by Jason Y. Ng
“Today is a day of celebration, not sorrow,” the governor, Chris Patten, affectionately nicknamed Fat Pang by Hong Kongers, began. He looked exhausted, close to tears.
“Whore of the East.” Lao Wang stubbed out a cigarette and poured more whiskey for the both of us.
The scene changed to cover the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army spilling over the border. It teemed with rain and their faces glistened. But they stood tall, three abreast in the back of the green trucks, eyes front, white gloved hands placed at perfect intervals gripping the side rails. The TV played patriotic marches and my heart swelled with pride. Beijing Blesses You Hong Kong, said the banners in a shot from Tiananmen Square.
“Where’s your old wife?” Lao Wang crushed out yet another cigarette. Damn him! He never beat around the bush.
“She’s gone to the yacht club with some friends.” I met his eye, steadily poured the tea.
“Hmm. Imagine them all up there, those foreigners, singing “Rule, Britannia!” and firing their silly old canon. Rule bloody Britannia! Long live China!”
“Long live China!” I raised my glass. It was really late now, pitch black outside. Suddenly I felt sick.
The television showed the reception at the convention center, all the Hong Kong great and good, the ladies discreetly adorned with jade and diamonds. It panned to clips from the British farewell parade: “Auld Lang Syne,” a lone Scottish piper in his kilt in the pouring rain. And then it was fireworks from Beijing, exploding stars and rainbow fountains of joy.
Lao Wang yawned, helped himself and me to yet more of my precious malt, and asked if there was any ice and soda. What a peasant. I didn’t have any, so he was forced to carry on drinking it neat, and me too, for if I was to press my case, I needed to keep him company.
“Here’s to an end to the century of humiliation.” Lao Wang raised his glass. “Death to the blood-stinking imperialists!”
“Gan bei! Gan bei!”
The toasts went on and on. Lao Wang’s face bloated, flushed red then purple. My head swam and I forgot Lizzie and Lily, ignored my anguish and confusion, blanked out my pain.
It was getting on toward midnight, reaching the climax of the day with the formal handover ceremony. On the TV, Prince Charles began his farewell speech on behalf of the Queen. Here was my chance. It was now or never.
“Actually, Lao Wang, there’s something I wanted to talk about.” It was me speaking but my voice was so gruff and hoarse that I barely recognized it. “I’ve been offered a job in Shanghai—a good one with an American bank.” I didn’t need to say more.
The band on the TV played “God Save the Queen,” and for the second time that day the Union Jack was lowered.
Lao Wang’s face locked down, his jaw tight. He swirled the whiskey in the bottom of his glass, looked at it, and swirled it again. My fate was in his hands. Then he beamed, and roared with laughter, slapping me on the back. “Well done! Welcome home!”
Suddenly it was as if it had all been a big joke: Tiananmen, the years in exile studying in London when I was too terrified to write home.
The handover ceremony was nearly over. The flag of the People’s Republic of China with its five stars was being raised, red, red, red, high, higher, higher. Lao Wang stood, unsteady on his feet, blasting out the Chinese national anthem, and I was up too, singing with gusto.
“Arise, all ye who refuse to be slaves. Arise! Arise! Arise!”
Exhausted, inebriated, but elated, we flopped down on the sofa. Lao Wang wiped his brow with his handkerchief and stared at me.
“And your old wife? A journalist like her could be a great friend to China.”
He knew I knew, and I knew he knew. That’s the way the system works. I thought of Lizzie. Bless her. She tried so hard, but really she had no idea. And then there was her member-of-Parliament father. I remembered him pruning his roses in his country garden. He was always kind to me. It was he who introduced me to the joy of single malt.
But Lao Wang had got his teeth into my weak spot. He gnawed and chewed, relishing it, toying with me.
“Does she know about the job in Shanghai?”
“No.”
“Do you think she’ll go?”
I shook my head. “Does it matter? It doesn’t to me.”
Lao Wang shrugged. “Shame. She might have been useful to us.”
The whiskey bottle was nearly empty by the time he tottered to the door.
