by Jason Y. Ng
You should be safe, but you’re not—not yet. Not as long as you pose your biggest threat, a grinning saboteur in lace, a wildly misplaced bet, a clumsy attempt to make yourself feel better, to find some rest, to be able, for once, to relax.
Watch out for yourself. You watch the sky instead. And as it begins to darken, you circle back home, back to not-your-home, back to life as sublet. Life as letting go of everything you thought you should try to get. Life as another evening weakening and passing away on Lamma. Island as hospital bed. From your little balcony in Yung Shue Wan, you watch the sun hang itself over the bay.
* * *
Some nights you sleep. Others not at all. On wakeful nights you recall yourself as a child, in the thrall of a crooked alleyway in Shanghai, your mother calling for you to catch up; or in Nepal, wandering from the guided tour, your cheek on cold temple stone, your eyes seeking the dusty mandala inside, before a teacher yells at you to rejoin the group. You wrestle with the sheets. Three o’clock. You see a yard with three magnolias. A drooping muscadine vine. South Carolina. Your mother’s childhood home. Locked linen closets. Female rage. Neat folds. Moths. Larvae.
Then morning, gray. The ferry, again.
These nights and mornings: a purgatorial upending following the end.
* * *
Tonight the bed is worse than ever. You lie there two hours. Three hours. Four. Then slip on shoes, shorts, a white T-shirt that glows like teeth in the dark. Walk past the photos of intimates unknown to you, close the door that’s not your door. Walk to the beach, where silky moonlight soothes the waves—Lamma at night looks much better than Lamma by light. More secretive. Elusive. Not careworn.
You sit in the sand but that’s not what you’re after. Something else tugs, as insistent as a little kid on your sleeve. You get up, oblige her, ask her where she wants to go. She points to the island hiking trail, ignores your protests of dark and danger, the shadows pooling on the path like blood from a freshly cut throat. You follow her lead, stumble a little over roots, jump at a snapped twig behind you, at the rustle of snakes in the leaves—getting ready to strike or ready to sleep? Bats cartwheel in the air, the jungle groans on either side, insects launching an ancient, endless argument.
The kid presses on, impatient. Then halts abruptly, waits for you to catch up. Lamma’s famous Kamikaze Caves. So this is where she had to go. What couldn’t wait for dawn. But why? You try to ask her, but you’re barely on speaking terms—you’ve been trying to kill her for most of your life. To your horror, she always revives—survives your strangling, smothering, burying her alive. You could have sworn you saw her draw her last little-girl breath at the altar. But ever since you left your husband, she’s begun to come around again. Occasionally with a lopsided grin, like the one she’s wearing now.
“You first,” you say, and turn on your phone’s fluorescent light.
* * *
You came here once, before you and she split, when you were six, trying to keep up with your father and brother on a Sunday hike. They plunged inside the man-made caves but you hesitated . . . because of what your father had said. About why the caves had originally been built. For the Japanese to store their kamikaze boats, during the war.
“What’s a kamikaze boat?” you’d asked, and your brother gleefully described the boat’s design: “Four forward speeds and no reverse.” So the soldiers inside would explode along with whatever they hit, couldn’t turn the boats around, even if they tried.
“That’s enough,” your father interrupted, seeing you go pale. You refused to step in the caves then, nor did you want the two of them plunging in without you, but in they went. You sat feeling sick, in the dirt, the cavern’s musty breath on your neck.
You could see the Japanese soldiers’ faces, white knuckles on the sides of the boats, clenched jaws, then all of them a burst of red, the unsuspecting British too. Too cruel.
You’ve passed the caves in the last few months, pacing the island, but never stepped inside. You do it now, turning off your phone’s unhelpful shine.
“Why here? Why tonight?” you ask, but the little girl is gone. How long have you been standing in the cave alone? You start to walk out, feeling silly, when something stops you. A twisting in the gut.
