Mazu was brave, wading into the ocean to save her foolish dad. Mr. Clark was brave, hugging all those schoolchildren every morning, until he ended up dead in a jar. Rachel was brave enough to sleep naked with a smelly guy and let someone drill ink holes into her arm. Cool Kwok was brave, standing up to Lawyer Leah by refusing to wear a SARS mask or flee the infected port of Hong Kong. Gloria was the most courageous person ever, fighting her loneliness, her sadness at being so far from Batangas City and all-day Tagalog, and lately her despair—an adult word, “despair,” one I heard her using on the phone—at her oldest son’s foul mouth and knock-off gangster fashion, his pornified teen lust. And Mary, Tai Long Wan, wasn’t it brave of her to try communicating with me, regardless of how many real gangsters were threatening her behind the camera? To be a good person you had to mind and esteem and call people by their proper names. But you also had to carry on even when you were need-to-pee afraid, and less than certain you were doing the right thing. Be brave, Xixi Kwok. Be brave or be a goat.
“It’s my fault,” I said to Gloria four crampy, goat-grey days later. “I have to do something.” We sat on the balcony, the sliding door closed, as though we needed privacy from snoops. We didn’t—Jacob and Leah were rarely home, and never at the same time—but Gloria felt more at ease talking out here, despite the cool air and the honking, hammering, and mechanical squeaking of everyday Hong Kong.
“You bring this girl to Hong Kong and drop her on beach?”
“I let the Net kidnap her,” I replied, although I was now convinced my sister’s boyfriend had stolen and posted the third photo, “and then shared her with 8,751 people. That’s maybe worse.”
“No chance.”
“I want to see her. Not to help her. Just to be sure she’s okay and apologize for the mess I made. I know where she is.”
Gloria gave me a look.
“A boy in my class shot a video with his phone. She’s on Shanghai Road in Mong Kok.” I did text Jonathan Rhys-Jones to ask where he’d taken the footage. He replied in a nanosecond and said we should meet and talk about it. I said sure, possibly next week or the week after, but could I have the information right now? He replied that he’d be back in Manchester by the weekend—all his family were leaving for an extended holiday from SARS—but gave it up anyway.
“Xixi, no chance.”
“I saw her face clearly, Gloria. It was the same girl. We’ll find her in the street, and I’ll say sorry and ask her to forgive me. We won’t go into any dangerous places.” I paused before adding what I knew she couldn’t resist. “Shouldn’t I seek her forgiveness? Isn’t that the only way I’ll be able to wash away my sin?”
Gloria, my Asian mom, the sweetest, purest person on the planet, blinked twice, her eyes softening. We were both Catholic, after all, forever apologizing for our sins and being forgiven, and then recommitting them. I bet she secretly wanted her oldest son to say he was sorry, so she could forgive him on the spot and resume loving him. I bet she was also hoping that my parents would apologize for threatening to fire her. That wasn’t going to happen, and I much preferred her to stay mad at Jacob and Leah, and take her revenge by helping me out.
Two grey days earlier, Gloria had finally asked the parentals the big favour she needed—an extra two weeks off at Christmas to spend with her boys in Batangas City. Despite not wanting her to go, I coached her on the wording, guessing it would be a tough sell, especially since she refused to provide details. “Too much shame,” she had said, also very Catholic. We’d settled together on an “urgent family matter” and a “private emergency.” She had wanted to speak with Dad first, alone, but after waiting forty-eight hours for him to be in the apartment when any of us were awake, she approached Mom. She did so as Leah was stepping in the door from another long day of dealing with the infected port of Hong Kong. Their conversation was brief. “Leave us during this crisis,” Mom had said, “and don’t bother returning.” Dad, naturally, had been kinder. “The situation here should be resolved soon enough,” he told Gloria later that evening. “Can you wait until then?”
“Neither of them will be back before midnight,” I said now. “Mom has another dinner with Singapore lawyers and Dad is in it for fun at Sticky Fingers. We can do this and be home by nine. They’ll never know.”
I saw it in her sad gaze—she was ready to agree. “If they find out …,” she said.
