For calling Dad an a–hole, and for not including Gloria as one of US who ached, and bled, and had impossible demands clasped around her neck, I went teen-vicious on my sister as well. Don’t make a sex tape with Greg, I wrote back. It’ll show up on the Net, whether you post it or not. And oh yeah—Head Tax was basically noise.
“Bangkok,” Dad said on Saturday afternoon, the second day of my incarceration. “It’s just the town for outlaws like us. No masks, no panic, no gloom. No ‘Eye of the Viral Storm.’ We’ll ride the Chao Phraya at sunset seeking saffron-robbed monks. We’ll see if God is paying full, or half, attention to our troubles. And don’t forget the three-legged dogs, Xixi. We’ll hang out with them.”
“Isn’t Bangkok underwater?” I said.
On the front page of the digital edition of the South China Morning Post, below the local headline “Eye of the Viral Storm,” was an article about the weird weather in Thailand. A few years ago the city had flooded for several months, the muddy Chao Phraya and the murky canals spilling over, rain pockmarking tin roofs and spewing up from drains. Now the rains were back, and though not yet a disaster, officials were concerned the city might drown one more time. Before Access Denied I had watched it all on YouTube. My favourite video, fifty-two seconds long and streaky from drops, showed a bronze Buddha inside a temple grounds. The Buddha sat cross-legged, a stream tickling his belly button and birds bathing in his lap, and seemed okay with it, okay with everything. I wouldn’t mind finding that temple and sitting next to the Buddha, my own legs crossed. The birds would use me for their bath too.
“Only parts of the town,” he answered. “We’ll buy boots.”
“What will we do there?”
He poured himself another vodka, forgetting to add ice. Cold pimpled my arms and the fog creeping up the slope hid the tram. Still, we had to sit at the balcony table so Dad could drink and smoke and pretend to be working from home again today, rather than serving as prison guard over me and Gloria. “Like I said before—we’ll hang out. Have fun. Leave all this crap behind. I’ve friends there who know how to have fun, and won’t care that we’re from SARSville. Lily Chan and JR Chu, Mint and Gun and even Aroon, who calls himself Pepsi and can be a pain sometimes. You’ll love them, and they’ll fall for you.”
“Mint?” I said. “Is that a name?”
“Thais have these nicknames.”
“Is her boyfriend called Pepper?”
“Huh?”
“Pepper and mint—peppermint?”
“Right. Good one.”
“And if all three of them go out together they’ll be Pepsi-peppermint.”
“On Christmas Day,” he said, not appreciating my joke, “we’ll order turkey with trimmings plus a tom yum soup and a pad-se-ew on the side. How will that be for an East/West mash-up?”
“Do you think Mom should come with us after all? She’ll have to quit her job, but she said she will if I ask her.”
“If you ask her?” He was definitely irritated now.
“Dad?”
“In Bangkok we’re just going to be, kiddo. Breathe in, breathe out, like everybody else. Let’s go off-grid for a while. It’ll be such a relief—for both of us, I bet.”
“I’m already off the grid,” I said. “No more Finding Mary.”
“Did they take down your page?” he said, doing a bad job of playing innocent.
“It’s blocked. Gone for good, probably.”
“It is.”
“Wow.”
“The police saw to it. They said it was necessary.”
“Constable Chu is an evil ninja.”
“I liked him better,” he agreed.
“He was a kind-hearted ogre!”
“You can build a new Facebook page later. And get your phone back.”
“But my phone is right there,” I said, indicating it on the table.
“For the moment it is.”
I said nothing.
“Until things are clear. Until they’re safe,” Dad said.
“I don’t even want to talk to Mary any longer. I don’t know who she is.”
He looked at me, not warm, not cold either. Cool, without being Cool Kwok.
“Honestly,” I added. “What I did was pretty weird. I get that.”
He continued looking. “Events are in motion, Xixi. They’ll have to play out now.”
Kill-me-bored, isolated from everyone outside the apartment and even those within it, I’d hatched an alternative plan. “We could all fly to Toronto instead and meet up with Rachel. Mom too. The grandparentals have an empty mansion—we could do Christmas there.”