A Japanese soldier. Your old friend. You’d imagined him, as a kid, outside the cave that day, to make yourself feel better, even though your brother had laughed and said it was good they blew themselves up. His class had just studied the Japanese occupation. What they’d done to local women. How they’d massacred an entire village after surrender, in ’45—“That’s enough,” your father said again.
But sitting alone, you couldn’t stop seeing one man’s face. One kamikaze soldier must have escaped, you decided. When the captain gave orders to go, one soldier would have just slipped out, unnoticed. He wouldn’t have stayed to watch the boats explode. He would have watched out for something else, instead. He would have tiptoed farther into the cave, betrayal metallic on his tongue. He would have reached the end, to where they’d chipped through pure rock weeks earlier, and stopped. He would have felt all over, touching spiders, and guano, and God knows what else, for the opening of a tunnel, like a drunk man’s wink, built to escape a British attack, but now he would be running from his own side, escaping himself.
You saw his fingers finding that hole, then him scrambling into it, a narrow birth canal. He would have come out somewhere near the quarry, on the other side of the island, and then, for years, lived on berries and whatever he could steal from village gardens and fish farms, growing feral, trying to bury his mother tongue, his myriad loves, his everyone he once was.
Watch out for yourself.
It was the only way you could bear the thought of the Kamikaze Caves back then, by inventing him: the one who survived. And here he is now. Scratched. Bleeding. A ghost. Alive. He takes your hand in his, leads you deeper into the dark. You stop at the back wall. He guides your fingers to the tunnel, smiles proudly in the dark.
“I know,” you say. “This is where you went.”
He wants you to crawl through it too, for you both to make escapes together, over and over, every night. You stop him from helping you up.
“It’s done,” you say. “They’re dead. Your soldier friends. My husband’s wife.”
That’s when you both sink to the cave’s wet floor and cry. For the life you were spared. For the lives you sacrificed. You hold him to you, all rags and bones and guilt and lice, and as his arms encircle you, he melts away, abandons you, like he abandoned his own suicide, leaving only the stench of sweaty relief behind.
You get up to go, but near the entrance of the cave something else has come. Some things. Some ones. Three of them. No, six. Dogs and women. The dogs closer to foxes. The women closer to gods. Goddesses. Not Kuan Yin, Buddhist Goddess of Mercy. Not Mary, Christian Mother of God. Not any of the bitter, martyred saints. The three figures standing before you are older, fiercer than that. The triplicate Greek Hecate, Goddess of the Crossroads, barring your way out. They raise their gray, grave gazes to you. You start to speak, to politely ask them to step, just a little, to the side, so you can pass, when one of them springs upon you like a cat, and the other two follow, light as spiderwebs, strong as rainforest vine, trying to bind your arms behind your back. You flail and kick and scream and fight, the foxes quietly circling the struggle, eyes aglow. You clutch at holy ankles, hair, throats, thighs. And after what feels like hours, just when you think they’re finally tiring, you suck in a long ragged breath and that’s when the smallest one smites you, when you’re not watching, right in the hollow of your hip.
You howl, but don’t let her or the other two go, pinned as they are beneath you. Bless me, you growl, and their hounds echo the moan in your throat. The Hecates struggle, you bark in pain but stay strong until the three of them touch your hip again, where you were just hit, and reluctantly, eyes averted, they bless it.
As the last syllable leaves their lips, the first light sprea
ds into the cave, a milky dawn, the rock’s strange curves becoming clear, and with the light all the night’s nocturnal beings disappear. It’s just you, with filthy knees, bleeding palms, a fiercely aching side. You limp back to your sublet, your unhome, spread out on your unmade bed. Unwed. Alone. The light blazes on the curtains fierce as a sacred fire, but for you the dark is finally descending; you close your eyes, you dream of nothing, not even the sun, not even, for the first time in your life, becoming someone else. You simply sleep. Watched over. Watched out for. Yourself.
* * *
From the balcony, if you were awake, you might barely glimpse a container ship making scant progress across the bay, asking for another continent.