“They won’t.” The kiss I planted on her cheek helped avoid any eye contact between us. Her return hug, pulling me so close that I smelled clove hair oil and fear in equal parts, did the same.
But in the elevator, having approved my outfit of jeans, zipped-up jacket, and a Toronto Maple Leafs baseball cap—a recent gift from Cool Kwok, special-ordered from Canada—Gloria rallied. “Your parents fire me from job, I don’t care,” she said from behind SARS protection. “You never speak with me again, I don’t care. But I will use strong words and I will slap you, Xixi Kwok, if you go too far.”
“We won’t do anything dangerous,” I repeated.
“You promise?”
“I promise,” I said, even though I didn’t. Since I was see-through, easy to confuse with any other Asian girl, maybe I could step right into Mary’s room. To help her, or not. To understand her better, or not. Non-stop I’d been mulling over the offer I’d made during our FaceTime, trying to figure out less why I’d said that I could become her for a while than what I’d meant by those words.
And Gloria could sense my not totally promising. The lie, or the half-truth, might as well have been written across my forehead in easy-to-read Tagalog.
“I will slap you,” she said again.
“So slap me.”
Suddenly I wanted to FaceTime Rachel and run the plan by her. But we were already in the lobby, a taxi waiting outside the door.
“You won’t put this on.” She pulled a second mask from her purse.
“Sure I will.”
“Oh,” she said in surprise.
We kept to ourselves during the ride into Central. In the subway under the harbour I reached over and took her hand. Her palm was moist, and above the subway noises I detected the squeak of her grinding teeth. But I couldn’t ask why. If I did, she would repeat her worries, and I’d have to offer to cancel the search. I deliberately opened my purse.
“Why you bring apple?” she said, staring into it.
“In case I get hungry.”
“You okay wearing the mask?”
“It’s like breathing through a gym sock,” I answered. The fabric collapsed over my mouth with each inhale. When I tried using my nose alone, I sounded like Manga sniffing a lamppost.
Six stops later we were in Mong Kok, a neighbourhood I knew mostly by sketchy reputation. Everyone knew about the massage parlours and night markets, the dai pai dongs serving pig guts and sea beasties. As well, I had bonus insights, courtesy of East Island boys and their walls. Even before I posted the special page for Mary, they were bragging online about Saturday-night excursions to Portland Street, where they dared each other to take phone snaps of the signs taped in doorways. The signs advertised the prices of the girls for sale. East Island boys posted on why Filipinos were cheaper than Thais, and Hong Kong more expensive than mainland, and one claimed he had negotiated on the sidewalk with a woman about the cost of hand job or blow job, front or back door, per hour or overnight. But none admitted to entering any of those buildings, never mind to buying anything. Jonathan Rhys-Jones had confessed to me that he’d videoed the girl he thought might be Mary for only seventeen seconds because the dark, and the rain, and the glare, freaked him out. He’d sprinted the three blocks to the subway station convinced Triad gangsters were close behind, ready to split open his skull.
Jonathan had filmed the girl leaving a food market on Shanghai Street, two streets over from Portland. The market was a city block closed to cars and covered along either sidewalk with awnings that served as drums for rain. The block was lined with no-class restaurants as baldly lit as public washroo
ms, and about as appealing. Along the sidewalks out front of each were fold-up tables with stools. On clear nights the tables could be pushed into the road, relieving the jam-up of tripe-slurping, bone-spitting diners, all simultaneously guzzling beer and smoking tumours. But a downpour forced everyone under the awnings, near the cauldrons of innards and baskets of twitching seafood.
The easiest route traced the uncovered spaces down the centre of the road. Rain rat-tat-tatted on our shared umbrella as I scanned table after table, seeking a cluster of girls dressed all wrong for outdoor dining in December. Picking out females wasn’t hard—the market was three-to-one male—and it was Gloria who nodded towards a table of eight young women in ankle boots and miniskirts, halter tops advertising breasts and midriffs. Purses in laps and SARS masks unclipped, they bent over bowls of noodles or picked at the carcasses of steamed fish, only the heads and tails surviving. Their faces and manners, squat figures and bad posture, reminded me of the mermaids on Tai Long Wan.
