Hong Kong Noir

by Jason Y. Ng

  “Your teachers are wrong about this one. You see, if you take too much of anything, it’ll be bad for you. But this pill is safe—if you only take a little at a time. My friends and I have been taking it for a while. Nothing’s gone wrong. I actually feel much better! Can’t you tell I’m always calm and relaxed?”

  Siu Wan looked intently at Tony. He seemed so genuine, and he’d been good to her since the day they met. Surely he wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, would he?

  “I don’t want to force you to do anything. As your friend, I thought this might help you. It has worked great for me.” After a short pause, Tony added, “Why don’t you just keep this? If you don’t want to take it, that’s fine. But when you’re feeling really sad, just give it a try.”

  “Thank you,” Siu Wan said hesitantly, as she carefully put the pill in her shirt pocket.

  “Don’t be so sad. Let me buy you another daan taat to cheer you up.” Tony gestured to the waiter and ordered two more of her favorite dessert.

  * * *

  When Siu Wan went home at five o’clock that afternoon, she was planning to get some food from the kitchen before going out to meet Ah Yan at their regular hangout. Much to her surprise, Mrs. Wong was already home, and looking pretty drunk.

  “Where have you been? Why weren’t you home? Who do you think you are, coming in and out of the house whenever you want? This is not a hotel!”

  Siu Wan knew better than to say anything that might anger her mom. Chi Wan was not home yet. She would have no backup if Mrs. Wong started getting out of control. “I was just hanging out in the playground with some friends,” she said as calmly as she could.

  “Friends? What friends? And where is your brother? You’re both ungrateful children! I should have left you guys when your dad split!”

  Siu Wan did not want to hear any more of this. She knew this was not her real mother talking. As soon as she fell asleep, everything would be fine. Maybe some food might help.

  “Would you like noodles? I can make some for us,” Siu Wan said timidly, then tiptoed across the room to the kitchen.

  Mrs. Wong sat at the folding table watching TV while Siu Wan started cooking.

  Clang! A loud noise from the kitchen woke Mrs. Wong from her zombie-like state. She jumped from her chair and rushed to the kitchen to see what had happened.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I dropped the lid. It was too hot,” Siu Wan said. “I’ll take care of it and I’ll make you some noodles.” As she bent to pick up the lid from the floor, she felt a rush through her left cheek. Before she could made sense of what was going on, she saw a tiny drop of blood on the floor and felt the cut on her lips.

  “Forget about the noodles. I’m not hungry anymore. You can’t even make noodles without causing trouble! You’re worthless!”

  Siu Wan could not quite comprehend what had just happened. All she was sure about was that she did not want to stay in the same room as her mom. She needed some fresh air. She needed to get away from this misery.

  As she was stepping out of the kitchen, she saw a tiny blue disc on the grayish mosaic floor. It was the pill Tony had given her a couple of days ago. She picked it up, turned around, and poured herself a glass of warm water from the kettle sitting on the stove. If there was a time she needed a happy pill, this would be it. She took a deep breath and downed the pill with a big gulp of water.

  * * *

  Siu Wan felt a peacefulness she had not experienced in a long time. She remembered her mom screaming behind her when she was running down the corridor outside their apartment. She saw the shock and scrutiny in her neighbors’ faces when they peeked through the silver metal gates separating their homes from the corridor. But none of that mattered now. She was enjoying the sea breeze on a big rock while waiting for her best friend to come.

  There was a weird vibe on the beach tonight. More people wandered about, and a small group was taking a late-evening swim. Yet with all the unusual traffic, the beach seemed quieter than ever. Siu Wan thought it might just be the effect of the pill that made her feel so serene. It really was a happy pill.

  “Hey, Siu Wan! Over here!”

  She turned around and saw Ah Yan waving at her from the water.

  “When did you get here? I didn’t see you,” said Siu Wan.

  “My mom and I were swimming off the coast. I started swimming back to shore when I saw you sitting there.”

  “Why are so many people swimming here tonight?”

  “I don’t know. I guess because it’s really hot today. You should join us!”

