by Jason Y. Ng
Time away in London turned out to be just what Serena needed. She felt like her misstep was just that, and now she was back on solid footing. Maybe she needed to travel more with work, be on-site more. That would get her away from Cole, his wife, and their new baby. She deleted her Facebook account one night so she wouldn’t see their tagged photos of weekend junk boats, group hikes, and free-flow brunches, all things they used to enjoy doing together. She also resolved to find new hobbies and new friends. Maybe she’d download that dating app where she could swipe right. At work, there was a deal brewing in Shanghai and a road show through Southeast Asia that she could supervise. That would keep her out of Hong Kong for most of the summer.
Decision made, Serena finally fell asleep. It was the first time in weeks that she slept without the aid of any pills.
* * *
Serena arrived home rested and relaxed. Four weeks had done wonders. Only now had her head cleared enough for her to realize it had been six weeks since her last period. She grabbed a taxi to a pharmacy in Aberdeen, where she was sure she wouldn’t bump into anyone she knew. She got home, ripped the cellophane off the box, and peed on the stick. Sheer terror filled her as the double pink lines appeared.
That evening, Heather came into the flat with a bottle of Veuve. “Time to celebrate! Jack left last night for California. And we haven’t had a drink together in weeks!” As much as she tried, Serena could not stop her body from shaking and tears from welling. “Oh my God, what’s wrong?” asked Heather as Serena sobbed on her shoulder.
“I’m pregnant.” She made up some story about a drunken one-night stand with someone in London. Serena continued to sob and blubber, while Heather stroked her head. “I didn’t think I really wanted kids, but now I’m not sure . . . Maybe I do . . . I’m forty-three . . . This might be my only chance.”
Heather asked Serena again about the father.
“There is no father . . . I don’t even know his name.”
Heather took her by the shoulders and looked her in the eyes. “You can raise it by yourself. You have the financial means, and you would have help. It’s not a bad place to be a single mom. Plus, you have loads of friends who would support you.”
Serena was comforted by Heather’s faith that she would be a good mother. But guilt made bile rise to her mouth. She would never tell anyone who the father was. Ever.
Serena started spending her evenings reading up on what to expect in the next few months, searching Pinterest for nursery décor ideas, and cooing over the cute array of baby clothes available.
* * *
On Thursday evening of the following week, Serena heard loud banging at her front door. What the hell is going on? She looked through her peephole. Heather was disheveled and mascara was smeared down her face. Serena opened the door to let her in. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay? No, I’m not fucking okay!” snapped Heather. “You selfish bitch! You slut! What did you do to my poor Jack?”
Serena stood there mouth agape. “What are you talking about?”
“You lying bitch. Don’t you pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I just spoke with Jack. He asked me how you were and I let it slip that you’re pregnant.”
A wave of panic filled Serena from head to toe.
“Then he started crying, asking if it’s his. You fucked my son?! What were you thinking? You are ruining my family. This is my life that you are destroying!”
Serena tried to deflect the truth. “It’s not his . . .” she started.
“Don’t even go there. You’re a shitty liar.”
“It was an accident. I’ll raise it on my own. Jack never needs to know who the father is,” pleaded Serena.
“But I will know! You’re ruining everything I have ever worked for! How dare you take advantage of him?” She pointed her finger accusingly in Serena’s face.
“I did not take advantage of him. He was the one who came over to my flat.”
“You’re the freaking adult in this equation. You seduced him and took his innocence away!” yelled Heather, as spit gathered at the corners of her mouth.
“Wake up, Heather, he was no virgin!” yelled Serena.
Heather picked up Serena’s favorite Aalto vase, filled with fresh-cut camellias, and threw it at her head. Serena jumped aside and the vase hit the wall, shattering into hundreds of razor-sharp shards of glass.
