Hong Kong Noir

by Jason Y. Ng

  “Then who am I talking to now?” Oi Lin asks urgently, terrified.

  The woman stops smiling. “Don’t you remember?”

  It is five o’clock again; the alarm rings. Oi Lin wakes, her eyes damp with frustration. She takes out a journal—there are dozens, stacked vertically in boxes under the bed—and writes the details of her dream. With each word she feels a knot dissolving in her gut, as if the act of transposing is causing the event to become a distant memory, or a fiction. She finishes the entry, dates it, and then moves to close the book—but instead pulls it open again, scanning earlier pages for clues, the dreams returning in her mind, but inverted, like negatives in a film reel.

  September 1: A teenage girl who died in a car accident. In our dream, she goes to an industrial block in Chai Wan to see an underground metal band play in an abandoned factory. She dances to the music . . .

  August 19: An old man who died of old age. We go to a Chiu Chow restaurant in Kowloon and he orders two plates of cold braised goose with tofu and eggs. The owner comes over and congratulates the old man on retiring . . .

  June 3: A middle-aged lady who died of breast cancer. She is picking up her daughter from school and has brought her a snack box of apples slices and orange juice. She drives home and listens to the BBC . . .

  March 28: A businessman who died of a heart attack. He’s watching something pornographic on his laptop; I don’t want to see so I just look at his saltwater aquarium, which he has kept in prime condition. There are clown fish, lionfish, John Dory . . .

  January 2: A little girl who died in her sleep. Her grandmother has given her some money to buy candy from the corner store; she runs down the street and buys a packet of ginger gummies . . .

  December 23 . . .

  “Oi Lin!” Her mother is calling. “Are you coming?”

  She looks at the clock; it is almost six.

  Work: cleaning, sprucing, weaving, painting, filing, cutting, trimming, buffing, spritzing. Oi Lin finishes her tasks and then sits by the front of the store on a plastic stool, taking out several journals from her bag. She begins to read again, absorbed by the dry, detailed accounts written in her own childish hand. She reads through the last year, and the year before, and the year before that, but nothing stands out. All of the people in her dreams had died and she had seen their bodies in coffins, being prepared with perfumed oils and powders by the mortuary makeup artist or being rolled into white halls. Oi Lin closes her eyes. Was the widow right? Has she been reworking her own memories in her dreams, tooling them into fictionalized accounts of others’ lives as a way to come to terms with the monotony of life, the monotony of death? And if so, then isn’t the widow also just another creation of her mind—or perhaps some part of herself, reaching out and requesting a wake-up call?

  Oi Lin is drifting; she tries to assemble the pieces in her head, but the pieces themselves are amorphous, shape-changing. She struggles to stay focused on the day’s proceedings, helping her mother with the weekly cleaning of the store and balancing the cash register. Her calculations keep coming up short, and the more she tries, the more she feels herself slipping further and further from the numbers, the connections between them, and reality.

  The day falls away, dragging her along with it. When evening arrives, she is somewhat relieved that it is over, though also fearful that yet another cycle of self-doubt might begin.

  “Can you eat something?” her mother scolds Oi Lin at the dinner table at home, pointing with her chopsticks to the untouched scoops of rice and minced beef on her plate. “Focus.”

  A few more hours pass at home. Oi Lin is lost in thought. She lies on her bed and listens to Chochukmo on repeat. Around ten p.m., she receives an urgent text from Hao: I’m alone and it looks like someone has broken into the funeral home. Please come. Hurry.

  She runs over; her apartment is a few short blocks away. The September evening is pale and on the cusp of turning, the thick, salty breeze bringing in warm blankets of humidity from the sea. Hao is waiting by the front doors, whose gold edges, under the dim streetlights, appear dull and tacky.

  “What happened? And why didn’t you call the police?” she whispers. The large building is dark, looming.

  “Are you serious? My dad left me here to lock up,” Hao says. “If he finds out that someone might have broken in, he’s going to murder me. Anyway, I don’t think the person stayed. I checked and nothing was taken. Probably got freaked out and left.”