  “No thanks,” said Siu Wan. “I don’t have my swimsuit with me.”

  “Don’t worry, we brought big towels. You can dry yourself after the swim. It’s really fun!” pleaded Ah Yan. “Plus, my mom is right there. She’d like to meet you.”

  Siu Wan didn’t want to disappoint Ah Yan. She had asked Siu Wan to go swimming with her a couple of times, but she kept saying no. Maybe the water would help her clear her head. She wanted to forget about what had happened at home. “Okay, I’ll join you!” she chirped as she jumped into the water.

  * * *

  Siu Wan woke up the next day feeling a little light-headed. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. She couldn’t believe she had slept that much. She also couldn’t quite remember what had happened after the swim with Ah Yan the night before. Her last memory was feeling cold water seep through her clothes. She sensed a calmness settling in that she hadn’t felt for a long time and assumed it must be a side effect of the happy pill. She got up from her bunk bed and went to the bathroom to freshen up.

  The air was thick and humid. The forecast said a typhoon was heading toward Hong Kong. Siu Wan turned on the TV to watch the news. If the typhoon was coming, she should probably just stay home for the day.

  “Typhoon Emma is on track to pass through Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Observatory is warning citizens to make appropriate precautions to protect their homes and be prepared for the typhoon to upgrade to a number eight by tomorrow morning.”

  “A twelve-year-old girl drowned in Book Bo Wan in Wah Fu Estate last night. Traces of methaqualone were found in her body during an autopsy. No foul play is suspected. This is the second drowning incident at the beach this year.”

  Siu Wan was shocked to see her picture on TV. What were they talking about? She felt very confused.

  “In May of this year, a seven-year-old girl drowned in the same location. Residents in the area are very concerned about the safety of the beach. We talked to one mother who lived in the area.”

  Siu Wan’s eyes were glued to the TV, trying to comprehend what this all meant. Then she saw a familiar face. It was Mrs. Chan. She lived just one floor below her, in apartment 1324.

  “As a parent, I’m really concerned about all these accidents. You know they always say that Book Bo Wan is haunted. I tried not to give in to superstitious beliefs, but yesterday was the Ghost Festival and another girl drowned. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

  Are they saying I’m dead? If I’m dead, why am I still here? Siu Wan decided to go back to the beach to find out.

  On the beach, she was surprised to see Mrs. Wong and Chi Wan already there.

  “Hey, Mom! Chi Wan! What’s going on?”

  They didn’t answer. They were weeping as they threw paper treasures into a large tin can blackened by the fire burning inside of it. A trail of heavy smoke rose from the tin and merged with the dark clouds hanging low in the sky.

  Siu Wan ran toward her mom and her brother. She needed to talk to them. Before she could reach them, however, someone tugged her hand and stopped her in her tracks. She turned around and saw Ah Yan looking up at her.

  “Don’t get mad at me, Siu Wan. You said we’d be best friends forever. It’s going to be okay. We’re together now. I won’t ever leave you.”

  BIG HOTEL

  by Ysabelle Cheung

  North Point

  We are born as from a quiet sleep,

  We die to a calm awakenin
g.

  —Chuang Tze

  Six o’clock; Tam Oi Lin is pinning long curls of paper to a wooden board at the entrance of her shop. It is September, and the sun will rise in just a few minutes. When Oi Lin looks down the street, she sees less than a handful of shops beaming rectangles of harsh light into the otherwise still blackness of the night. The funeral flower business is as it has always been: a necessity. Oi Lin moves slowly in the still and silent ink of the day’s prologue, awaiting the first break of dawn, when a cool lavender mist will signal the start of a ritual.

  Inside the shop, Oi Lin’s mother is counting orders. There are thirty-seven today, the majority to be placed at the funeral of a detective who recently passed after a difficult, protracted battle with brain cancer. Oi Lin and her mother switch places; the girl sits at the table and goes over the arrangements, while the senior begins to paint, with a black-inked brush, characters of condolences and names on the papers hung by the edge of the store. A radio is on in the background, tuned to a local news station; after a while, Oi Lin switches it off and inserts a cassette. Songs from the past are lifted from the silky ribbons of film. The two women work side by side, fastidiously, pausing for a drink or a brief interlude about an order or a flower that darkened at the edges overnight. The work is unforgiving. Hours of preparation must go into these displays, but the shelf life of a cut flower, already dead, is brief. At the funeral, these delicate organisms must appear alive, white and crisp, right up until the end, after which they are customarily dumped on the ground around the back of the site.

