“Don’t tell her, or Gloria, okay? Don’t tell either of them about Mary.”
“Won’t Dad tell Mom?”
“Definitely not.”
“Not saying anything feels wrong.”
“Not saying to Mom, or to Gloria?”
“Both,” I answered, though I really meant my amah.
“Uh-huh,” Rachel said.
Petit mal was why I was now the girl with the condition, the problem, treatable with valproic acid, 250 milligrams per pill, three times a day. Small epileptic seizures that I might grow out of, or might not. For years I’d been Spacey Xixi, the one who never listened to her parents or teachers and couldn’t remember the simplest things. That child was dopey and none too bright, but cute and loveable, another shaggy-haired mutt. Nice Xixi/Sarah. There there. But a fifteen-year-old who has to swallow stuff in order to stop the brain disturbances that last only a few minutes and are difficult to detect—some of us flutter our eyelids and smack our lips, pouty starlets at the premieres of movies we aren’t even in—and which leave gaps in memory, deep, narrow crevasses that are scary to look down, never mind to fall into and get stuck, shouting help! help! while basically waiting to die, alone and sad and with terrible skin? She wasn’t cute at all. She was damaged goods. She was mal-brained.
Better that I’d never found out. But I did, in early September, and with the specialist, Dr. Wilson, saying the diagnosis of absence seizure epilepsy had been confirmed, there was no going back to being that earlier Xixi/Sarah. Rachel had left for Canada a week before nurses strapped a suction-cup cap onto my skull, called an EEG. She didn’t really know her little sister anymore.
Before she fled Hong Kong for boring commerce classes and non-stop partying in Toronto, Rachel showed me a trick. “They spy on us all the time,” she’d said, “or on me, at least. We have to spy back.” Since the move to 2201, 26 Old Peak Road, sixteen months ago, parental conversations of any importance had been occurring on the balcony, the sliding door clicked shut. Once, Mom accidentally pocket-dialled me, and I listened to five minutes of adult snarls until I ended the call. But otherwise the door, and the low, steady roar of Hong Kong, sealed them outside, him smoking and drinking at the railing, her seated at the table checking for texts and sighing.
Rachel’s old bedroom, where Dad now slept, had a window onto the balcony. Crack it ahead of time and keep the curtains drawn, squat or kneel below the ledge, and voices would come trickling in, easy as water under a door. Important to lock Manga in my room at the far end of the apartment, and under no circumstances bring a phone or emit a cough, even with cancer smoke passing through the crack as well.
Tonight, he was smoking and drinking—ice clinked in his glass—and she was reading messages between sighs. For a while they blah-blahed about how “flu-like symptoms” could easily graduate to “atypical pneumonia” and “acute respiratory distress,” and how “in this country” microbes jumped from animal to human with “terrifying ease.” If that happened, “all hell will break loose again.” Mom considered Asia an infected pool, smelly and scummy and coated in floating fish, and loved frightening everyone with warnings to Keep Out, to not dip a toe. She did the doom talking. He said “okay” and “right” and lit another tumour, poured another vodka.
At last, they moved on to an interesting subject.
“Any idea which Triad?” she said.
“The 14K, maybe. Or the Sun Yee On. They run most of the massage parlours in Mong Kok and control the Guangdong coast. Not that I’m any expert.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s true.”
“Tell me you don’t know anything about the Sun Yee On, Jacob. Tell me you don’t make it your business to be aware of whose food, liquor, and prostitutes you’re paying for in Shenzhen.”
“Don’t forget the opium dens.”
“Here’s what I know,” she said. “Earlier today those women we met on the beach were escorted to the apartments where they’ll be imprisoned, in effect, for the next several months. They’ll be cleaned up, told what clothes to wear and what makeup to put on, and be working shifts in the clubs and parlours by tomorrow. Lap dances, blow jobs, getting screwed in every hole—they’ll be expected to do it all. Most will be fine, but a few will struggle, like the too-pretty one wearing Sarah’s hat. She seemed fragile.”
“She thinks her name is Mary.”
“That child …”
“She says the girl introduced herself that way.”
