by Jason Y. Ng
I changed Lily’s diaper, holding her close to my chest, enjoying her soft warmth. The flat was stifling. It smelled of the rotting garbage both of us had forgotten to take out. Handel kept the air-conditioning off as much as possible and absolutely refused to sleep with it on.
“It’s for the baby, Little Bourgeois,” he would scold in Mandarin. His once affectionate nickname for me had become like a sly pinch from a schoolyard bully. There was no compromise. During the night, mold grew on our clothes in the wardrobe. By day, heat and humidity made us bicker and fight.
“Mummy’s sweet pea, Mummy’s sweet pea . . .” I smiled through the tears. It had only been six months since Lily was born. Handel and I didn’t talk anymore. What was it I fell in love with? I was so tired I couldn’t remember. Was it the idea of him? Was it Hong Kong? Was it China?
I went over to the open-plan kitchen at the back of the living room. Balancing Lily on my hip, I mixed up a small portion of rice cereal from a packet and heated up half a cup of milk. Then I settled down to feed her at the little table.
None of this was what I’d signed up for: not Handel, not the baby, not our tiny rented flat in Ma On Shan. But I lie to you now and I lied to myself back then. The responsibility was mine alone. I married him. I had gone into it with my eyes open. I wanted the child and so did he.
It’s not that I wasn’t warned. They had all tried in their different ways.
“But he’s a Big Six,” my Hong Kong Chinese colleagues at the newspaper had whispered to me as we stood next to the water cooler. Big Six is the name Hong Kongers have for people from Communist China. It’s a Cantonese pun on the word for mainlanders. “They,” the emphasis was on the otherness of the they, “they have no traditional values, only care about one thing: money.” And now that I had no illusions left about Hong Kong, I understood the subtext. As a white English girl, I was marrying beneath myself.
“Best go home. Choose one of your own. The gap is too great.” My wise old Mandarin teacher had brought fat American cherries to our lesson and washed them himself. “You’ll be waking up every morning, each of you wondering what on earth is going on in the other’s head.” He was being cruel to be kind.
“You can’t do both. People won’t accept it.” My boss at the paper had a Hong Kong Chinese mother and an English father and had been educated at Harrow. “In the end you’ll have to choose. Believe me, I’ve tried.” He meant that in Hong Kong it was difficult if not impossible to function socially in both the Chinese and the expat worlds. But I had ignored all the advice.
“Sweet pea, Mummy’s sweet pea!” There was so much I wanted to tell Lily, but how could I when I didn’t understand it myself? I was trapped, suffocating in this sweltering matchbox apartment away from my own people. The tiny place was home to four of us including the maid. People back home might have thought it quite luxurious with its marble floors and modern conveniences. There was even a swimming pool, a laundry room, and a gym. But the whole apartment was the size of my parents’ sitting room in Berkshire.
Handel and I first met in London at an Anglo-Chinese corporate event. I was an aspiring business correspondent angling for the newspaper to post me to Hong Kong or Beijing. He was a young banker with a British bank. I wasn’t sure if it was love at first sight, but his face broke into such a gargantuan grin of delight when I addressed him in Mandarin. We ended up having supper in a Chinese restaurant in Soho, and over the weeks and months things went on from there.
Yes, he was handsome, well over six feet tall, with big eyes, high cheekbones, and a cheeky smile. He wore an expensive suit with a green-and-purple jewel-patterned tie. His outfit was topped off with a smart black coat embellished with a yellow cashmere scarf, which reminded me in a cute way of Paddington Bear. The waitresses in the restaurant that night certainly thought him dapper. He sweet-talked them into extra helpings and the softest doufu hua dessert. He could charm the hind legs off a donkey!
We chatted in Mandarin and then slipped into English since he spoke it much better than I did Chinese. His mother was a teacher and his father a Party man. He had been separated from them during the Cultural Revolution. His mother had been held in a makeshift Red Guard prison known as the “cattle stall,” and his father relegated to cleaning toilets. As for Handel, he was sent down to the countryside for “reeducation” with his classmates. His face had clouded over at this point in the story and he talked about keeping rabbits for food and how he had been the one chosen to wring their necks. Over the following weeks and months I got to know him better. He had come to the UK in 1990 to study economics and business, paying his way with a loan and by working in kitchens in Chinese restaurants. The customers had no idea their meals were being cooked by gangs of ex–Red Guards now studying for degrees.