“The Party needs young men like you,” he lisped, putting his arm paternally around my shoulders. “Don’t worry about a thing! Old Wang will sort you out.”
Softy, I closed the door behind me. For a few moments I rested my head on it. I had drunk far too much. I began to worry about Lizzie and Lily. They still weren’t home. My head swirled, everything pale green—green, the color of my childhood. Everything was painted that color in those days: offices, schools, hospitals, even our tiny little state-owned apartment. Imagine it, the whole country green. I don’t think I knew what color was until I got to London and saw all the girls in their pretty summer dresses: pinks, reds, yellows, oranges, and, goodness me, the gardens and the flowers. My guts churned. The old smells returned—coal and cooking oil, sweat, shit leaking from overflowing latrines. My mouth tasted like iron, a memory, blood. I made it to the sink just in time, vomiting lumps, pale puke green.
I retched until I was utterly spent, then went over to the window. I had to fix the safety catch. For the moment, I threw it open, wide open, raising my head, welcoming it, begging for it, the lashing, slashing rain.
PART III
FAMILY MATTERS
TICKET HOME
by Charles Philipp Martin
Yau Ma Tei
Almost. That could have been Jun’s nickname. Since childhood every prize in life lay just out of his reach.
He should have made it into the army like his older brother Wing, who joined after the family paid a fifty thousand–yuan bribe. But the sergeant took one look at Jun and said seventy-five. His parents, shopkeepers who scrimped for years and took bribes of their own, could only manage sixty.
Almost.
Had Jun been born a few years earlier, he might have joined the gang that pulled off the robbery at Sun Cheong Gold and Jewelry in Kowloon. That one made the papers even in Swatow. It was a professional operation, run by the Sun Yee On out of Mong Kok. But even that triad, the largest and most resourceful of the city’s criminal organizations, preferred mainland talent for the big jobs—good ex-army people who knew weapons, could follow orders, and who needed money. Jun’s cousin Mak was twenty-four, the right age for the job. The papers said he whipped his team through the shop in four minutes and snatched a good thirty million dollars in diamonds.
Jun was only fourteen that year.
Almost.
And today he had almost made it into the getaway car, having been the last man out of Yip Fung Fine Jewelry in Yau Ma Tei. But while backing away from the shattered counters, he tripped over a customer’s briefcase. The few seconds lost were enough. By the time he found his footing, a van loaded with cops was screeching to a halt, blocking him from the anonymous Mitsubishi across the street.
The other three on Jun’s team had burst from the doorway and scrambled into the van, clutching their Black Star automatics. Lucky Ma, never one for thinking things through, took hasty aim and fired at the police transport. The cops returned fire, and that was that. The team was pinned down, three crew and the driver, forced into a gun battle by the reckless Ma. One of the trapped crew was his brother Wing.
Jun watched uniformed men herd back screaming onlookers. He had to move now. Removing his balaclava and gloves, he ducked sideways out the door and slipped behind a knot of pedestrians gathered on the corner. The cops, pinned down by a gang of thieves taking wild shots, couldn’t follow him.
An alley appeared midblock and Jun let it swallow him. Here and there a worker pushing a loaded cart paused to watch him run by, but no one followed, and Jun eventually fel
t safe slowing down.
The Sun Yee On had chosen to hit a place in Yau Ma Tei for a reason. The district was sandwiched between Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok, both of which presented getaway problems. Tsim Sha Tsui, at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula to the south, had loads of jewelry shops, but was crammed with tourists. That meant lots of police on patrol, and cameras everywhere. Mong Kok, on the other hand, had few tourists, but was the densest place on earth, a black hole of compressed humanity just north of him. A job on wheels was suicide there: they’d list your cause of death as traffic.
So Yau Ma Tei it was—populated enough to give you cover with all its teeming stores and office blocks, but still a place that moved.
Emerging on the other side of the alley, Jun did his best to match the pace of the street’s foot traffic and rein in his gasping lungs. No one seemed to be in pursuit; he’d achieved his goal of dissolving into the oblivious throngs on Woosung Street, looking like any other salaryman on a lunch break.