* * *
Serena started taking pills again to sleep. Herbal pills, so as not to hurt the baby, but sleeping pills nonetheless. Again, she started seeing things, things that weren’t there. But this time she didn’t see Jack. She saw Heather. Heather screaming expletives at her. Heather pouring her a glass of champagne, then tossing it in her face. Heather on the balcony ripping out her flowers.
A week or so later, Serena was in her drugged sleep when she awoke to a loud bang coming from the balcony. Was she dreaming? No, the noise seemed all too real. She got out of bed, put on her robe, and went to the living room. She opened the door to the balcony and saw that the wall garden had fully collapsed. Plants and dirt were strewn everywhere, her camellias beyond saving.
A piece of paper fluttering in the wind, tucked into one of the hanging planters, caught her eye. She tried to grab it, but it was too high. It was a letter and she could read part of it. Dear Heather, I cannot face the world anymore . . . She could not make out the rest.
She grabbed a stool to reach for it, but suddenly felt a heavy hand on her back, a violent push from behind. She looked back and saw Heather on her balcony. As she fell, she glimpsed Repulse Bay—the beautiful view that had cost her so much—for a split-second before it all went dark.
EXPENSIVE TISSUE PAPER
by Feng Chi-shun
Diamond Hill
Diamond Hill—what a glorious name for a place.
No one outside of Hong Kong would have guessed it was the moniker of a squatter village in Kowloon East. In the fifties and sixties, it was a ghetto with its share of grime and crime, and sleaze oozing from brothels, opium dens, and underground gambling houses. There and then, you found no diamonds but plenty of poor people residing on its muddy slopes. Most refugees from mainland China settled in dumps like this because the rent was dirt cheap.
Hong Kong began prospering in the seventies and eighties, and its population exploded, partly due to the continued influx of refugees. Large-scale urbanization and infrastructure development moved at breakneck speed. There was no longer any room for squatter villages or shantytowns. By the late eighties, Diamond Hill was chopped into pieces and demolished bit by bit with the construction of the six-lane Lung Cheung Road in its north, the Tate’s Cairn Tunnel in its northwest, and its namesake subway station in its south. Only its southern tip had survived. More than two hundred families and businesses crammed together in this remnant of Diamond Hill, where the old village’s flavor lingered. Its buildings remained a mishmash of shoddy low-rise brick houses and bungalows, shanties, tin huts, and illegal shelters made of planks and tar paper occupying every nook and cranny. There was not a single thoroughfare wide enough for cars. The only access was by foot using narrow lanes flanked by gutters. The lanes branched out and merged, twisted and turned, and dead-ended at tall fences built to separate the village from the outside world. The village was like a maze.
The last of Diamond Hill’s residents were on borrowed time and borrowed land. They had already received eviction notices from the Hong Kong government, and all had made plans for the future. The government promised to compensate longtime residents for vacating the land, but not the new arrivals.
The most recent arrival to the village was a young girl named Ling. She was trouble. She soon wreaked hell and havoc on one neighboring family.
Ling had recently come from China to be reunited with her mother, Mrs. Cheuk, who had been living in Diamond Hill for about five years, short of the seven years of residence required to qualify for government compensation.
Mrs. Cheuk was a Hong Kong native. She had g
one to her ancestral village in Hunan province to marry her cousin a few years after the Cultural Revolution. Ling was her only child. When Ling was thirteen years old, her father died, and livelihood issues forced Mrs. Cheuk to return to Hong Kong. She found a dishwashing job in a Mong Kok restaurant. Her pay was commensurate with a Diamond Hill abode.
Before leaving Hunan, Mrs. Cheuk had entrusted her brother to care for her young daughter, and that was a big mistake. Her brother was a sexual predator.
Ling’s maternal uncle, whom she called Uncle Xia, worked in a machine factory. Lifting heavy equipment had conditioned him into a rugged man, with big calloused hands, broad shoulders, and bulging biceps. He made good use of his muscles at home too, to discipline his wife.
Xia’s wife was a weak and simple woman. She was terrified of him because he was brutal with her. Whenever he was displeased with anything in the household, a fist to her ribs or a kick to her side would make her see things his way.