“Poor little white cabbage!” he said when our first meal together was nearly over, reaching with his chopsticks to fish up one remaining leaf. “Here, Little Bourgeois, eat up!”
Perhaps that’s when I fell in love with him, that night in the restaurant when he first teasingly called me Little Bourgeois. Perhaps it was when he cooked me sweet soup balls with sesame filling and we ate them out of one bowl in bed. Perhaps it was the old photograph: Handel when he first arrived in London, thin and gaunt in his blue trousers and white shirt with a bowl haircut. I was proud of him then, proud of his determination to educate and better himself, excited by his transformation from Red Guard revolutionary to modern city boy. I delighted in his success, and enjoyed being in the arms of such a handsome man. I helped him with his English and he with my Chinese. The sex was gentle, kind, if unadventurous. He made me feel good.
Where had it all gone so wrong? People told me that he was using me. But if that were true, then surely I was equally guilty of that charge. He was my key to things Chinese, career advancement in Hong Kong and China. Think of the stories I could get that others would miss! On my side, my dad was a Conservative member of Parliament. Had Handel thought I was his way into the British establishment? He was ambitious for sure, but then so was I. Yet I had come to understand that for him it was something more than ambition, rather a kind of desperate frenzy to make up for the deprivation of the Maoist years, all at once. Pizza, sex, croissants, French wine, opera, golf, horse riding, even cricket at Lord’s! He was like a child in a candy shop.
* * *
The bedroom door opened and Handel shuffled out, his plastic slippers scuffing lazily on the floor.
“Happy handover!” I chirped brightly, determined to start the afternoon positively, for the celebrations would soon begin. I had given the maid a week off over the holiday period and she had gone home to the Philippines. Without her in the flat, I thought the two of us might talk. Handel noisily cleared his throat and spat into the kitchen sink. It was his regular waking-up routine, learned from his mother. He knew I detested it. His eye fell on the empty bottle of milk and the dish that I had fed Lily from.
“You’ve been giving her that stuff again, Little Bourgeois,” he sneered.
I didn’t rise to the challenge.
“Congee not good enough for her? It’s not done me any harm.”
I gritted my teeth and shuddered inside. It was hopeless, day after day, always the same. There was no physical violence, but with constant criticism and verbal assault on everything I did, there might as well have been.
He picked up yesterday’s Ming Pao newspaper. I stared at him sitting at the table in his wifebeater and boxer shorts. Who was this man I had married? I didn’t know him anymore. I busied myself playing with Lily, sitting on the floor making towers with her colored blocks. He watched me out of the corner of his eye. What did he see? I was wearing a yellow-flowered nightdress that I had bought in Mong Kok. It was more suitable for a grandma than a young woman of twenty-eight.
It had started after we moved to Hong Kong, small things at first, so I almost didn’t notice. He missed me. He didn’t like me going for drinks after work with gweilo colleagues. My lipstick was too bright, m
y skirt too short, my underwear too revealing. I thought it was a joke. I wasn’t exactly a socialist virgin. Did he want me to wear my hair in braids under a Mao cap with a little red star?
Pushing aside the newspaper, Handel cleared Lily’s empty bottle and dish, clattering them to the sink. The dish detergent was all used up.
“Damn that girl,” he said in Shanghainese, thinking I wouldn’t understand. He was referring to the maid, but he meant me. I couldn’t do anything right.
His eye fell on Lily and his face relaxed into a smile, that wonderful joyous smile that I had first loved. He came over and sat cross-legged on the floor opposite us. Lily laughed and offered him a bright yellow block with her pudgy little hand. Despite myself, I softened and was drawn in. I dared to hope. We played a little, the three of us, silently passing blocks, building towers, knocking them down. Then gently, very gently, I looked him in the eye.
“Handel, we need to talk.”
“What about?” His face clammed up, hard, unreadable.
“You know—this, us, everything.”