PART II
OBEDIENCE & RESPECT
YOU DESERVE MORE
by Tiffany Hawk
Lan Kwai Fong
At forty-one, I'm probably too old to be elbowing my way through the crowds moving up D'Aguilar Street toward the bars and clubs of Lan Kwai Fong. I'm certainly too married to be sneaking around like this, and God knows I'm far too sweaty and jet-lagged to make the impression I'd hope to when meeting the ex-boyfriend I've spent almost two decades trying to forget.
Sweat rolls down my temples, pools between my breasts and at the back of my knees, yet I breathe in the humid air and car exhaust as if returning to this city can bring me back to life.
I'd forgotten the world could be so vibrant and bright and alive. It's been a long and bitter winter in Fairfax, Virginia. No leaves on the trees, no people on the streets, nothing but dirty snow covering the ground. Even at the best of times, the DC area is a dark and paranoid place, where everyone seems to work for the government and you're never more than ten feet from someone wearing black sunglasses and a coiled-tube earpiece.
My husband Paul fits right in. For him, this trip to Hong Kong is nothing more than a means to an end, a chance to network with potential clients and diversify his computer security business, which is currently too dependent on feast-or-famine government contracts.
I'm just happy for an excuse to be here, on my way to Liang Hai Jun, or Leon as he called himself then, fresh from a year at Oxford.
My mind bounces back and forth—should I sleep with him or shouldn't I? It's a pointless internal dialogue because it's obvious that I shouldn't. It's equally obvious that if given a chance, I will.
I hear the slow ping of the Don't Walk signal turn into a fast metallic rattle and watch a tour group of mainlanders follow their red flag–wielding guide across the road. Every last one of them carries shopping bags emblazoned with names like Louis Vuitton or Giorgio Armani. That's something you wouldn't have seen twenty years ago.
It's not quite seven p.m., when the streets will close for cars and begin to fill with tourists and expats from all over the world, laughing and yelling in Cantonese and Mandarin, Korean, Hindi, the occasional Portuguese or Arabic, and of course English accents of every variety.
Right now, the road is still crammed with delivery trucks and boxy red taxis. A double-decker bus whips around the corner onto Wellington Street, nearly slamming into a white van. His is the first honk I've heard all day. Hong Kong may never sleep, but it is no New York. It feels more genteel, more charming, more welcoming. Especially to an obvious outsider like me, the five-foot-nine blonde bobbing awkwardly above the crowd. I feel a twinge of guilt thinking of how the city's character is rooted in colonialism. Not only am I accepted in this neighborhood, I'm expected. I'm part of the history and social fabric of Hong Kong. In fact, despite Leon's pride in China, I know he once saw my fair hair and native English as a status symbol.
* * *
We met at Club 1997 in 1998, an oddly in-between era. The much-anticipated handover from Britain had just taken place, but its effects were yet to be understood. The world eagerly awaited the new millennium, and the idea of "partying like it's 1999" still had some cachet.
I can still clearly see Leon as he was then, a chic Chinese boy who moved easily through the world of boisterous expats. Everyone seemed fully aware that he would become someone they needed to know.
We glanced at each other for the better part of an hour before we spoke.
We discovered that his year at Oxford overlapped with the semester I spent studying abroad at University College London.
"We might have even crossed paths," I said.
"No. I'd remember you."
And like an old-fashioned Westerner in the sweltering colonial tropics, I swooned.
He ordered us two gin and tonics.
I shook my head. "The last bus back to the hostel leaves at ten thirty." There was no way I was going to hoof it all the way up Mount Davis. He promised to walk me back down to the harbor to catch my bus.
He looked so elegant as he held his drink and cigarette, like something out of a classic movie. He offered me a cigarette. Smoking was already passé by then in the States, so I had never touched a cigarette. But I took one. And coughed.
He laughed.
Based on the expensive suits of the crowd he was with, I figured he was someone important, but I didn't ask. He seemed to be enjoying the anonymity of hanging out with someone who didn't know anything about him.
"You're so tall," I said.
"I'm from Beijing," he replied, as if that explained anything. Looking back, and knowing what I know about him now, there may have been some snobbery in his tone. Regardless, he was the most impressive boy I'd ever met.