Dad didn’t like that one bit. “Do you know how much I had to pay for our plane tickets?” he said. “And it’s minus ten today in Toronto. Who’s the girl who’ll never take snow into her heart?”
I shook my head.
“The second-to-last time we were in Canada, visiting my parents at Chinese New Year, you complained pretty much non-stop about the cold and snow. ‘I’ll never take snow into my heart, Dad,’ you said to me in the car. I was impressed.”
“What did I mean?”
Finally, he switched back to Cool Kwok, especially the smile. “That you’re Xixi, not Sarah. That you belong here, not there.”
“I say strange things.”
He glanced over at the sliding doors in case someone was standing in the living room, observing and judging him. But the only other human in the apartment was Gloria, and she hadn’t left her amah cell since we returned from Mong Kok three days ago, except to be interrogated by Senior Inspector Shrek and Constable Evil Ninja, and swallow bites of the too-salty chicken adobo that I cooked for her. She wouldn’t sit to eat, watching the kitchen doorway in case either parent appeared. Tomorrow she would be flying to Ninoy Aquino Airport in Manila, and then taking first one bus to Calamba, an ugly ride south through slums and poor towns, and then another forty-five-minute trip past gorgeous Mount Makulot into Batangas City. Tomorrow her life in Hong Kong would be ending, and though she didn’t believe me when I said it, my life here would be over as well.
“What else have you been talking about with Gloria? You’ve slept in her room these past nights—without, I hope, trying to squeeze into that narrow bed.”
Was he tricking me into saying more that could be used against her? “I sleep on the floor,” I answered slowly. “We hold hands until one of us dozes off. She doesn’t grind her teeth, which is good.”
“But you’ve been talking …?”
“I wish.” A sob almost escaped my chest.
“This has been pretty rough for her, eh?” Dad said.
The parents had to be told about Miguel. It was their best chance at redemption. Suppose I kept my word to Gloria, and they found out after she was gone and said, “If only we’d known about her troubles, we’d never have fired her and would have let her go home for a month, even after what happened!” Then I’d have committed the biggest mistake, and greatest sin, by far.
“Miguel is in serious trouble,” I said.
“Who’s Miguel?”
“Gloria’s oldest son. He quit school and joined a gang. He’s—”
“There are two boys, right?” Dad said. “The other is pronounced Hey-zeus?”
“She has to save him before it’s too late.”
“Is this more ‘Jesus Talks Filipino’ crap? Those people dive way too deep into the evangelical stuff. That baseball cap she wore …,” he added, shaking his head.
To get away from the feelings that were souring my tummy and watering my eyes, I told him I had to email my sister—unless that account had also been suspended.
There was another message in my box.
Cool Kwok is messed up about the most basic stuff, Rachel wrote. He thinks he’s Soi Cowboy when he’s really Markham Mall. He thinks he’s gangsta-rough but is pretty-boy puffball. Okay, so I’m writing this after two beers and a killer joint, which is what a girl needs to survive an hour of sitar-mandolin drones with a smile stuck to h
er face. And the most important fact to register? Dad’s a dick. Literally. He has one, ergo, he IS one. It makes them stupid. It keeps them—sorry to keep saying it—a–holes. He’s going to lose it and he won’t even know that’s what he’s doing. Why else do you think he’s so keen to spend the Xmas holidays in Bangkok—X, or XXX, being the key letter? That city is a permanent GREEN LIGHT for guys who want to show their DICKNESS, their A–HOLENESS, in full. Okay, so I’m worried about what you’re going to witness, have to avert your gaze from. Worried how you’re going to be expected to handle it, live with it, forget that you’re seeing it—another thing men expect of women, never mind if they’re still kids.
PS Yellow Peril is worse noise than Head Tax. Greg’s NOT going to squirt my babies, promise. No sex tape either. What am I, some white-trash hotel heiress? Sex tapes are sooo 2002.
That same evening, with the parents both out, I brought the scissors into Gloria’s room. “I’m going to cut it off,” I said, “whether you help or not.”
“I have to pack.”
