by Jason Y. Ng
The pub’s the sort of place you only find in expat enclaves in Asia. Chairs and low tables on the beachfront terrace so spavined that secondhand shops wouldn’t sell them. Sand underfoot. The dogs of people who’ve known each other for years yelp and sniff each other’s butts. The menu features fish and chips and mac and cheese. But the drinks list features Belgian Trappist ales on draft and good sauvignon blanc from New Zealand. The facade of cheap, cheerful seediness is only as deep as a worn Gucci loafer.
With a pint of something I’m not sure how to pronounce, I read e-mail on my phone and wait for my food. The first sips of lager dispatch the last shreds of the hangover. I won’t get hammered again. I don’t want my time here to be a black cascade of days where I can only keep track of the passage of time by using shaving cream to write a number on the bathroom mirror before I pass out for the night.
There are five messages from Adrian. About what I expected. He understands why I left but not why I did it so suddenly. No goodbyes, I just packed my shit and cabbed to Heathrow. Four years, gone just like that. This was how I wanted to thank him for putting up with my craziness while I worked on my thesis? And what the hell, I fucked off back to Asia the day after I submitted it? I skim through the rest of his Reuben, I miss you, come back bullshit, delete the message, delete the others. Done.
My food comes. While I’m waiting for it to cool, I order another beer. Hell, I’ve earned it. Two sips in, and I get a message. It’s from my uncle Tsz Lam. In English, he goes by Charles. Do you want to have dinner tomorrow? He names one of the seafood restaurants on the promenade. Says it’s good. Of course I say yes; I’m not busy. I spend a couple of hours at the beachside pub, drinking more than I planned to. It hurts less than thinking. I chat with a couple of Australian backpackers, watch kids romp on the sand, nurse beers. The Aussies invite me to throw a Frisbee with them down on the beach. I have to decline. The cast is off but the bones still ache and my grip isn’t great.
I tell them it was an accident. The wince when I cut my fish with the side of my fork is sincere. Even after a couple of beers, there’s an arthritic ache in my wrist. I tell myself one more pint of Flemish unpronounceable. Then I won’t feel anything.
2
Today’s better. Overcast, like my head, but still better. That bender from two days ago didn’t get Adrian out of my system. Only time will do that, or drastic measures. But that’s for later. For now, I just need coffee.
Sometimes people compliment me on my Cantonese. This is funny. I grew up speaking it with my mother and her side of the family. Even my dad can twist out basic sentences. There’s no reason why I wouldn’t be fluent. It’s my appearance: on the dark side of white, I’ve been taken for Italian, Portuguese, even Polish. In England I tend to feel Chinese. And now that I’m here, I feel transparent. While I’m eating, I watch the local news. Might as well know what we’ll talk about over dinner. More than that, it’s for language. Like any language, my Cantonese recedes when I don’t use it.
I tune out the weather and politics. They’re both more of the same: heat, haze, and bullshit. The last story catches my attention, so I sit back down on the awful little sofa and watch. A university student’s gone missing. A girl. Third year at CityU. Last seen two days ago. The reporter is saying something about boyfriend trouble. No known history of mental health issues or drug abuse. There’s a part of me that marvels: this is actually on the news here. Hong Kong is safe and orderly enough that on a slow news day, this story warrants airtime. Then I realize where I’ve seen her—where I think I’ve seen her. I bumped into her yesterday, glaring at the two boys at the beach. By the time the story ends, I’ve convinced myself I’m imagining things. It might have been the same girl. But even if I were to go to the police, they wouldn’t believe me. It was just a glimpse, after all.
The day advances with minor agendas. I left London in such a hurry that I need clothes. I enjoy shopping almost as much as I enjoy biopsies, and I don’t have the right clothes for this climate. I’m always sweaty. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as living in London too long, but if there’s a next destination for me, it’ll have to be cooler than this. I’m also running low on clean boxers. Like coffee and toilet paper, underwear isn’t negotiable.