Except he looked nothing like that. As his breath slowed, he eyed the stream of Hong Kongers around him. They seemed to be eyeing him back, these people who looked foreign even though they were Chinese.
Next year, you get yours. The handover was coming, less than a year off, and all this, the tall buildings and the cars and the gold, would be shoved neatly under Beijing’s heel. Next year, I won’t be the foreigner here. But right now that was of no concern.
A man strode by wearing a dark suit with a plush silk tie. His shoes had thin soles, not thick rubber ones like his own. The man gave Jun a once-over, then vanished in the crowd.
He’d never get back home if he were noticed, and his cheap garments seemed to label him a product of mainland China. Blending in was the answer; looking like everyone else would give him time to think.
You don’t find good suits hanging on a clothesline, he knew. Jun needed money. Funny how spare cash is the last thing on your mind when you come to Hong Kong to steal diamonds on Jordan Road.
Money had been on his mind for weeks, though. The days of rehearsing the heist, the teeth-shattering ride on a watermelon truck, borrowed papers in his pocket, weapons tucked under the melons in the back—it had all been for money. The boring hours in the Tai Po flat with dim lights, no fan, not even a radio—he’d endured it in the name of a rudimentary financial plan: to head back to Swatow with all the cash he’d ever need. But he’d tripped on that briefcase. The duffel flew from his hand, along with the Black Star that he’d only fired eight times for practice in a field outside the city. The gold was gone, traded in haste for a ticket home.
Would Wing be there when he got back? Lucky Ma might be an idiot, but Wing was clever, and he knew the plan backward and forward. Once the driver got going, Wing would know how to evade the cops. He, at least, would make it home with his share.
Cash. Reflexively he patted his pockets and drew out a souvenir from what seemed like a hundred years ago, back when the plan was working. He had a vision of the shop’s customers laid out side by side like bream at a fish market, the showroom eerily quiet, the only sounds his own breathing and the muffled sweep of gloved hands shoveling gems and gold into bags. That was before the clang of the alarm and the shriek of the onlookers and the whine of the police siren and the shouts of the unit leader and the bark of the guns.
Almost.
Back in the showroom, Jun had kicked in the glass on a display of Credit Suisse .999 bars. Nice, fat, twenty-gram ones. While chucking them into the bag, one by one, a box flew open and two of the bars, each about the size of a cigarette lighter, fell out. Jun stuffed them in his pocket for luck and went on loading up the duffel.
He had a plan for the gold bars. This past year, every moment Jun didn’t spend thinking about the robbery he’d spent worshipping Su Yin. She was no great beauty, with her unremarkable figure and a mouth that seemed to hold five or ten extra teeth, but her eyes were warm, and she laughed politely that time when Jun tried to make a joke. He’d asked her to a movie once—a nice, safe group of five was going and she’d be the sixth—and she’d accepted.
But at the movie she’d gone rigid, and then inert, when Jun placed his arm around her shoulder. Since then, Su Yin had made it clear she had no interest in being his girlfriend. It made no sense to Jun—she wasn’t going out with anyone else, but she rebuffed his advances and made herself scarce when he was around.
The Yau Ma Tei job would have changed that. Back in the Tai Po flat, he rehearsed over and over a scene where, safely back home, he’d greet Su Yin with a casual hello. He’d pull out a diamond necklace—a piece he’d kept from his share for just that purpose—and dangle it like a fisherman’s lure in front of her eyes. She’d melt into a passion-laden kiss right there.
There would be no necklace now, but the bars would do. Every girl loves gold.
He knew the way home—the top man, a Wo Shing Wo 432, had discussed escape routes should they have to disperse. Like any good businessman, he’d studied the work of his competitors, and he was determined to equal the success of his rivals in the Sun Yee On. Any man who couldn’t make it back to the van was to hire a boat to Ling Ding, an island belonging to the People’s Republic that lay just a few miles off the Hong Kong coast. It was forbidden to Hong Kongers, of course, but flashing a couple of those big red bills would get an enterprising fisherman to take you over.
