by Jess Row
I’m supposed to be saving money, she said. Instead I’m spending it. If I don’t show up they’ll fire me then and there. In Shenzhen you don’t get second chances.
You can find something better, I said. You’re spending everything you make on taxis. It doesn’t make any sense, Lin.
I told you. I warned you that it wouldn’t work.
Let me help you, then.
She pressed a finger to my lips.
My life is so little to you, she whispered. A snap of the fingers. I’m the dust you shake off your shoes.
Do you think that’s what I meant?
She shook her head. You don’t have to mean it, she said. It just is.
It was June. In the evenings after she left I went for walks along the concrete seawall that overlooked the bay, watching the sun melt through layers of haze. The water there was clotted with sewage and the shiny bellies of fish; without wanting to, I imagined myself paddling through it on top of my sailboard, and felt a shiver of nausea and disgust. That isn’t fair, I thought. There’s always garbage on the beach at Shek O. I turned to the east and looked up at the skyline, or what little of it I could see through the smog: a jumble of tall spires and cylinders and shining glass tower blocks, some of them copies of buildings in Hong Kong, others probably copied from buildings elsewhere in the world. Why is it that Shenzhen doesn’t look quite right, I wondered. Why does it seem like such a mirage, as if I might come back next week and find it gone?
We slept together for the first time on the night of July 1, the first anniversary of the handover, of Hong Kong returning to China. From Nanhai Lu we could see the fireworks over downtown Shenzhen and over the Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong, and on satellite TV we watched the small crowds gathered in Statue Square, waving the new Hong Kong flag—the one with the purple flower, the bauhinia. The joke is, I told her, that it’s a hybrid flower, and it’s sterile. Produces no offspring. But she didn’t laugh. In the flickering light of the screen her face was inert, unmoved; nothing I did made her smile.
I’m sorry, she said. I’m just tired.
You need to look for another job. A day job. This work isn’t right for you.
I don’t see what they’re celebrating, she said, nodding at the screen. Hasn’t it been a terrible year? What about the stock market crash?
They’re celebrating the future, then. Things will get better.
The future, she said. What a luxury.
I turned off the TV and we sat slumped on the couch in the dark.
I’m sorry. She touched my knee. I feel like I’ve poisoned you.
We have to forget all this, I said. Can’t we just be us, just once?
She reached for my hand and squeezed it, hard. I want to, she said. Try to make me forget.
When it was over she folded herself against me, limp, like a body washed in by the tide.
I have an idea, I said the next morning, bringing her a cup of tea in bed. I want you to hear me out. Will you listen?
She nodded, brushing hair out of her eyes.
I’ve been reading some articles about immigration, I said. We both know there’s no way to move you forward on the list for Hong Kong. And I can’t legally change my residence to the main-land, even if you wanted me to. But there’s nothing to stop us from simultaneously emigrating to a third country.
But—
I raised my hand. There are two options for us, I said. Canada and Australia. Both are expensive. I would have to sell my parents’ investments. And we would probably have to wait two or three years for you to get a visa. But that’s it—three years at the most. You could start a Chinese kindergarten in Toronto or Vancouver or Sydney. It wouldn’t be so hard—I could help you.
You would do that? Leave Hong Kong for good?
Not necessarily for good. Once you’re naturalized in another country we can move back to Hong Kong if we want to. We’ll keep my apartment and rent it out.
She drank her tea in one gulp and set the cup down. You’ve figured everything out, she said. Haven’t you.
It’s not so difficult. People do it all the time.
Of course, she said. People buy wives all the time.
Her eyes were bloodshot, and there was a streak of rouge smeared across her nose. And I felt I couldn’t tolerate her stubbornness for a moment longer. It seemed perverse, almost artificial, and I felt myself getting angry, a rim of hot sweat around my lips.
The rest of the world isn’t Shenzhen, I said. You don’t have to see it that way. We don’t have to see it that way. Once you’ve left China everything will be different.
She gave a small cry, like a cat when you step on its paw, and reached over and slapped me across the face. Don’t tell me about the rest of the world! she shouted. Don’t tell me what you can do for me. Is that what love is? She moved to the other side of the bed and stood up, winding the sheet around her. No more, she said. I’m almost out of money. I have to move out of my room.