  Oi Lin shakes her head. “So why am I here? I ran all the way over. My mother thinks I went out to buy tampons.”

  “I need to lock up, okay?” Hao gestures for her to come inside. He nervously peers upward. “Someone else should be here just in case, and you live the closest.”

  They start on the ground floor and work their way up to the top. Each room has its own lock and within each room are vitrines for the coffins, also with locks. The rooms on the ground floor are the largest; there are two main halls with closets for storage. The second floor comprises seven smaller rooms, the silk stall, and a broad public area with a few armchairs and a hanging Georgia O’Keeffe print. In it, stone-shaped clouds of opaque white fill a sky that is a soft blue unlike any Oi Lin has ever seen.

  It takes them no more than twenty minutes to complete the lockup, by which point Hao has shed his earlier, nervous self and has begun to rant about his dissatisfaction with the funeral home.

  “My father wants me to become a director one day, but I really don’t see it,” he says. They are sitting on the front steps of the building, the gleaming structure firmly locked behind them. Hao is smoking; every so often Oi Lin tastes the peppery, watery fumes in her nostrils. She has always liked the smell of cigarette smoke—her father used to light one after the other, leaving a trail of ashed surfaces and burn-scented clothing behind him. It is one of the only memories she has of him: a smell that resurfaces on streets, in clandestine bars and cha chaan tengs, and outside factory buildings, when workers get off their shift and together take their first, protracted draws from the thin, elegant cylinders.

  “What are you going to do then?” she asks.

  “Quit. Leave.” He blows out smoke through his nose. “I’ve been thinking of joining the police force. Did you know a new recruit can earn as much as eighty thousand a year? I’m lucky if my dad decides to pay me, and it’s only when he thinks I’ve met his standards.”

  Oi Lin is silent for a while. “I thought of leaving the shop too at one point,” she confesses. “I wanted to be a painter. Not calligraphy painting, but oil, contemporary stuff. I even made a portfolio and picked the colleges I wanted to apply to.”

  “Really? I never knew that. Why didn’t you do it?”

  “Well, first, my mother would never let me. And secondly, I realized something. Even if I were a painter, I don’t think I’d be satisfied.”

  Hao shakes his head. “Why?”

  “I realized . . . that I’m seeing a part of life, every day, that reminds me of how futile it is. Whatever we do, whatever we love, whatever we put our heart into, it all just dissolves in the end. Nothing is solid. Nothing seems real.” She pauses. “You know, when I was young, really young, I was so confused about why the funeral home was called the big hotel.”

  “I prefer big restaurant, but okay,” Hao says.

  “Big hotel. Big restaurant. Anyway, it seems like a joke, so callous, right? But why shouldn’t it be? There are the same number of bodies, with plenty of food and beds. The only difference is that while we’re all still walking around filling our guts with made-up dreams to fulfill ourselves, someone else isn’t around to see the festering of human life anymore. And the better for them. There’s something so nice, so calming about not being able to think or see anymore.”

  “Huh,” Hao says. “That’s really depressing.”

  They sit for a while.

  “You know, if I became a detective, I would earn a lot of money. You wouldn’t have to work at all. Maybe you could be a painter. Even i
f you feel like you’d be unhappy, at least you would have tried. That’s all one can hope for anyway, right?”

  Oi Lin is suddenly shaken by the conversation. Is it a coincidence that Hao wants to be a detective? The events of the past few days, with the widow and the detective’s funeral, are brought up again in her mind, but why? She asks herself again: What is happening right now? A dream? A piece of my future or my past? Her mind races as she frantically attempts to link the thoughts in her head. Is she Oi Lin or the widow?

  She turns to look at Hao, his face half-buried in shadow. “You never said you wanted to be a detective before,” she says hollowly.

  “Didn’t I? It’s been on my mind for a while. Oi Lin . . . ?”

  She feels herself breathing heavily, and then the sky is spinning. She is falling. She feels all logic has been smashed, its pulpy remains submerged in a black pool in which they are spiraling, toward an end that is receding and expanding, as unfamiliar, changing, and desolate as the dark and star-lined edges of the universe.