“What’s the point? You’re not Chinese. You wouldn’t understand.” He grabbed the remote and switched on the TV.
The British governor of Hong Kong and his family were leaving Government House for the last time. He stood on the podium, holding back the emotion as the band played “God Save the Queen.” It began to rain. Onlookers’ umbrellas went up. The “Last Post” was sounded and the Union Jack lowered, folded, and presented to the governor on a velvet cushion. The return of the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong was not very straightforward.
China is a totalitarian Communist state, and despite the “one country, two systems” promise, the people of Hong Kong were being left without any meaningful democratic rights. It was a shameful betrayal. I began to cry, wiping away the tears with the back of my hand.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Handel said in Mandarin, and something inside me snapped. It was China that had brought us together and China that was driving us apart. I began to put away the blocks one by one, red, yellow, blue, green, placing them in their box. And when I was done, I picked up Lily and very carefully, walking as if on eggshells, I made my way to the bedroom door.
“You’d better get dressed, Little Bourgeois.” The nickname was no longer a joke. His words, all of them, were knives, jabs, stabs, slashes, cutting deep wounds. “Chi fan,” he taunted.
Chi fan literally means eat rice. With Handel it was code for meeting his Chinese friends, not my gweilo ones. We were supposed to be going out with a group this afternoon to celebrate the handover.
I didn’t reply and locked the bedroom door behind Lily and me. My stomach twisted with the agony of realization. For him, I was like the horse-riding lessons, the opera, the cricket at Lord’s. Once experienced, I could be rejected, spat out, nothing more than a half-eaten candy discarded on a marble floor. Coldly, calmly, I dressed Lily in her new pretty red dress, the one I had bought specially to celebrate the day as if it were Chinese New Year. Handover, a new start for Hong Kong, for us?
“Mummy’s sweet pea, Mummy’s sweet pea . . .” She gurgled, kicked her legs, and smiled. I put on my little white summer dress, the pearls my grandma had bequeathed to me, my highest heels, and my most audacious red lipstick. I got our passports, my credit cards, and the cash I had hidden, rolled in a walking sock. I packed a small duffel of essentials: diapers, a few clothes, and the chewed cuddly seal named Sally that Lily couldn’t sleep without. At the last moment I removed my wedding ring, placing it on Handel’s bedside table. I knew then that there would be no turning back.
I took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and Lily and I went back into the sitting room. Handel lolled on the sofa cutting his toenails with the kitchen scissors and didn’t look up. Staring at the top of his head, quietly, steadily, I took an umbrella from the shoe stand by the door and balanced it on top of my duffel. Snip, snip, a toenail fell away into the Ming Pao newspaper he had placed under his feet.
“Lily and I are going out. “ I announced. “Chi fan? You’ll have to go alone.”
Handel
That’s not my real name, of course. I’ve never really had a name, at least not in the way a Westerner would understand. I was born a number: fifty-eight, the year of my birth. During the Cultural Revolution my father gave me the name Wei Lie: Defending Lenin. It was for my own protection, or so he said. And later, in better times, I chose the name Han for myself. Han means China, as in Chinese civilization. Later still, when I was a student in London, Han became Handel. I heard his “Music for the Royal Fireworks” performed in Hyde Park one summer. Such a triumphant piece! So that’s the story of my names, if not exactly who I am.
To tell you the truth, when I first saw the way it was going with Lizzie, I just went along with it. I don’t believe in love. Marriage is business. I’ve never told her or anyone else exactly how I got out of China. Westerners will pour out their life story to any stranger in a bar, but we grew up differently. The less people know, the better. It’s safer that way. I was involved in the 1989 student protests in Shanghai. In the aftermath, I tricked an official in Shenzhen to let me escape to Macau and then to Hong Kong. All the years I was studying in London, no one back in Shanghai knew where I was, not even my parents.
Looking back, I suppose I thought I would stay in London, and Lizzie was kind. She wasn’t very pretty—too thin, a bit scrawny for my taste—but she was a generous soul. Of course, I regret it. But I couldn’t seem to help myself—me, her, the baby, and the maid, all of us cooped up in this tiny flat. I never had time to myself.