You didn’t tell me that.
I’m getting rid of my mobile, she said. I’m leaving my job.
What will you do?
Don’t ask me that question.
Lin, I said, don’t I deserve an answer?
She turned to the window, covering her face with her hands, the sheet sagging around her ankles. You should forget about me, she said hoarsely, her voice muffled in her palms. I warned you. You should never have expected anything from me.
I don’t believe you, I said. I know what you want. You only have to be brave and want it enough.
She took a corner of the sheet and wrapped it again around her chest, and blew her nose with her fingers, the way farmers do. It isn’t a question of bravery, she said. You still don’t understand.
I blinked my eyes once, twice; the room seemed to bend around me, like a reflection in one of those funny mirrors at Ocean Park. Lin, I said, it doesn’t matter who has the money and who doesn’t. If I were in your position—
If I lived in Hong Kong, you would never have noticed me, she said, turning from the window. You wouldn’t have looked at me twice. Isn’t that true?
No, I said, but I felt a sagging weight in my chest, as if I had swallowed a stone. Of course it was true. I saw myself again in the dark back corner of Club Nikko, handing her a packet of tissues, a business card—when would I have done that, in my normal life, with a stranger? It isn’t important, I wanted to say. How can it be so important? But the words wouldn’t form on my tongue. I saw my face as she must have seen it: my eyebrows tilted in concern, my mouth slowly forming the syllables, as if I were talking to a child. I hadn’t meant to sound that way, I thought. But how else could she have heard it?
Pity isn’t love, she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. It doesn’t turn into love. Maybe I thought it could, but I was wrong. I’m sorry if I deceived you.
This can’t be the end, I said weakly. I sat down on the edge of the bed, steadying myself with my hands; the floor seemed to fall away from me, curving into the trough of a wave. For a moment I thought I would be sick. You are making a terrible mistake, I wanted to shout. You’ll always regret this. But I knew how she would respond. I made that mistake already.
I think you’re lying to me, I shouted at her suddenly. I wasn’t even aware of what I was saying; I only felt my shoulders clenched together, as if I was expecting the ceiling to fall. You’re not really out of a job, are you? You’re just sick of me and you want someone else. It’s a convenient excuse, isn’t it?
She turned and stared at me, and a shiver of recognition ran down her body: as if I had confirmed something she had always known. I’m going home, she said. Back to Anhui. Maybe I’ll get a job. Probably not. I don’t care if I have to eat rice out of a hole in the ground. At least I won’t be one of those women who sits in a villa and waits for a man, like a wind-up toy. I may go crazy, but not that way.
We took a taxi together from Nanhai Lu into the city, and at a street corner, just blocks away from the border, she told the driver to stop
and got out quickly, without saying a word. Hey! the driver shouted. Pay your fare!
It’s all right, I said. I’m paying for both of us.
As I walked to the border terminal the clouds were beginning to break up, and the sidewalks glowed in the glaring sun. Twenty minutes later, when the train pulled out of the station on the Hong Kong side, I rested my forehead against the cool glass of the window and closed my eyes. I knew exactly how I wanted to remember her: sitting on the plastic couch, her feet propped up, her hair still wet from the shower, laughing at some inane romantic comedy on the TV. I strained to fix the image in my mind, but already it was difficult to recall the details: what did she do with her hands? How did her voice sound when she spoke my name?
If I disappear, that’s it, she had said. China will swallow me up.
Finally I gave up and opened my eyes.
When you take the train south from the border into Hong Kong, after you pass the small town of Sheung Shui, the countryside opens up into a lush valley, a lowland forest dotted with small farms that climb the sides of gently sloping hills. This is the valley of Fanling. In all my trips past this place I had never seen what I was passing: a hundred shades of green so rich and deep that it hurt my eyes to look at them. In the colonial days, I read once, the English governors and magistrates had huge estates in Fanling, and they played a game where they released a fox and then chased after it with horses and a pack of dogs. All the animals had to be imported from England—even the fox! But it was worth it to them, because it was the same game that they played at home in England, and they wanted to forget for a morning that they were here instead of there. I wondered what it would feel like to ride a horse through that incredible landscape, so green that it hurt your eyes to see it, and whether one of those Englishmen might have slowed his horse for a moment, and breathed the air, and felt in that instant that he belonged here, on the other side of the world from where he was born. I raised my head from the window, and the faces of the other passengers dissolved, as if I were looking at them from underwater; and I whispered to myself, peace, peace, peace.