“One or two may even commit suicide, their bodies dumped in international waters. The odd corpse washes back to shore, the faces gone.”
“Were they trafficked?”
“More likely they paid for their spots on the boat. Loads of superfluous females in Guangdong, as you well know. Cheap pussy couldn’t be easier to come by.”
“Are we going to have this conversation again?” Dad said. He sounded sad.
“You’re right. Sorry.” She stood, the legs of her chair scraping concrete, probably to watch the tram ascend the slope beneath us, its lights flickering up through branches. For the first year we lived in Mid-Levels, I never knew when the tram to Victoria Peak would climb past our building, and didn’t care. But once Rachel went away and I had no one to talk to except Gloria and Manga, I taped the schedule to my bedroom wall. Every night since late August I’d slipped onto the balcony three minutes after a listed departure, and first listened for the grind of the cable, and then checked for the lights below. Only once had the Peak Tram failed to be at the exact spot at the exact minute. During a Black Rainstorm Warning—a typhoon, basically.
“They all have dreams of earning a quick fortune in Hong Kong and opening a beauty salon back in their hometowns,” she said. “A few do but most never get close … And there was definitely trafficking in some of the mainland orphanages I dealt with. No one would admit it, especially to the foreign lady lawyer—they’d been threatened by the gangsters—but you could see the fear in the older girls. Fourteen, some of them, or younger.”
“But this isn’t so bad, is it?”
“How is it so good?”
“I mean, the women on Tai Long Wan looked grown-up, and if they’re choosing to do this …”
“Choosing, like I ‘chose’ between Osgoode Hall and McGill for my law degree? Like you ‘chose’ to be handed control of your father’s business, and relocate it here, where conditions were right for maximum profitability?”
“Not what I meant.”
Her phone vibrated, rattling the tabletop. Neither spoke until after the third ring.
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Sanjay? Hi … No, no bother. I’m on that, for sure, first thing tomorrow. Can we talk then? … Seven is fine. A bit early for tiffin, but I’ll have a Starbucks, the usual.”
There was a silence, the Peak Tram climbing the slope, and them possibly following it through the tree canopy. The low squeak and grind of the cable reminded me of Gloria. She didn’t grind her teeth only in her sleep. She did it in taxis, on buses, while riding the Star Ferry. Anytime we were on the move in public. Anytime she was responsible for my safety.
“It’s why I do corporate law now,” Mom said.
“To take tiffin with Sanjay at seven in the morning?”
“The heartbreak, Jacob, the endless cycle of exploitation of girls. I couldn’t help any of them, really, and by the end I couldn’t watch it going on any longer.”
“Okay.”
“You’ve heard all this before, I know. Sorry to bore you.”
I decided to sneak out soon, before my backside went numb and I had to drag myself across the floor, like a one-legged man I watched in an underpass in Shanghai and made Dad give some yuan to, even though he hadn’t been begging. But I also wanted to know more about why Leah MacInnes had quit her old job, the one she had loved and hated in equal parts, and which had kept us in our plain, sunny apartment in Stanley for almost a decade, and instead gone to work for a law firm with head offices in London
and local offices in the Landmark Building, Central, floors 22–23–24. About the new job she never expressed any real love or hate, because, as she once said in front of us both, you couldn’t have strong feelings for something without a soul. I’d been desperate to know for more than a year now, and not only because I wanted our old apartment back. I wanted my old mom back just as much.
When Leah sighed, Dad liked to say, even potted plants felt badly for her. “How did this happen to us?” she asked.
I froze. He didn’t answer.
“All we did was go camping in the New Territories,” she said. “To see if we’d treat each other better outside this apartment.
To take Sarah’s mind off her disorder. We weren’t trying to help anyone!”
“Nothing has happened, Leah.”
“The mamasan told them on the phone. That phone, during the call I foolishly allowed her to make. I heard the words gweilo and hou leng. You don’t work in China and not recognize gweilo and hou leng, said twice. She told her bosses that the moron smugglers had dropped them off near a tent containing the only humans on the entire beach, and that a half-foreign couple with a teenage daughter had witnessed everything. And oh yes, the daughter was hou leng, very pretty, which was worth repeating.”