  * * *

  The nurses at the hospital wear blue face masks; their hair is black and their uniforms are white. Through the opaque veil that surrounds her bed, cordoning Oi Lin off from the rest of the ward, she sees the shapes of these women and men, coming in and out of the room quietly, against the soundtrack of bell-like wheels on the floor and the dim hum of a television set on low. On occasion, shadows overlap as one leaves and another arrives. Oi Lin sits up to look at the large wall clock just above the line of the curtain: it is six p.m.

  “Medicine.” A nurse is by her side. There is a small needle attached, with surgical tape, to her hand; a second nurse is pressing a tiny vial into this, from which a cold liquid flows, instantly freezing up Oi Lin’s veins. “You were asleep for a bit. We called your mother; she’ll be in in around a half hour or so, when visiting times open.”

  The chill in her arms and hands causes a momentary numbness. Oi Lin feels her eyelids drooping; sleep pulls her back into its undercurrents.

  When she awakens next, her mother is sitting by the side of the bed, reading a book. There is a lamp next to her, emitting a lovely white glow that she somehow feels she hasn’t seen in a while.

  “You’re awake,” her mother says, closing the book and hurrying to the head of the bed. “How are you feeling? The nurses told me not to wake you.”

  “I’m fine,” Oi Lin says slowly. “I don’t remember what happened, though.”

  “You fainted again.” Her mother wrinkles her forehead. “Oi Lin, listen to me. Is there something I should know about? Are you on drugs? Are you pregnant?”

  A nurse comes in bearing a syringe. “Medicine,” she barks as she plunges the syringe into the vial in Oi Lin’s arm. A cold sensation spreads through her arm. The nurse checks the chart. “Your medication causes drowsiness. You have to rest.” She moves on to the patient next to Oi Lin, an elderly male who croaks desperately: “Where’s my son?”

  “I’m not pregnant. I’m just very confused,” Oi Lin says. “I feel like I’m meeting all these dead people in my dreams—”

  “Perhaps it’s the medicine,” her mother interrupts. “The nurse was right: you really should get some sleep. Don’t talk now.”

  Just hearing the word sleep causes extreme lethargy in Oi Lin. Even though she tries to stay awake, the effort of simply opening her eyes drains all remaining energy from her body. She struggles to remember the events of the past few days; everything escapes her.

  Her mother is leaving, or so she thinks; her vision is blurry. “Doctor, I need to speak with you about my daughter . . . She’s having visions again . . .”

  Before Oi Lin falls unconscious again, she sees before her a procession of images. The shop at dawn, empty and lonely. Her mother watching her write in her journal, lines of worry marking her face, but silent all the same. The funeral home, the detective’s widow and her hard glare that day, as if she could see the spirits that live in Oi Lin’s head. And then: cold, milky chrysanthemums; serrated-silhouette lilies with rust-hued stamens; tissue-thin globe peonies; creamy roses with rubbery skirts; flowers, flowers, and more flowers, clouding her vision until all is blinding, whiter than white.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong. Her writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books’ China Blog and China Channel, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Asian Jewish Life, and several Hong Kong anthologies. She received an MPhil in government and public administration from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Blumberg-Kason now lives in Chicago and frequently travels back to Hong Kong.

  Ysabelle Cheung is a writer and editor based in Hong Kong. She is currently the managing editor of ArtAsiaPacific, a publication focused on visual contemporary culture, and was previously the arts and associate editor of Time Out Hong Kong. She holds a BA in English literature and creative writing from the University of East Anglia in the UK, and is the cofounder of the Hong Kong edition of Liars’ League, a spoken word organization with branches in London and New York.

  Feng Chi-shun was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Hong Kong. He graduated from Hong Kong University’s Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine and found his passion for writing late in life. He is the author of the memoir Diamond Hill, as well as the story collections Hong Kong Noir and Kitchen Tiles. A history book, A Little History of Sex and Romance in China, and a novel, Three Wishes in Bardo, will be published soon.