The Ferry
This is what it’s like to be a freak, Marcel thinks. He strides across the empty arrivals hall, thrilled to be standing after a sixteen-hour flight, and the woman in the pale green uniform at the passport desk tilts her head back and stares at him, openmouthed, as if he has just swooped down from the air. Her lips form a single syllable: Wah. It’s like a chorus: the stewardesses, the pudgy kids in tracksuits, the old women in embroidered jackets look at him and say it immediately, involuntarily. That’s me, he says to himself, folding back the cover of his brand-new passport, looking around for the signs to the baggage claim. I’m Mr. Wah.
Hello? A hand touches his sleeve; he flinches and turns around. A young Chinese woman with silver spiked hair gives him a nervous half-smile, giggles, and covers her mouth. Excuse me, I wonder if you please sign autograph? She presents him with an open magazine, a picture of a basketball player in midflight over the basket, surrounded by Chinese characters.
But that’s not me.
She looks confused. Sorry? she says. Not you?
No, he says. I’m flattered. That’s Alonzo Mourning.
You basketball player?
No, he says. I mean, sure. I play basketball. But I’m a lawyer.
Oh, she says. OK. But she remains there with the magazine folded, expectant.
So that’s why I can’t sign this, right? You don’t want my autograph, do you?
Her eyebrows pucker. Sorry, she says. Don’t understand.
You don’t—for God’s sake, he thinks, make the woman happy. OK, he says. Give me the pen.
Peace, he signs, Marcel Thomas. But he scrunches up the words, and thinks, she’ll never know the difference.
Hong Kong is like no place he has ever imagined. Green hillsides rising out of a steel-colored sea. Rows of identical white apartment blocks that seem to sprout from low-hanging clouds, like mushrooms after rain. When he steps outside the airport terminal the air sticks to his skin, and he feels queasy, his joints rubbery, a bad taste in his mouth. He’d give anything for a shower. Thirteen thousand miles, he thinks, staring at the curving aluminum handrails on the escalator, the green-tinted glass walls of the taxi stand, as if looking for evidence of that fact, some basis for comparison. Thirteen thousand miles from San Francisco. This. And this. And me.
He falls asleep on the long ride into the city, lying across the backseat with his head propped on his garment bag. When the taxi jolts to a stop his eyes open and he sits up carefully. The car is surrounded by people rushing past, bumping up against the window, and he hears a muffled roar: voices, horns honking, music blaring.
What is it? he says. Is it a riot?
Yih ging lai dou ah, the driver croaks. Causeway Bay. Excelsior Hotel, OK?
When he steps out into the street, he finds himself staring down at a sea of black-haired heads, none higher than his chest. People moving in every direction, weaving, colliding, clutching shopping bags and mobile phones and children; no one looks up at him here. A van turns the corner with brakes squealing, and they scatter out of the way; like ants, he thinks, like cockroaches, and feels ashamed. He makes his way across the street, holding his bags shoulder-high, as if crossing a river. Without quite knowing why, he holds his breath until the hotel’s revolving doors close behind him, and then releases it with a gasp.
There’s no place like it on earth, Wallace Ford tells him later that evening, on the outdoor patio at the American Club, twenty-two stories above Central. From his seat Marcel can see the shining columns of office buildings crowded close together, and between them, the dark shadow of Victoria Peak. The glow of the city turns the sky dusky orange. There’s an otherworldly quality to it, he thinks, as if Hong Kong were one of those cities in science fiction movies, where everyone lives far above the ground. It wouldn’t surprise him to see a spaceship passing silently among the skyscrapers, or a white robot coming out to serve them drinks.
You take New York, Ford says. San Francisco. L.A. Chicago. Even London and Paris—none of it compares to this. The Chinese were living in cities before anybody else on the planet. They’ve got it figured out. It’s not always pretty—or at least we don’t think so. But it works.