Arriving back on Cheung Chau after a few hours on Hong Kong Island is like arriving into a different country. The low row of shops along the modest harbor bring Vientiane to mind, a modestly sparkling flatness along the north bank of the Mekong. Decades fall away. Everyone troops off the ferry, rattled after an hour on choppy waters. Down the ramp with its lateral ribs to keep people from slipping when it rains. To the right, a row of hawker stalls under canopies and big umbrellas: stacks of vegetables, fresh cuts of meat, seafood caught earlier today and still twitching in beds of ice. There are little pyramids of fish balls and tofu puffs. I feel like a tourist for noticing; I feel like a displaced local for wondering which stall has the best food; I feel like a foreigner again for worrying about hygiene and MSG; I feel like a lazy bastard for being grateful I’m eating dinner with my uncles so there’ll be no dishes to wash up afterward. It’s early evening, so lines of commuters form at the hawker stands. People picking up dinner. The waterfront promenade isn’t as chaotic at this time of day. The day-trippers have gone home and the folks who work in Central are trying to do the same thing. Here, there are no blaring taxi horns, only seagulls and a few squalling grannies.
I stop at the apartment—hard to think of it as home when my parents’ house is so close by—to drop off my bags. The creaking dehumidifier needs its tank emptied. The groaning air conditioner just needs to be taken out and shot. Quick spin through the shower to wash off the sweat. There’s time for one beer.
The news again. Background noise. Just loud enough to keep me company in this rank little flat, not so loud as to assault my ears like the crowds and the car horns in town. It’s just starting. The lead story: the body of the girl who vanished has been found on one of the Lantau Island beaches not so far from here. She must have waded out to sea to end it all. She didn’t leave a note behind, and her friends and family would like to ask the community what happened. I can’t shake the feeling I’ve seen her before. Maybe I’m not meant to. After this comes the weather report: more of same. Politicians making speeches. You can almost see the not-so-invisible hand of Beijing overhead, pulling their puppet strings.
In the shower, so narrow I bump my elbows against the wall when I turn around, I’m thinking of Adrian. How we’d both fit into this space. He’s bigger. He drinks. Bit of a beer belly. It’s not unattractive. The shower curtain keeps blowing in and sticking to my ass. This would annoy him. He’d complain about it but he wouldn’t know how to fix it and wouldn’t try. It would all come back on me somehow in the end: how I have a hundred ways to make him the bad guy, how I look down on him, how he puts up with me even when I hurt him, how I’m spoiled. Spoilt. He’d spit out that British t at the end.
To make myself stop thinking about him, I hurry. It mostly works. So what if I rack myself pulling clean boxers up my legs too fast or bang my hip against the nightstand, or drop my keys instead of putting them in my pocket? In the moment, they erase Adrian.
Charles stands up to greet me when I arrive. There’s a surprise: Gideon, my other uncle, is with him. Charles and Gideon were more like cool older cousins than uncles when I was a kid. They didn’t mind buying me beer now and then. It’s been years.
“Did you put on insect repellent?” is Charles’s first question.
“I forgot.”
Gideon hands me a spray bottle, and I thank him. We take a seat and Charles signals the waiter to bring me a pint while I mist my exposed skin and rub the stuff in. Now I smell like a grapefruit. It’s essential, though. Like the other restaurants on this part of the waterfront, the dining area’s outdoors under a retractable roof. The mosquitoes are bloodthirsty little vultures and dengue’s making a comeback.
They’ve already ordered. Razor clams in black bean sauc
e. A steamed fish. Hainan chicken rice, which Charles tells me this restaurant does well. When the waitress comes back with my beer, Charles asks what kind of vegetables I want. Gai lan is the default, the one people tend to order. Black bean sauce, garlic, or belachan? In Britain, I missed these restaurant conversations. Here, the waitstaff will tell you what’s good today. She reminds him the clams have black bean sauce, so we should opt for the garlic. Skip the belachan, it’s too salty and too fishy. She doesn’t understand how Southeast Asians can stand the stuff.