“So?”
“Don’t play dumb.”
“What, the Triads are going to kidnap Xixi into prostitution? Crazy town,” he said. “Totally.”
“They hate outsiders knowing their business. They don’t tolerate it for long.”
By the click of his Zippo, and her fresh sigh, I guessed how Dad was responding to her latest mean words.
“Disgusting,” she said.
“My smoking? I didn’t know you felt so strongly.”
That was strange—she must have complained about his smoking a thousand times, right in front of me and Rachel. “Your tattooed Shenzhen business associates have probably fucked girls Sarah’s age,” she said. “Or not much older.”
“Christ.”
“And I gave them our number. Call display, Leah—hello! How stupid can I be?”
“Get another number. Or another phone.”
“By now they have our basic information. Where we live and work, possibly even her school. Another phone won’t help.”
“Then do nothing.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Let’s go off-grid for a while. Maybe we should, regardless. It might be good for us.”
“Sometimes …”
“Sometimes what?”
“They’re going to call.”
“So they call. And we reassure them that we aren’t interested in their business. That we didn’t see anyone on Tai Long Wan this morning. That we weren’t even on the beach! ‘My foreign ghost wife helps shipping firms pay no taxes in any sovereign nation,’ I’ll say, ‘and I manufacture jeans that European ladies buy for five times their actual worth. We could give a shit about what goes on in Mong Kok.’ They’ll appreciate that,” Dad added. “It’s what they already think of people like us.”
The tabletop rattled again. Both of them drew sharp breaths, but then laughed. Only their laughter wasn’t the kind I remembered from when Rachel or I did something adorable, or that I used to hear from behind their bedroom door. It just wasn’t.
Sanjay was back on the line, asking to push their morning meeting ahead by thirty minutes. Next, the parentals started talking about my “disorder,” and how much trouble it was causing them. Quick as I could I slid across the bedroom floor, a crippled almost-beggar in a Shanghai underpass.
First I drained a two-thirds-empty carton of OJ, dribbling just a little and shaking bottles and jars in the fridge to give her fair warning. Then, because it was past ten, her bedtime, and no light seeped under her door, I knocked twice, feeling badly about waking her up.
“SeeSee, ho-kay,” Gloria finally said. “You come in.”
The amah cell, designed for women from near the equator who didn’t deserve better, was the one room in the apartment without air conditioning. I entered a jungle, hot and humid and scented of Tiger Balm, the herbal ointment she rubbed over her shoulders and hands every night, even when they weren’t sore, and sometimes applied to her temples, for migraines. Gloria switched on a lamp and smoothed a patch on her bed. Why else did I hate this apartment? Because in Stanley her room was bigger and brighter and its window opened not onto a brick wall, as in posh Mid-Levels, but a garden of orchids and lilac, butterflies on palm fronds and kites in banyan trees.
“Rachel can be so bossy,” I said.
Gloria had a pillow head, which I tried to fix. “Don’t look,” she said, patting her hair. Her face was a penny, hair black and eyes brown, nose pug and smile reluctant, a defence against showing her so-so teeth. Her skin was lighter than women from the islands further south, but those eyes and teeth, that nose, were standard issue. She had small breasts and bow legs, was short, poor, and Catholic, and spoke English scrambled by Tagalog, the music of excited birds. Little about Gloria Bella, thirty-six, of Batangas City, Luzon, distinguished her from the other Filipino amahs camped around the city on Sundays, clattering in their bird tongue and behaving rudely cheerful. Little except what she meant to me—everything.
“I miss her,” I said.
“But you talk to her tonight? Talk to her, and see her.”
“You talk to Miguel and Jesus, and see their faces, every night. Don’t you miss them anyway?”
“Jesus score a goal in soccer game.” Her gaze rested on the school photos on the table.
Oh right, and Gloria meant everything to her sons as well. Miguel, aged fourteen, and Hey-zeus, aged eleven.
“He’s the best player on his team. Everyone says so. On Facebook,” I said, to her frown.