Xia belonged to a breed of mainland men obsessed with pornography. He watched it openly and frequently, as if it were a normal hobby. He and his pals would gather in the evening in the living room for a long session of skin-flick viewing while drinking and snacking, like American men getting together for Monday Night Football. His wife prepared the snacks and drinks, but made sure her son and Ling were not around for the show. They were told to stay in their rooms whenever Xia’s friends showed up with videotapes.
Uncle Xia was strict with Ling, but that was only until she turned fifteen and her breasts had a growth spurt. He started looking at her funny sometimes and made her blush furiously.
As you can guess, Xia sent his wife and son on a long trip one Sunday, and made Ling stay home with him. First, he drank some rice wine and ordered Ling to have some too. She took a sip, and complained that it burned her throat. Uncle Xia said sternly, “I have already poured you a glass. Don’t make me angry by wasting the wine.”
She drank some more. Her face turned red, her head became light, but the rice wine did go down easier after a few more gulps. Then he put on some porn for them to watch together. Ling didn’t know what was going on with all those naked people moaning and groaning. All she wanted was to go back to her room and sleep. Uncle Xia pulled her onto his lap and put an arm around her waist while explaining all the actions on the screen. In his warped mind, he justified his behavior by Ling’s need for some sex education.
The booze went to Ling’s head fast, and she collapsed on her uncle’s lap. He groped her, and seeing no resistance, he carried her to her room.
She was in and out of consciousness for the rest of the evening. She felt a rough hand running over her naked body. She complained, but the stroking and poking didn’t stop. Her breasts were kneaded and squeezed. Then came a sharp pain in her private parts, and she heard heavy breathing next to her ear.
Uncle Xia treated her much nicer after deflowering her. More pocket money, snacks, and kind words. After a porn night with his buddies, he routinely sneaked into her room and reenacted all he had learned from the Japanese blue movies. She was still afraid of him, but she played her hand the best she could. She knew what would make him happy—making the right kind of noises when he was in her, and uttering lame complaints about his size and virility. When she needed a new dress or handbag, she would ask him for it while he was taking a breather next to her after sex. She got by as long as she put out.
That was her early lesson in life—sex pays.
The incestuous relationship lasted two years.
One day, police came to their house and arrested Xia. He was soon brought to court and convicted of embezzlement—a grave crime because he was working for a state-owned enterprise. He was summarily sentenced and locked up.
Xia’s wife threw Ling out of her house the same day Xia was jailed. “Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on with you and my husband. Get out, you no-good whore,” she seethed.
From Hunan, Ling took a bus to Shenzhen. She was then seventeen years old, but was still baby-faced, with large smoky eyes, pouting lips and pointy nose, a creamy complexion, and a natural blush on her dimpled cheeks. She was still petite, no more than five feet two and a hundred pounds, but her body had filled out, except for her twenty-inch waist.
She found a job as a waitress at a Hunan restaurant in Shenzhen. It wasn’t a great job, but her one-year tenure there prepared her well for better things in the future.
Most of the restaurant patrons were men from Hong Kong who thought every mainland woman was an easy lay. Ling learned to speak Cantonese from them. She also learned how not to give anything away without offending any of them. In that respect, the restaurant owner, a woman of forty, was her good teacher.
The owner was also from Hunan. She was a woman with a past, having worked in a Shenzhen sauna for twenty years before she saved enough money to open a restaurant. A sauna in China was where men could pay for a massage, as well as, if so desired, a hand job, a blow job, or the whole shebang. Her “stage name” was Jenny and she kept it after she retired from the business. Jenny had in-depth knowledge of the sex trade. She was also well-informed, shrewd, and worldly. She took a shine to Ling, who looked up to her as an older and wiser sister. The girl confided in Jenny what her nasty uncle had done to her. Jenny said she wasn’t surprised, because men were pigs and they liked young girls, the younger the better. She told Ling that her uncle had robbed her of something extremely valuable. Had she been in old Japan, she could have auctioned off the right to her first night as geishas did, and she would have earned millions.