  A few hours later, their work is done for the day. Oi Lin helps deliver the last of the batch to the funeral home down the road and then goes to sit in a loud cha chaan teng with a cream soda and a slab of toast drowned in condensed milk. It is her twenty-fifth birthday, and as each year before, it has passed so far as an event of unmonumental proportions. She is a quiet person. Some might even call her slow because of her dreaminess, her inability to snap to focus when she is lost in thought.

  As she eats and drinks, she thinks of the dream she had the night before. In it, a man was walking beside her in a park somewhere in Europe, and he was looking at the trees, the ground, and birds that swooped past, their silvery bodies like fat bullets. They neared a bench. He sat down and she hovered close to him; they hadn’t spoken. The man then began to write in stretched cursive script, filling the pages of a notebook he drew from his inside jacket pocket. Rain started to fall in solemn, oily drops; he continued to write.

  That was where the dream ended. Although he hadn’t told Oi Lin his name, she knew instantly who he was. The morning before, she had seen his body in a funeral, laid in a coffin with black velvet padding. She often has these dreams, of corpses she sees at the funeral home. In them, mundane scenarios occur in random, familiar yet also unrecognizable places; a woman might be riding a green-top minibus, or a man might be watching a daytime soap opera and eating airplane olives, leaving purple-black, briny pits on the sofa. Once, a little girl got on a bicycle printed with daisies and pedaled all the way to the shoreline of a beach where the water was gently tugging the white sand. Oi Lin never interacts with these spirits; there are no conversations. She is merely there in the background, watching as if she’s the ghost and they are the ones who are living.

  “Can I join you?”

  She looks up and there is Hao, one of the juniors at the funeral home. He’s around her age; similar in mind-set with the capacity of a million years for the minutiae, and not a second for anything else outside their realm of funereal monotony. He orders a hot tea with lemon, which arrives with a crown of wet tea leaves. Hao berates the owner, who takes it away with a glare. Oi Lin is embarrassed; she feels so acutely the crudeness of human interaction.

  “You could have just taken it out yourself,” she says.

  “I don’t see why I have to sit with their mistake,” he replies, helping himself to a sip of her cream soda. “Anyway, it takes them two seconds to make another one.”

  They talk awhile about the detective’s funeral that is taking place at that moment.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be there?” Oi Lin asks.

  He shakes his head. “They only really needed me to help set up chairs for this one. There’s a lot of staff in today.”

  “Brain cancer . . . I can’t imagine.”

  “I heard his relatives talking about it when they delivered the body. Apparently, he couldn’t even talk or move in the last few months of his life. Just lay in the hospital bed staring at the ceiling, knowing he was about to die, but not remembering enough of anything to reflect on his life.”

  Hao finishes Oi Lin’s drink and stands up. “They never brought me another tea . . . I’m going back now. My dad probably wants to talk to me about the events tomorrow.”

  The pair walk out together. As they part ways—he toward the funeral home, she the flower shop—she sees a woman smoking by the side of the road. A car passes by; its window beams a reflected ray of light onto the woman, covering her in a bright, white-hot aura that appears spectral. Oi Lin realizes she is staring and notices the woman—the detective’s wife—looking back at her. A relative pulls the woman away and gestures toward the hearse that is parked by the curb. Oi Lin watches as a procession of four people climb into the car—their spines crooked and stiff, their hair the same unwashed fog of charcoal—then walks toward the industrial entrance of her shop, her feet scuffing against the broken stems and ragged strips of torn flowers all the way to the mouth of the parking lot.

  * * *

  Oi Lin wonders: why is it that she feels things so sharply in dreams, much more than in her waking hours? A pocket of cold wind, a vinegary aroma—all these things stay with her for days, sometimes confusing her mind with what happened and what didn’t; what is real and what is not.