“What brought you back?” Gideon asks. He speaks slowly as if he’s not sure I remember Cantonese. Before I can answer, he has more questions: “You’re doing a master’s, right? Or a PhD? Are you finished?” I’m swallowing some beer and before I can answer, he’s at it again: “When’s your graduation? Do you have to go back to England for it?”
“I haven’t had my viva yet. Someone in my department will e-mail me when they’ve decided on the date.”
“Will you pass?”
“I think so. I don’t know why I wouldn’t.”
“And then you’ll graduate?”
“That’s how it usually works, unless the examiners want me to change some things in my thesis. They might. But I’ve been thorough. My supervisor said I’m a little bit scary.”
I said this last part in English: a little bit scary. Gideon blinks and looks to Charles for clarification. Charles obliges. I could have, but I’m used to this. Unlike the rest of the family, Gideon left school in form five, went to a technical college, and became a mechanic. He’s a wizard with an engine but words are a challenge.
Our razor clams come. We dig in. The chef has put just enough chili oil in the black bean sauce to give it a bite. A couple of times, I catch Charles looking at me in a thoughtful way: he can tell there’s something I don’t want to talk about. Someone I don’t want to talk about. I stay vague about why I came back: I’ve been away for so long, I missed Hong Kong, I needed a break after I turned in my thesis. Maybe later I’ll tell him about Adrian. Something tells me he’ll get it. But it’s a relief when talk turns to food, as is axiomatic in Asia. The black bean sauce is perfect but the clams are a little on the rubbery side. The fish, though: it’s perfect, tender without falling apart. It’s a real skill, knowing when to be done.
Have I heard from my parents? An e-mail yesterday or the day before, I mumble to Gideon through a mouthful of gai lan. They bought some land outside of Christchurch and are driving down to Dunedin to look at property there. Charles asks about this week’s political storm in a thimble. I haven’t paid much attention. Some politician did something. There’s always some politician doing something. It’s a scandal. Somber legislative council members are giving interviews nonstop. It’s the kind of thing I tune out. Besides, I was on a plane when it was all happening.
“What about the girl?” Gideon asks. “You must have heard about that.”
He’s on his third pint now. The third one that I’ve seen, that is. His face blazes sunset red. Like many Asians, he lacks the enzyme to metabolize alcohol completely. He’s not drunk but he looks like it.
“It’s pretty sad,” is all I know I can say safely.
“Last year, there was a suicide epidemic. High school students, university students . . . even some younger ones. I heard it was worse than we saw in the news,” Charles says.
“How can that be?” I ask.
“I know a psychiatrist. He said a lot of his colleagues reached out to the newspapers and the TV stations. They convinced them to cover it up, to stop the copycat suicides.”
Suicide’s a touchy subject here on Cheung Chau, the site of Hong Kong’s last string of publicized suicides. For a time, you couldn’t buy charcoal here. Even braziers were banned, but that didn’t keep people determined to die from buying them on Hong Kong Island and bringing them over on the ferry.
“Her note said her boyfriend was gay,” Gideon blurts.
“I thought there wasn’t a note,” I said.
Charles shrugs, sets his beer down on the table too hard. It’s a fresh glass—a waitress just brought it. Foam splashes his hand, and he looks around for a tissue. “Ki-hong,” he says quietly. Gideon’s name in Cantonese.
“Do girls still kill themselves over that?” I ask. “I thought the world had moved on. Today they’re like, Let’s be besties and go shopping?”
For the record, I fucking hate shopping. Did I already mention that?
Gideon sinks into an odd silence. After all that beer and food, we’re slowing down. The waitress brings the last dish, fried rice with prawns, and we share a final-course groan. There seems to be no choice at this stage but to order more beer and dig in. Our talk turns back toward safer subjects: the weather (cooling down for the season), politics (heating up), and the family (same as usual). Once we’ve eaten so much that one more bite will be fatal, Charles asks for the bill.
There are no knowing looks, no dark undertones, no double entendres. Maybe we’re all just too drunk. But I’m pretty sure there’s something my uncles aren’t telling me.