Jenny had been to Hong Kong, and she convinced Ling the city across the border was paved with gold. Sometimes they watched TV programs from Hong Kong together, and Ling was mesmerized by the glitz and glamour. Ling contacted her mother and asked her to bring her to Hong Kong. Mrs. Cheuk told her that Hong Kong was heaven if you had lots of money, but hell if you had none; and they had none.
Ling begged repeatedly. Mrs. Cheuk finally relented and went to the immigration department to inquire, but was told by the officials that by the time all the papers were processed, her daughter would be an adult nearly twenty years old, not a child dependent, and the chance of government approval would be close to zero.
Jenny came to the rescue. She knew someone back in Hunan who could issue Ling a birth certificate with any date of birth she wanted. All it took was a bribe, and she could bankroll it.
Ling’s new birth certificate arrived in ten days, and just liked that she was three years younger. Not a problem with credibility either, because Ling did look like a fifteen-year-old.
Mrs. Cheuk submitted the paperwork to the immigration department. All they had to do was wait for the corresponding government department in China to do its part. Jenny also knew someone in Hunan who handled this kind of stuff, and there was nothing one could not buy in China. All the papers were ready in two months.
“I owe you so much, how can I ever repay you?” Ling asked Jenny.
“Come into my office. I am going to teach you how to make money in Hong Kong, now that you are fifteen once again. I want to make sure you don’t give it away for free this time.”
* * *
Ling settled with her mom in Diamond Hill. First thing first, she applied for and obtained her Hong Kong ID card.
“Who are the richest people in Diamond Hill?” she asked her mom.
It had to be the owners of the Chiu Chow restaurant, the biggest business remaining, and a landmark of Diamond Hill for decades. With a big payout from the government for relocation, they had already bought a place in Mong Kok for a new restaurant. They must have also stashed away loads of money from years of profitable business.
The restaurant was started by Old Man Cheng, who had died a few years back and left it for his oldest son to run. Everyone in the village called the new owner Uncle Cheng; his son looked just like him but fifty pounds heavier. Chubby, the son, worked as one of the cooks, while Uncle Cheng was the manager and cashier.
&nbs
p; Ling called Jenny, and they mapped out a plan.
Ling went to the restaurant for meals. The old restaurant needed major repair work, but the owner could be forgiven for the neglect because its lifespan was no more than a few months. The toilets in the back were unusable because construction of the underground railway the year before had clogged up the sewage system. Uncle Cheng had to rent a small tin hut fifty yards away for its toilet facility. Customers had to walk that far to answer the call of nature, but it was Diamond Hill on its deathbed; people understood.
When Ling went to use the toilet, she noticed a neat little room next to the toilet, furnished with a desk and a cot—probably used as a makeshift office and rest area for the boss.
Ling and Jenny talked again.
* * *
Getting to know Chubby was easy. He liked playing video games after work in the rustic arcade down the lane from the restaurant.
Ling sidled up to him, smelling good and looking cute.
Chubby turned his head from his game and stared at the pretty young thing. After a minute or two, he gathered his courage and broke the ice: “Can I help you?”
“How do you play this game?” Ling asked with a coy smile.
Chubby showed off his video game skills. He asked how old she was.
“Eighteen.” Her real age.
“You look younger. I’m twenty-five,” Chubby said.
Ling commented that he, too, looked young. And handsome.
Two youngsters getting acquainted fast—nothing extraordinary there. It was Chubby’s day off the next day. They agreed to go to the movies together.
In the air-conditioned cinema, Ling complained that her hands were freezing, and would it be too forward for her to put her hands on Chubby’s thigh to keep warm? She said she felt secure with a big guy like Chubby. She then put Chubby’s hand on her bare thigh, and said they were now even. Chubby had never had a girlfriend, and this was heaven on earth. He began to caress her smooth thigh.