  She is dreaming. She is in an apartment somewhere, with walnut-wood furnishings and a low dusk light that enters in horizontal slices through the window shutters. There is music playing, a current of drowsy, twangy saxophone riffs. Oi Lin guesses this must be the apartment of the detective, or perhaps the home of someone he knew well. She senses there is someone else nearby; she walks across the room, where there is a door, and pushes it open; the music grows louder. The door leads to the living room, and there’s a record player next to a person who is crouching with their back turned. A grinding hum from a dishwasher or washing machine nearby rumbles through the room, and the hint of a half-eaten meal—notes of sesame oil and the glutinous waft of instant noodles—betrays the life of a lonely soul. The music stops and a woman turns and stands up. She is looking directly at Oi Lin, wearing owlish tortoiseshell glasses and a thin cardigan over a shapeless white nightgown that nips at her ankles.

  “Who are you?”

  Oi Lin is speechless. She feels as if a wall has eroded, one that had been imperceptible up until the very moment it dissolved, and its nothingness reveals what was hidden before.

  “Answer me,” the woman says in a short, austere tone. “Who are you?” As she steps closer, Oi Lin recognizes the same wan pallor marred by telltale twitches of anxiety that she had seen a few hours earlier. A dark block of hair falls from behind the woman’s ear and over her face. Dumbfounded, Oi Lin realizes that this is the detective’s widow.

  She wakes with the ding-ding-ding of her alarm clock, her head clouded and throat dry and gingery. Her mother is already slipping into her jacket when she walks into the front room. “Hurry,” she says, her gaze calmly assessing Oi Lin’s pajamas and somnambulant daze—she is used to her daughter’s nightly visitations and their disorienting aftereffects. “Busy day today.”

  At the flower shop, forty-five orders await. Mother and daughter begin their morning ritual: cleaning, sprucing, weaving, painting, filing, cutting, trimming, buffing, spritzing. The radio is on; the night sky is fading, in variegated streaks, to dawn. As with most mornings, Oi Lin enters a mechanical, cyclic mode of working as she tries to grasp the events that occurred in her dream
s. It is the first time she has dreamed of someone who has not yet died—presumably. Was it a dream or a premonition? The widow’s face comes to her again: colorless, aged features drawn in a vacuous arrangement by the weight of grief.

  Later that evening, as she is lying in her bed in that half-conscious state where thoughts froth and fall apart like streaks of cirrus in the sky, Oi Lin returns again and again to the conversation in the dream. She considers the strangers in her life; the dead that return to ritual in her dreams, who go through the motions one last time before passing over. In those eclipsing moments in the shadow lands, she feels bound to these people, viewing life as it was for them, through their eyes. Every morning, she writes in her journal about these encounters, these embodiments, and the way the ink flows from the pen is indication that there is so much to say; every detail, every sigh, every heartbeat is another clue to understanding their stories. Are they really strangers if she meets them, walks with them, in another realm?

  When Oi Lin sleeps, she dreams again. She is sitting on tall grass by a silver-mirrored lake and the ground is peaty and cold. There are several small plums around her feet. Inexplicably, some are crushed, their wet, golden pulp mingling with the soil, while others are intact, perfect, purple. There are spindly, tall evergreen trees surrounding the lake, obscuring half the sky.

  “You again?”

  The widow is sitting across from her. She’s changed; instead of a white nightgown, she’s wearing a simple, sleeveless blue-and-white-checkered dress. Her hair is washed, flaxen, and stirs with the light wind. Without glasses, she looks younger.

  “I always dreamed of having a picnic here,” she says. She picks up a plum and bites into it; clear juice runs out in rivers. When the widow giggles, Oi Lin notices with horror that her teeth are stained black.

  “You’re quite clever, you know,” she continues, smiling. “Think about it. All these years, you’ve been fabricating these stories in your head, convincing yourself that you’re walking with the dead. Have you ever thought that you’ve just been talking to your subconscious this whole time? If I were you, I’d be worried.”