“Wait,” Gloria said when I veered towards them, the photo of Mary folded in my hand. “Next table.”
Five men and one woman sat there, their dinners even more of a carnage fest. Four of the gangsters wore sunglasses, three chewed toothpicks, and one had the ugliest tattoo I’d ever seen. A tail-to-horn dragon, inked in dark blue, disfigured his left cheek and neck. All five mobsters were either talking on phones or playing video games. The woman had a flat, fishy face—being a mamasan seemed as boring as being a sea bass—her long black hair tied with a clip and her lips blue-red, a ghost mouth imprinted inside her dangling mask. She had to be an escort, or a junior mam.
“What about those men?” Gloria said, her voice also fish-dead.
“I’ll talk to the girls.”
Stuffing my mask in my pocket, I approached the table, the photo pinned to my chest with fingertips. Originally I’d made a copy of the nice-Mary shot. But then I decided I’d better use the third image, because of where she lived and what she did. “Hi,” I said.
Only a couple glanced up.
“I’m Xixi Kwok,” I said in a fluttery voice. “I’m looking for her.”
“Funny hat,” one said of my Maple Leafs cap.
“It’s a hockey team.”
“Who she?” another woman asked.
“My friend,” I replied. “I need to speak with Mary. I owe her a ping gwoh.”
With a frown so abrupt it cracked her mascara, the woman who had asked about the baseball cap turned to the others, spit-firing Cantonese at them. Several more looked up then, and although I wished they’d focus on the photo, I tried not to flutter or shrink or appear cowardly under their scrutiny. To myself I said, Don’t be a goat! You’re younger and prettier than all of them. The gangsters at the next table sure scared me, especially the one with the tail crawling up from his shirt collar, the body, mostly wings, choking his neck, and above all the scaly head with flaring nostrils and snaggleteeth, a horn poking into his own eye, burn-scarring his cheek. The mistake of a lifetime, I thought, way worse than Rachel’s arm.
Jr. Mam came over from her table to look at the photo. She got close, but not that close. Still, Gloria said, “No ma’am!” and slipped between us, like I was a movie star and she a fan with boundary issues. Gloria unclipped her mask, revealing her full Filipino identity. I had to pass the paper around her.
“You? Her? You?” Jr. Mam said, studying Mary.
“She’s a friend.”
“She is not,” Gloria said. “This child is inventing.”
Treating Gloria as though she were see-through, the woman examined me up and down, a quality dress that just didn’t seem priced high enough. “Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe you’ll take me to her?”
“Come.”
“Come where?” Gloria said. “Xixi, this is mistake.”
But Jr. Mam had collected her bag, issued instructions to her crew, and was waving at us to follow.
“We stay here,” Gloria said.
“She knows Mary,” I said.
“We stay here, with so many people. It is safe. Safer,” she added, wiping rain from her cheek. Her hand shook like a sparrow clipped by a propeller and about to plunge.
I unzipped my jacket to show my shirt, too tight across the chest and belly button exposed.
“Hello Kitty!” Jr. Mam said.
Gloria’s mouth fell open. But had she seen the pajamas back at the apartment, she wouldn’t have let me out the door. Deceiving her had been my only option.
“See,” I said. “She does know her.”
I set off. Having no choice, Gloria caught up a half block later, sharing the umbrella but not taking my arm. Jr. Mam crossed a road, cut through an alley, and emerged onto Portland Street. All of Mong Kok—or what little I’d seen of it—was lurid with neon signs climbing every floor of every building, ideograms and letters, drawings of products and outlines of women, in glowing, brain-distressing blue, red, gold, and green. But this street was twice as glowing and twice as lurid, even with only a few cars parked along the curb and a few men smoking in doorways. Jr. Mam stopped in a doorway with a grate pulled down over a storefront.
“Look,” I said. “They’re for real.”
Taped to a wall inside the entry were two cardboard signs. The first, shaped like an arrow and readable thanks to a naked bulb overhead, advertised the product. Free Preview—many different countries girls—taste back excitement—less 50%. The second, in both Chinese and English, provided nations and numbers: Russian 590—China 260—Hong Kong 300—Malay Thai 190. The arrow pointed up a set of stairs.