He sits back with a grunt of satisfaction and drains his glass. Fifty-three years old, Marcel remembers, and his skin glows like polished copper; he wears a cream seersucker suit, a crisp tailored shirt, and a new pinky ring, a ruby the size of a fish’s eye. Marcel hasn’t seen him in five years, since before he was hired at Peabody Stein Loeffler; it was Ford who gave him his final interview, who motioned him to shut the door to his office and said, confidentially speaking, from one brother to another. Marcel doesn’t remember all of it—a torrent of words, as if Ford had been waiting for years for the right young candidate to appear— but one riff has always stayed with him: Anticipate the next move. It’s the key to good law and it’s the key to surviving in this firm. Always be planning. Always listening. Never act until you understand the whole field; and then strike before anyone notices. Work in the small hours. Let the others wake up to the bad news. He remembers sitting on the edge of his chair, trying to keep up, nodding at the appropriate places. A few times he caught himself thinking, is this for real?
It wasn’t until his first day on the job that he heard Ford had transferred to Hong Kong, almost overnight, without a farewell party or even so much as a good-bye letter. He was disappointed, momentarily, but then felt a strange surge of relief. He can’t protect me, he thought, but he can’t make me his errand boy, either. Better not to be anyone’s protégé.
I think you’re going to like it here, Ford says, catching his glance and holding it for a moment. You like Chinese food?
I grew up on it, Marcel says, remembering the Fortune Kitchen, across the street from his old apartment house in Yonkers. Somehow it seemed there was always a container of sweet-and-sour pork dripping red sauce on the kitchen ta
ble, a packet of egg rolls in wax paper in the fridge. Egg foo yung, he says. Shrimp lo mein. All that good stuff.
You can forget about that. Ford leans forward. I’ve got a woman who cooks for me, he says. She makes food you won’t believe. None of that Happy Delight stuff—everything’s fresh, no MSG, no chow mein. She’s got me eating it morning, noon, and night. No more doughnuts in the house, no potato chips. I feel like I did when I was twenty-five. No. Better than that. How long are you staying?
Not long, Marcel says. Cold spreads across the bottom of his stomach. They want me back for a deposition on the seventeenth. Next Monday.
Ford shrugs. Not bad, he says. Not bad for a young comer who wants to make partner. We’ll make it worth your while. There’s some people I definitely want you to meet.
Marcel has to glance away for a second. Another look into those eyes, he thinks, and I’ll be telling the whole story, from beginning to end. The lights inside the club have come on, and through the sliding glass doors he can see the crowd gathered around the bar: young, blond, tanned, thin briefcases, martinis, cigars. A few faces he ought to recognize, from Williams or Choate. Can I ask you an honest question? he says. How can you stand it?
You mean the white boys’ club inside?
I mean being the only one, he says. Sticking out all the time. In the airport I felt like I was in a museum display. Some woman thought I was from the NBA. Wanted my autograph.
I’ll be honest with you, Ford says. Most can’t take it. I’ve had boys making monkey noises at me on the subway. Sometimes babies cry when they see you. Sometimes they’ll pretend not to understand your English. Or make up some excuse: only Chinese menu, or some such thing. I’ve seen lots of brothers come out, and most of them leave after a year or so. And it’s too bad. Because they don’t understand the underlying principle.
And what’s that?
Ford takes a heavy gold pen from his pocket and flattens a cocktail napkin on his palm. I learned this from a friend of mine, he says, drawing carefully. A box with a cross inside it, with a pair of legs underneath, it seems, and a few squiggles attached to the top. This is the Chinese word for foreigner, he says. Gwai. It literally means “ghost.” Or “demon.” Now, usually when they say gwai they’re thinking of the white man—the white ghost. But actually a ghost is anyone who’s not Chinese. White ghosts, red ghosts, black ghosts. He looks up at Marcel, and from his expression Marcel can tell that his attempt to suppress a look of disbelief has failed. It means you don’t really exist, he says. Sure, you might run into a little trouble once in a while. But fundamentally you don’t matter to them. White people, black people—it’s all the same. You’re not on their radar screen. They’ll make deals with you, sure. They’ll take your money. But otherwise you might as well not be there at all.