I missed my bus. Then I stayed for the summer.
Should I have stayed forever?
* * *
I quicken my pace up the steep sidewalk and under bamboo scaffolding, looking behind me for God knows what. All day I've been unable to shake the feeling that I'm being followed. I know it's irrational, but it's remarkable what a guilty conscience will do.
I promised Paul I wouldn't contact Leon. We probably both knew it was a lie, but he didn't push the issue. Paul trusts that I'm not the kind of woman who would cheat, definitely not the kind of woman who would risk a scandal with the son of a high-ranking Party officer, one rumored to work with a triad if it means getting what he wants.
I'd like to be that kind of woman.
After years of playing the good wife, I'm desperate for something more, something unpredictable. Part of me even wants to throw caution to the wind and bring Leon back to my hotel room. The thought of such a huge risk is thrilling. And so is the thought of revenge.
Can Paul really blame me?
He must know that I know. Unless he thinks I'm really stupid. He didn't even hide it well, which was almost more insulting than the affair itself. Leaving receipts for Victoria's Secret right out on his desk, acting suspicious while taking late-night texts and calls in the other room, going to a hotel in the middle of the day.
He was practically begging for me to find him out.
It's especially galling because I thought I'd married the safe choice, the glasses-wearing intellectual geek who spends his spare time writing code.
* * *
Blissfully chilled air streams from the open front of a 7-Eleven. I stop and stand with my back to the shop, pulling my wet dress away from my sticky back and fanning it in a vain attempt at drying out. I was going for glamorous when I bought this blue silk A-line from Shanghai Tang, its mini-Mandarin collar just Chinese enough to be special without making me look like I'm trying too hard. Between the dress and the impractical four-inch heels that are already pinching my feet, I thought I would be irresistible.
Instead I'm so nervous my stomach hurts. I hope this bar still has Western toilets.
I turn down the alley toward our garden, as Leon said in his text. He means Le Jardin, a lush little bar tucked away down an alley behind D'Aguilar Street and above the al fresco restaurants of Wing Wah Lane. Back in the day, we spent many an early morning there after the other bars had closed. I'm not sure if his text was cute or cryptic. Who would he be worried about finding us? Paul? His own wife?
In all the times I've
walked this path, I don't believe I've ever seen it in the daylight. Everything looks the same nonetheless—the Chinese graffiti, the back of a high-rise with a hundred spinning air conditioners raining condensation onto the street below. The gray stone wall that Leon pressed me against that first foggy night as we kissed until the sun came up.
At the end of the alley and in front of Le Jardin, I see a man. His back is to me. He is smoking a cigarette.
Perhaps hearing my steps, he turns. It is indeed Liang Hai Jun in the flesh. He flicks his cigarette onto the ground and snuffs it out with a twist of his foot.
A current of electricity surges through me. It's like seeing a movie star.
Leon smiles at me with a tenderness that catches me off guard. Even from here I can see that he now has pronounced laugh lines and crow's feet, but they only make his smile deeper, seemingly more meaningful. He is looking at me the way you might look at a child who is suddenly all grown up, beautiful and successful. If he only knew the fundamental level at which I have failed.
Paul doesn't even see me anymore. If I wore a skimpy negligee—or hell, a studded leather harness and a ball gag—and got between him and his computer, he would crane his neck to look at the screen.
But Leon, Leon just stands there beaming at me as if I am a world wonder.
"Hi," I say from a little too far away. My voice sounds quieter and more nervous than I want it to.
"Hi," he says as I get closer. He doesn't reach for a hug, and I don't want to initiate. I step back.
I notice his hair starts a little farther back but is still almost entirely black. The sexy but severe angles of his cheekbones and nose have softened just a touch. The top of his shirt is unbuttoned casually, but his jacket and pants have obviously been well-tailored, if not custom-made. He looks every bit the part of CEO and heir to a corporation that owns a monstrous portion of this island's real estate and commerce.