What’s so hard to understand? The world is changing. Europe and America are dying. The twenty-first century will be the Chinese century! The West has been top dog too long. Now it’s our turn. You won’t believe how much China had changed in the years I was away. There were fortunes to be made back home. Some of my classmates were already multimillionaires and I was late to the game. Lizzie didn’t get it, of course. She never understood that I was looking for something, I always have been.
I guess motherhood changed her, made her more English. She couldn’t wait to work in Hong Kong, and then she was desperate to go home. There was no satisfying her. She hated being in the New Territories away from her British friends, complained she was lonely. And sex too—she always wanted more. Little Bourgeois! She was always spoiled. They all are, Westerners, too soft.
The baby, you say? Of course, it’s sad, but she’s mixed blood, better off in the UK.
Do you know that when we lived in London, I used to admire minivans? I set my heart on a sky-blue Peugeot.
“We’ll have four children, and then we’ll have to buy one of those!” I used to say to Lizzie, heaven knows why. Anyway, the British were leaving Hong Kong at last. It was over. I was going to marry a rich Hong Kong Chinese girl and retire at fifty!
* * *
The doorbell rang. It was getting late. Lily and her mother still weren’t back. I had just returned from our handover dinner and was desperate to be alone. It was Lao Wang, damn him! I needed to see him; indeed, I had invited him to pop in sometime, but why this night of all nights? He was a clever one, make no mistake. It was the old way of doing things in a new disguise.
“Welcome! Come in! Sit down.”
Lao Wang was already making himself at home, slumping proprietarily in the middle of the sofa, his black leather man-bag on the coffee table, ready for business. In his pink Ralph Lauren polo shirt and cream-colored khakis, he was a very modern man, except he wasn’t. I had grown up with the system. Designer clothes and hair gel can’t fool me. We think when we go abroad we’ll be free, but we’re not. Wherever there are Chinese, it’s there, like a great hydra. Its tentacles stretch into student digs, university lecture halls, Chinese restaurants. All smiles, offering banquets and cash, it slips into foreign institutions. For Chinese there’s no escape. It’s in the food, in the tea, in the air. You find it in a nod or a whisper, a tap on the arm, a few careless
words marked on your file in the Chinese Embassy. The Chinese Communist Party, the most powerful organization the world has ever known. Old stench in new bottles.
Thankfully, the years of eating bitterness are behind us. Let bygones be bygones. But a man has to do what a man has to do. Number one thing, survival, and a man needs money for that, the more the better. Best not be too clean.
I smiled at Lao Wang. “What are we drinking, tea?” I had already drunk far too much beer with dinner.
“As you wish.” Lao Wang waved his hand imperiously and my mind whirred. That meant I had to present tea, beer, and possibly whiskey. My precious malt I rationed so carefully.
“Nice place.” Lao Wang stretched back, arms behind his head and feet up on the coffee table. “How much?”
“It’s just rented.” Some of Lizzie’s English manners had rubbed off on me after all. Didn’t he know it was rude to ask about money?
I put the tray down on the coffee table. Tea, beer, whiskey, nuts, and a few Marks & Spencer chocolates left over from Christmas. Lao Wang took out a packet of cigarettes and carefully chose one, as if somehow it might be special, different from the others. Without asking, he lit up, blowing smoke lazily into the air. My blood boiled, my throat tightened with panic—or was it rage? It was seven years since I left China. Everything had changed, yet everything remained the same. One little gesture said it all.
I had never liked Lao Wang. We all called him Old Wang out of habit, deference, fear, although he was not much older than the rest of us. It’s always best to keep your options open, not burn your bridges. We first met when I was a student in London. He sought me out in the student cafeteria one day at lunch. I recognized him immediately from the strutting way he walked with his hips thrust forward, and the pigeon-like turn of his eyes. He was the Party man, there to keep us in line. Freedom, democracy! What a joke!
Lao Wang picked up the remote and flicked on the TV. He helped himself to a whiskey, obliging me to do likewise. The channels were running and rerunning the handover events throughout the day: the arrival of President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng by air from Shenzhen, the farewell speech of the last governor.