Ling Ding lay west. Jun would have to get to the water and look for boat people. Wing couldn’t help him now; he needed to stay calm, blend in, and not attract attention. A vision of Wing, beaming in pride at his brother who made it back home the hard way, formed in Jun’s head. They’d have some stories to tell each other.
Jun resolved not to speak—the people in the shop had heard his brother shouting orders and would have nailed down his accent. The cops would be looking out for a man from Swatow dressed in black jeans and a black polo shirt.
He’d have to keep quiet. He’d have to get some Hong Kong clothes. And he’d have to eat. There was no telling how long the trip to Ling Ding would take.
In his pocket the lucky gold beat like a heart. There would be no Su Yin without it. But there would be no Su Yin if he couldn’t get back to Swatow. He resigned himself to another failure, another almost, and walked with a new purpose in mind.
The pawnshop took less than ten minutes to find. A friend had said they were all over, because on Friday everyone needs money for mahjong, and then on Monday everyone needs money to eat.
The red swinging doors kept no one in or out; they were ceremonial, a way of sorting the down-and-out and desperate from the legions who were at peace with their striving. The doors opened into a dim, high-ceilinged room where a bald middle-aged man sat at a desk raised a half foot above Jun’s head. Hong Kong pawnshops were considerate in that regard; having a pawnbroker perched high meant you could submit your goods while concealing your shamed face. Needing money was as humiliating as it got in this city.
Not showing his face worked fine for Jun. He held up the Credit Suisse bars and stared at the dingy tiled walls.
The man above him made no greeting and did not smile. He took the objects that Jun handed him and scanned them with an unsentimental eye. “Forty grams total—3,630.”
Jun nodded. A sign on the counter showed the day’s spread—the buying and selling prices for gold—but Jun couldn’t make the calculations; the price was in taels, and the Swiss bars were in grams.
In the background a radio burbled news: a robbery in Yau Ma Tei, four men dead, no police hurt, one bystander in the hospital. Money recovered. One man still at large.
Jun closed his eyes and turned away from the pawnbroker. Not Wing! But Wing was surely dead, along with his two army friends and some kid they picked up as a driver.
At that moment he realized that his brother had really been his whole family. Jun’s father paid little attention to him. His mother, he thought, wished Jun were someone else, someone who brought in more money, who got compliments from teachers and employers. It
was Mama who had disciplined him, who tried to make him into a man like his brother, one slap at a time.
Wing was dead, and for some reason Jun’s hand went to his cheek to feel heat that wasn’t there. Instead he felt the familiar warmth of a tear, the one that always shamed him worse than the blow from Mama that brought it on.
But Mama and Baba had only him now. If Jun didn’t make it back, no one would care for them in their old age. That’s what the money was for. Some of it, anyway. That, and a place for him and Su Yin to raise children.
In a stealthy move, he wiped the tear and turned back to see the pawnbroker put down the gold and point to a sign that Jun had missed until now: ID NUMBER REQUIRED FOR ALL TRANSACTIONS.
Jun froze. “I forgot it,” he said, almost a whisper, as if that would keep his accent from escaping. He grabbed the bars. “Later.”
By the time he got outside, panic had once again overtaken him. There was no place to go; every step seemed to be in the wrong direction. He had assumed Wing was making his escape through the New Territories, guiding and reassuring the others, using his wits to evade the cops. But Wing wouldn’t be rooting for him, wouldn’t be waiting at the flat in Swatow to slap Jun on the back and welcome him home; no one would.
Jun stared into the window of the bakery next door, pretending to look over the cakes but thinking of Swatow, two hundred miles northeast of Yau Ma Tei. His brother was dead and he was trapped in Hong Kong like a fly in a bottle—the police after him and his gold useless. His breath began to quicken again.
Inside of a minute, a man, younger than the pawnbroker and with a more animated face, emerged from the pawnshop and approached him. Jun hadn’t seen him in the shop; he must have been in the back.
“Looking to sell something?” the man said. He was in his late twenties, with short hair with a splash of gel at the front. Like Jun he wore black, but the jeans seemed sleek and expensive, and the shirt, buttoned to the top, was silk.