“No, no, no,” Gloria said. She grabbed my arm.
I shook her off. “Why do Russians cost so much?”
“You? Her? You?” Mamasan repeated in her Triad-lousy English. She studied the nasty photo again. She had clutched the paper in her fist, forgetting about the rain. Mary was half dissolved into ink.
“I can be,” I said.
Gloria backpedalled into the street.
“Massage,” Jr. Mam said to her. “All girls clean. No trouble.”
“A mango candy would be nice right about now,” I said. I was shivering, in part from hunger and cold—neither of us had touched our dinners before setting off, and my jacket wasn’t waterproof—in part from seeing Mary’s face disappear so easily on the page. In part, too, because the signs were suddenly throbbing and the puddles in the pavement were lit like outdoor pools with strobes buried in their floors. But I’d swallowed all three pills today, just as I had on Sunday.
“SeeSee, no,” Gloria said.
“I’m going with or without you.”
“But you said—”
“Need to see her room,” I said, climbing two stairs at a stretch. “Need to be inside it with her.”
I was halfway to the top when Gloria spun me around and slapped my cheek. The slap wasn’t hard but the sting, or the shock of it, was raw enough that I rubbed the skin. Far nastier was the cackle of satisfaction that puffed Jr. Mam’s SARS mask.
“You be good girl,” she said.
Gloria groaned but still followed. We tracked arrows taped to the floor of a corridor that reeked of cooking oil and fish sauce, and then climbed a shorter set of stairs to a red door without a number on it. Behind that door was a waterfall of beads and a coat rack. Passing through the clattery gate we entered a gloomy apartment made up of a living room cramped with couches and chairs, a galley kitchen fronted by a countertop of liquor bottles, and a corridor behind another gateway of beads. Asian movie stars grinned from the walls and gossip magazines were spread over a coffee table, Cantopop, perhaps sung by Mr. SARS suicide, Leslie Cheung, crooning from a CD player. Ashtrays were stuffed with filters, reminding me of ducks feeding butts-up in a pond, and the couch and carpet, lampshades and wallpaper, all reeked of cancer past, cancer present, and cancer future. While waiting for Jr. Mam to sit across from us I decided that Dad had to quit smoking. Only low-lifes, and traumatized girls, puffed tumours anymore.
&nbs
p; “How old?” she said.
“I thought she was my age,” I answered, speaking in English for Gloria. “But when I talked to her on FaceTime I realized she’s probably twenty or twenty-one. Where’s her picture?” Glancing around, I saw a bin near the door, the paper crumbled on top of bottles and newspapers.
“Fifteen,” Gloria said. She had once more untied her mask. Jr. Mam, I noticed, kept hers on.
“Too young, lah,” Jr. Mam said.
“Is she here?” I asked. I knew she was—beyond the next gate, down a dark, narrowing corridor with, I imagined, rooms off either side. The MacBook she had used for FaceTime cost nine thousand Hong Kong dollars new. She must have borrowed money from the Russian.
“But pretty,” Jr. Mam said. When she reached out to rehook the hair that had fallen over my eyes—I was back to feeling strange, and having trouble speaking—Gloria smacked her hand in mid-air, much harder than she had with me. Weirdly, Jr. Mam’s mask filled with another cackle. She didn’t much mind who got hit, even herself.
“No buy, no touch?” she said.
“You make dirty movie here?” Gloria said.
“Whoa,” I managed.
“You make porn-he—porn-he-graphy?” my amah said with a choke.
“Is Mary sleeping?” I said. “She’ll be okay if I wake her up.” Rising, I made for the beads, ignoring the newborn colt wobble in my legs. Pornography too? I hadn’t thought of that, and wished Gloria hadn’t either. A mango candy wasn’t going to cut it any longer. I needed real food, and soon.
I was right about the corridor. Along each pinching wall were three closed doors, numbered one to six, with a seventh door at the back, probably onto a fire escape. From behind one of them drifted the tinkle of pop music, not Asian. Jr. Mam and Gloria followed me.
Planet Lolita Page 11