“You packed yesterday. I watched you. And that’s the most you’ve said to me since the taxi ride under the harbour. How come?”
She shrugged.
“Please, Gloria. Please.”
“Child,” she said.
“Everyone’s unhappy now. Even my sister, and she lives in Toronto. I don’t know what to do about it. Do you know what I should do?”
She pulled me into her chest, probably so I could use her shirt to wipe my leaky nose. “SeeSee, now you have the tears. I have none left. It means I am ready to face my boy.”
“You’ll forgive him.”
“Yes?”
“And save his soul,” I said. To keep from sticking myself with the scissors, I pulled back.
“You really want to cut the hair?” she said.
“All of it,” I answered. “Or most. I’ll never stop chewing if I don’t.”
In the bathroom I insisted on sitting in the tub, not in front of the mirror. “Better not to watch,” I said. “But wait—don’t do it to take revenge on the parentals. I won’t let you this time.”
“This time?”
“I won’t.”
“I cut it for you,” Gloria said.
“Even though I messed up your life?”
“Quiet.”
“You can do a terrible job, make it uneven and leave bald patches, to get back at me. I’ll understand.”
“Quiet,” she said again. But she smiled!
Later, after we’d cleaned the bathroom together, dropping a bag of hair down the garbage chute next to the elevator, we squeezed onto her single bed. I felt naked and fresh and, having studied my image in a mirror, too much a child to know about brothels or sex workers or the three holes. I felt like a kid and looked like a boy.
“Do I look like Jesus now?”
“You are still prettier.”
“Maybe I should spike my hair with product, like Miguel in his Facebook photo.”
“He wants to be bankay,” Gloria said, using the Tagalog word for tough guy. “With tattoos and scars from knife fight.”
“Rachel has a tattoo,” I said. I wanted to keep her talking. “On her arm. It’s Guanyin, the goddess of compassion and muffin-making. Mazu is her reincarnation … I don’t know why I know that …”
“You look more your sister. But please no get any tattoo,” she said.
“You are beautiful, Gloria-in-Excelsis.”
“I am plain. Plain Filipino.”
“You’ll meet a nice man in Batangas City, maybe someone you knew years ago, from high school. He’ll be called Jorge or Arturo, and will have thick black hair and kind eyes, and won’t smoke or drink, except for a few beers. You’ll trust him and he won’t hurt you. He’ll straighten Miguel out, and help Jesus become a great soccer player.”
“Silly girl.”
“I am silly. And stupid. And I can’t live without you,” I said.
That night we did share her bed. Before sliding into the deepest sleep since lying in a tent on Tai Long Wan, the scent of Tiger Balm helping me relax, I traced with my fingertips the twin constellations that occupied Gloria’s face. Excelsis-Major originated at the moles on her left ear, one so prominent people mistook it for a stud, then moved across two birthmarks on her cheek to the mole buried in her right eyebrow, a baby bird in a nest, dipped south first to her left nostril and next to her upper lip, and ended with the cluster of stars along her jawbone. The faint line that my fingers left behind drew a paper fan, one-quarter open. Excelsis-Minor, discovered at the same age—Mr. Barcley taught us astronomy in grade seven—had more points of connection, eighteen in all, but when linked up by the same fingertips produced nothing so beautiful. And even before I learned in school how massive the universe was, I sensed that stars had to be lonely, separated from each other by too much space and imprisoned within their own gravity. Only lately had I found out that humans were the same. Billions of us side by side, but everyone alone and lonely, and without a clue how we’d ended up so far apart.
“I hate having my own room,” I said, only half-awake. “I wished you’d moved in with me once Rachel left for Canada. I never want you to be lonely, Gloria. I love you too much for that.” I touched the nape of my neck. “Come find me wherever I end up. Ho-kay?”
Ho-kay, she said, although I may have been asleep by then.
20—-12-21 6:50 am
Me: Wake up, Mom!
Me: Wake up, Dad!
20—-12-21 7:11 am
Mom: Can’t you hear me knocking? I hear you and Manga moving around in there. And don’t you want to say goodbye to her?
Dad: The airport car will be here in five minutes. Want me to pass along any message?