“I don’t understand this Facebook.”
“And Miguel is pretty cute. He looks more like you than Jesus does.” Last time I checked, Miguel Pacquia wore a red bandana and hoodlum shades, an unlit tumour dangling from his lips. He didn’t look cute at all. He looked sketchy, another advertisement for why most boys, Asian or Western, weren’t worth the bother. To please Gloria, and maybe feed her information she might need to know, I had asked both her sons if I could be their friend, despite their profiles being mostly in Tagalog. Jesus accepted my request. Miguel didn’t.
I stretched out on her bed. Gloria hugged me from behind, the same way I hugged Manga. Sometimes she reached around my shoulder to play with my cross, also zipzipping it along its chain, but not tonight. A wooden crucifix, with an actual carved Jesus, hung from the door. Way back when, Mom had objected to her putting it up, but Dad said it was her room to decorate as she pleased.
“Tell me,” she said.
I told her.
“Why she say this to you?”
“Not to me,” I answered. “I overheard them. On the minibus. They thought I was asleep.”
Of the three people I couldn’t lie to—Cool Kwok, Mr. Clark, Gloria Bella—she was the hardest. I blamed how her eyes, warm and laughing, turned cool and serious, and her stare saw right through me, right to my sins, which no priest had managed.
Luckily the lamp was forty-watt dim. “Mom says they’ll get screwed in every hole.”
“Your parents, they should be more careful what they talk about.” She tightened her hold on me. “They used to be.”
When they still loved each other? I kind of wanted to say. For sure, a Rachel thought, spiky as a durian.
“How many holes do I have, Gloria?”
She took in a breath and then, instead of speaking, released a curt, swallowed sob.
“What is it?” I said.
“Nothing.”
“I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“I know.”
“You smell like Tiger Balm.”
She was silent.
“And I’m glad you don’t sleep with your SARS mask on,” I said, noticing it folded on the table. “That would be too weird.”
“Sickness is coming,” she said. �
��This time much worse. But the Lord will protect us.”
“Ho-kay,” I said.
She demanded a proper hug. Still not sure what had made her cry, I collapsed into it, grateful that anyone could love a one-legged loser with a mal-brain.
Up the winding stairs we climbed, the 6 already lurching back into traffic. Our favourite seat was free—the upper deck was pure amah, most of whom got motion sickness in the front row—and I slid in first. Dad followed, widening girl gazes and flaring smiles with his ironed white shirt, slim-fit Pearl jeans, and polished black boots. He was Cantopop glamour, lean, clean, and casual.
“Nurse,” he said, “scalpel please.”
“Ha ha, Dad,” I said. Surgical masks, hooked at the ears and protecting skin from above the nose to beneath the chin, adorned each and every female face except mine.
“There’s no outbreak. Not officially, at least.”
“Kids say they’re going to close the school starting this week.”
“They didn’t need to close the schools last time, and they don’t need to close them this time around either,” he said. “But they will.”
“Because of Mr. Clark. He has SARS.”
“Is that one hundred percent certain?”
“I think so.”
“I like Eric Clark. I do.”
“People say he’s gay.”
“People aren’t wrong.”
“Will he die?”
“Of course not,” Dad answered. “He’ll be fine.”
Sunday bus chats were the best, whispering to each other while never taking our eyes off first the city, and then the country, coming at us through the wide window. When we lived in Stanley, the 6 was the ride from our sleepy village on the south side of the island into frantic downtown Hong Kong on the north side, facing Victoria Harbour and Kowloon. Now the bus took the Catholic half of the household back out to Mass once a week at St. Mark’s, the church located sixty-four steps, or twenty-two skips, from the apartment that had once provided Gloria Bella with a lilac and butterfly view.
“Kerry Chung has an auntie in hospital,” I said. “She’s kept in a special room that no one can visit. Even doctors aren’t allowed.”
“My staff have started calling in sick because of the rumours,” he said. “Why wait until there’s a genuine crisis to panic? Board up schools and shut down businesses. Crash the economy again.”
Planet Lolita Page 3
