “You should know that from dating Celeste!”

  He looks uncomfortable, and I regret having brought it up.

  “The only problem with staying single is that I’ll get stuck living with Mom forever. And as I said, Hong Kong women are high maintenance. Mothers being the highest maintenance of all.”

  “Fathers can be high maintenance, too.”

  “Yeah, but let’s face it, yours is old. He’s not going to linger on for decades.”

  “Let’s hope so, for everyone’s sake.”

  I’m tipsy now, more than tipsy. Kowloon’s skyline looks like a forest of Christmas trees, lit up with a neon brightness that appears to be trying too hard, and it suddenly makes me sad.

  “The hardest thing is I have no id
ea what my father wants from me right now.”

  “You’re here. That’s enough.”

  “I wish. He wants more, he’s always wanted more. The way he looks at me, while lying in that hospital bed, it’s a desperate, pleading look. Like he wants confirmation that he’s been a good father. Like he wants to be cleared for every nasty thing he’s ever done.”

  “Fathers,” Terence says, like that one word says it all.

  “Mine appears to have made some enemies over the years.”

  I’m approaching the right level of drunkenness to tell him about the dead mouse and photos. In fact, I’m just drunk enough that as I launch into the story, the whole thing strikes me as kind of funny, in a sick, sad way.

  When I get home, I’m not feeling so well. The giddy sense of escape offered by the alcohol has faded and now I just want to hit the sack. I’m surprised to find my sister still up. She’s locked herself inside the bathroom and when I tap on the door, she tells me to go away. A second later, I hear her heaving and puking.

  “Celeste, are you okay?” Although I haven’t forgotten about our fight, some other impulse is overriding that at the moment. She really sounds terrible. “Did you eat something bad? Are you coming down with a bug?”

  “Just leave me alone. I’ll be fine.”

  Okay. Looks like I’m going to bed without brushing my teeth. I pop out my disposable contact lenses and let them fall wherever they fall and shrivel up like slips of dead skin.

  I hope my sister’s not getting all weird about her weight again, fantasizing pockets of fat where there’s only skin and bone, puking herself to wafer thinness.

  My head thuds onto the pillow, but my mind’s too agitated to drift off. If Celeste’s not well tomorrow, it’ll be me going to see Ba on my own.

  Turning on my side, I try to calm myself by hugging a pillow, the conversation with Terence replaying in my head. At first, it seemed like he was trying to be comforting, trying to reassure me that a dead rodent isn’t anything to get too bent out of shape about. When he was a kid, his father received a cake box full of shit in the mail, he said. A month later, a second box of shit arrived. Whether it was animal or human shit they could never figure out.