20—-12-21 7:34 am
Mom: We gave her an envelope. 18 months of severance pay, plus a letter of recommendation on my firm’s letterhead. That has to count for something
Dad: I thanked her for all she’d done for our family
Mom: She’s a good person. I know that. She didn’t intend you any harm. I know that too
20—-12-21 7:44 am
Dad: 11 years she’d been with us. Amazing, eh? Never had another helper our entire time here. Kiddo …? YOU GOT TO TALK TO YOUR PARENTS
Mom: Or not. As you wish. We’ll be waiting …
20—-12-21 9:02 am
Mom: Just spent an hour on the phone arranging a kennel for Manga. In the New Territories, at the cost per night of a decent hotel. He’ll be well looked after until we return
20—-12-21 9:19 am
Dad: How about we do a dope deal, you and me. Knock 3 times on the wall, just to let me know you’re okay. Knock twice if you’re not. I won’t tell
20—-12-21 9:32 am
Dad: No deal with me either?
Mom: Darling, don’t overestimate our sympathy for you. Zero contact suits me fine. We’ve a thousand loose ends to tie up today …
20—-12-21 9:49 am
Dad: Aren’t you bored? I bet Manga is chairdog of the bored! What say we ride bus 6 into Stanley? I’ll put on a SARS mask, if you really want to attend Mass.
20—-12-21 10:02 am
Dad: Roger that. Over and out
20—-12-21 11:40 am
Mom: I have, against my better judgment, left some lunch outside your door
Dad: What, you trained that dog to pee in the sink?
20—-12-21 1:10 pm
Dad: Enough. I’ve woken Rachel up and asked her to text you. Can you reply to her?
20—-12-21 1:25 pm
Mom: It’s over, Sarah. Over with Gloria. Over with Mary. We did what we had to. Not for us—for YOU. Please don’t make us feel any more disappointed or exasperated than we already do
20—-12-21 1:36 pm
Mom: And, darling daughter, I had to be at the office hours ago. I’ll probably be the last one to show up—yes, on a Sunday 4 days before Christmas. This is a real crisis, a real emergency, and I can’t waste any more time indulging your teen mo
odiness. Consider that iPhone confiscated as well
20—-12-21 2:07 pm
Dad: Just you and me in the apartment now, kiddo—does that change anything?
20—-12-21 2:21 pm
Dad: Not in the least? Can’t say I’m not hurt …
20—-12-21 2:40 pm
Dad: So you know: Rachel has officially declined to intervene … whatever that means … And your mother, typically, has decided to stage her own protest. No contact from her until further notice. I think I’ll take a nap
20—-12-21 4:32 pm
Dad: I’m baacck. Just outside your door, matter of fact. I can hear Manga whimpering through the wall. Even thinking about holding a pee that long would make me weep too. One of two options, Xixi. You play your ringtone for me, so I know you’re okay, or I go find a couple of guys from the security staff and pay them to bust this door down.
10 seconds. 1, 2, 3, 4—
Dad: Thanks. Is that a Beyoncé tune? … Now, how about I replace this sad cold lunch with an early dinner. We can order in—pad Thai, Singapore noodles, whatever you like
20—-12-21 5:58 pm
Mom: Me again. This is cruel to us, to yourself, and to Manga. I assume he has relieved himself all over the bed
20—-12-21 6:11 pm
Rachel: Promised to stay out of this … but a 12-hour siege, SeeSaw? POINT MADE WITH THE PARENTALS. Now I’m worried about you, and the mutt. He could explode
20—-12-21 7:18 pm
Mom: You can’t blame me, Sarah—not me alone. I’m not the only culprit … and there wasn’t even any crime
20—-12-21 8:25 pm
Dad: Is one of Gloria’s sons in trouble with the law? Your sister has been texting cryptic messages about a family situation that may have affected her decision-making with you. First I’ve heard of it
20—-12-21 8:42 pm
Mom: Too bad about Gloria’s boy. Wish we’d been told. Not that it would have changed anything. But I’m sorrysorrysorry, as I am about most things these days
Planet Lolita Page 14