3
Thomas keeps checking his phone. This isn’t surprising. I met him on an app. We’re at a coffee shop in SoHo. It’s a million degrees and he’s wearing a scarf to show how European he is. He was working in Milan until a couple of months ago doing something I’ve forgotten already. Fashion? Finance? Now he’s back in Hong Kong, adrift like me, trying to belong while holding onto a measure of difference. We’re supposed to connect.
Adrian’s a thing of the past, or he would be if I could make myself filter his e-mails; it’s time to try dating again. I’ve had it with white men for now. When you’re outside of Asia, they have preconceptions. You’re passive, a geisha with a dick. You’re good at math. Your parents don’t know you’re gay and would be appalled to find out. What about the family name, the bloodline, the grandchildren? Asia’s not that simple. Now that I’m back where I came from, I want to touch skin that looks like mine. I want to wake up and see someone else’s black hairs on the pillowcase.
It’s been nine or ten days since that dinner. I met Charles a couple of days later for a beer, but he didn’t mention the dead girl and neither did I. He told me he was going to Bangkok and Phuket, a long-delayed holiday. For the first time, something occurs to me: I don’t actually know what he does for a living. I assume he flips properties, or he once did. He owns shares in a couple of restaurants, I think. And stock. I think he’s one of those Hong Kong guys who made good investments back when you still could, and now coasts on the rents and the dividends. As for Gideon, he has some on-again, off-again thing with a woman over in Macau. Once or twice a month, he spends the weekend there. This is one of them.
There’s nothing more on the news about the girl. I wasn’t expecting much. No matter where you go, the news is the same. Reporters break stories and milk them for drama. If it bleeds, it leads. But half the time, you don’t know how they end. I can fill in the blanks for myself. The family wants privacy. They had her cremated over in Hung Hom. There’s a memorial service, an interment. Best to bury the story as well as the girl. Too many kids kill themselves as it is.
Thomas sets down his phone and looks at me for the first time in what feels like twenty minutes. “Is this . . . working out?” he asks.
“I think the question suggests the answer,” is all I can come up with.
“I’m sorry. I was texting my friend Jerry. He’s telling me not to be so damn shy. You’re . . .” Here, he stops, seems to be hunting for the right words, and switches to Cantonese for an idiom that means, You’re out of my league, more or less.
“I’m just a guy who lives in Cheung Chau and doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.”
“It doesn’t show,” Thomas says. “You seem . . . very together.”
“I fake it,” I assure him.
Is he expecting me to compliment him in return? I scramble for something that won’t be a cliché. Mostly I’m grateful. He’s being real n
ow. The locals’ self-loathing can be problematic. There’s a sort of flustered charm I didn’t see before, and my urge to shake his hand and take my leave has gone.
“Don’t you feel nervous, living out there? Or just bored?”
“Why would I be nervous?” I ask.
“Cheung Chau—the suicide capital of Hong Kong? Aren’t you superstitious? I would be.”
“I don’t think I believe in ghosts.” Besides, there are other ways to be haunted. But I don’t say this part. “I’ve never seen one, anyway, and I live in one of the buildings where it happened.”
“You’re braver than I am, living there,” he says.
I wonder if he’d feel this way if he were to have witnessed what happened with Adrian. I’m not proud of it. I won’t tell him.
“A distant cousin of mine killed herself out there. I think it was two years ago, maybe three? I was in Italy then.” He looks down, gives the ice cubes in his empty glass a stir with his straw, takes a last sip of his liquid dessert. He’s a slender guy, which must mean he has the metabolism of a blast furnace if he drinks these sugar bombs often. “We weren’t close, and I couldn’t come back for the memorial service.”
“I’m sorry to hear about that,” I say, a reflex.
“You know what the funny thing was—funny in the sense that it was weird? She was seen boarding the ferry to Cheung Chau. But something happened after that. I mean, obviously it did. She killed herself. But you know where they found the body? Lamma.”
“You’re right, that’s weird.”
“The cops said she swam out to sea, but it didn’t make sense. Aren’t there currents between the islands?”
“I’ve never thought about it much.” I have, actually. We don’t need to talk about why. “I suppose so. You’re saying they should have . . .”