  Tiffany Hawk is a former flight attendant with an MFA from UC Riverside. Her debut novel, Love Me Anyway, was published by St. Martin’s Press. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Potomac Review, StoryQuarterly, and on NPR’s All Things Considered. She has also worked as the travel editor at Coast magazine and as a freelance journalist for the Los Angeles Times, Sunset, CNN.com, GQ.com, and National Geographic Traveler.

  Christina Liang grew up in Canada feeling like she and her sister were the only Eurasians in town. Now based in Hong Kong and armed with a curiosity to discover more about her heritage, she’s attempting to learn Chinese and find the best dumplings in town. She also writes for children under the name Christina Matula. Her debut picture book, The Shadow in the Moon, was published by Charlesbridge.

  Charles Philipp Martin grew up in New York City. After university and music conservatory he joined the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. He eventually quit bass playing to write for newspapers and magazines in Asia. Neon Panic, his first novel featuring Hong Kong police inspector Herman Lok, came out in 2011. Martin now lives in Seattle with his wife Catherine. His jazz radio show 3 O’Clock Jump is broadcast weekly on Hong Kong’s Radio 3 and online.

  Marshall Moore is the author of seven books, most recently the novel Inhospitable and the short story collection A Garden Fed by Lightning. A collection of his translated work, Sagome Nere, was recently published in Italy. He has also written dozens of essays, book reviews, and other odds and ends. He holds a PhD in creative writing from Aberystwyth University in Wales, and he teaches English and creative writing at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

  Jason Y. Ng is the best-selling author of Hong Kong State of Mind, No City for Slow Men, and Umbrellas in Bloom—the first book in English to chronicle the Umbrella Movement of 2014. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies. Ng is also an adjunct associate law professor at the University of Hong Kong and president of PEN Hong Kong, an advocacy group that promotes literature and defends freedom of expression.

  Shen Jian is a lawyer and an occasional contributor to the South China Morning Post. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and recognized as notable in Best American Essays.

  Brittani Sonnenberg was raised across three continents and has worked as a journalist in Germany, the US, China, and throughout Southeast Asia. Sonnenberg’s fiction and nonfiction have apeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, Time, and on NPR Berlin. Her debut novel, Home Leave, was selected
as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She serves as a visiting lecturer and thesis advisor for the University of Hong Kong’s MFA program.

  Carmen Suen was born and raised in Hong Kong, where she wrote and edited for City Magazine, Eat and Travel, and East Magazine. She was also a founding editor of the photography blog Resolve. After relocating to the United States, Suen has been living a semi-nomadic life with her husband Gary and their boys Genghis and Rohan, moving from the Wild West to the Southwest and the Midwest, until finally settling in New York.

  James Tam is a pseudo-scientific realist who regards twenty-first-century Homo sapiens a self-endangered species. His novel Man’s Last Song, a Proverse Prize finalist, is about humanity facing protracted extinction due to sterility. His bilingual stories have been anthologized by Hong Kong Writers Circle, Asia Literary Review, Hong Kong Writers (Chinese), and Ethos Books in Singapore. He regularly writes about an assortment of irregularities at www.guo-du.blogspot.com.

  Rhiannon Jenkins Tsang is a British writer whose work focuses on historical fault lines and contains strong international themes. She read Oriental Studies at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, and is a nonpracticing lawyer. She speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, French, German, and Spanish. Her second novel, The Last Vicereine, was published by Penguin Random House in 2017. Her debut, The Woman Who Lost China, was published by Open Books in 2013.

  Xu Xi 許素細 is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. Forthcoming are Insignificance: Stories of Hong Kong and This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being. An Indonesian-Chinese from Hong Kong, she lives between New York and Hong Kong and codirects the new low-residency International MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

  Shannon Young is an American author living in Hong Kong. Her books include a coming-of-age travel memoir, Year of Fire Dragons, a Kindle Single on millennial student debt, and two novellas set in contemporary Hong Kong. She was the editor of an anthology of creative nonfiction by expatriate women in Asia, How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit?, and she once won a Literary Death Match.