The Daughters of Henry Wong

by Harrison Young

  Zhang knew all about me, I realized. He would have made it his business to do so from the moment I’d appeared on the scene eight years earlier. I had devalued him because he wore laughable suits and seemed disorganized. I’d never bothered to distrust him, but I wondered if I should have. That night I wondered if I should have accepted his dinner invitation and let myself be seen with him.

  Much later, I realized that Zhang’s appearance was a disguise. He had the willing self-effacement of a spy. Good tailoring would have been a tip-off that he saw himself as inferior, which he didn’t. Fierce self-belief was why he’d survived.

  “Congratulations on performance.” Zhang lifted his teacup. In common with a slight majority of all Chinese, he was intolerant to alcohol.

  “It was quite a scene.”

  “You have admirers all over Hong Kong now.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “Big handsome American in old-fashioned suit, speak good Cantonese, even a little Hakka, charm old ladies. You see yourself on TV? FCC only turn sound on when everyone interested.”

  “I only saw it as I was coming in.”

  “You miss opening: anchor teasing Helen Fong about ‘new boyfriend.’ You know her before?”

  “No,” I said, taking a big swallow of my drink.

  “Lot of pretty girls want to know you now. You want another drink, or order dinner? By the way, how come you left before run stopped?”

  “Both,” I said. “Only way to show confidence.”

  I wondered what Amanda would make of my new celebrity. At twenty-seven, she was still a pretty girl herself, though I rarely thought of her as such. I hadn’t seen her since morning.

  “You too confident,” said Zhang. “Henry have enemies. More will happen.”

  “Should I worry?”

  “You do O.K. today. You need help, you call. Henry very old friend.” Zhang lifted his teacup again.

  Zhang had gotten out of China, according to Henry, six years after he had – in 1972, I calculated. Somehow he’d gotten to Canada, where he worked as a cook, acquired a version of English and learned enough about restaurants to open one of his own. Then there’d been a travel agency, and a money-transfer business. Zhang purported, Henry had told me, to be able to get Canadian dollars, handed over in Vancouver, delivered to a village in China, in renminbi. Net of commissions, of course. By the late 1980s he was fairly well off. And “usefully free,” as Henry put it, “of pretensions of respectability.” So when Comrade Deng made it politically correct to get rich, Zhang was in a wonderful position.

  “In his way,” Henry explained after my first exposure to the man, “Hai Ming has style.” He really was an old friend; Henry called him by his given name.

  Zhang’s flat in Wanchai, when he first returned from Canada, was the penthouse of a new hotel, with an industrial kitchen. Zhang Hai Ming didn’t cook any more, but he knew what equipment to have, and he liked having it. The hotel, in which he had a minority interest, always had a good chef, and that chef was always available to cook when Hai Ming had important visitors.

  “So there’d be his business acquaintances sitting in his gleaming steel kitchen, drinking XO brandy and being fed individual fried prawns as the chef produced them, and, do you know what else he had in the kitchen?” said Henry.

  I’d had no idea.

  “A pinball machine. And a crystal bowl of dollar coins. And when his guests got tired of pinball they could go out on the big balcony, which had a view of the harbor then, and smoke expensive cigars, of which Hai Ming always had an ample supply. He made a lot of friends in those days.”

  “What’s he do now?” I’d asked.

  “Everything,” Henry had said, and changed the subject. There was a lot I should have pressed Henry about, over the years.

  Partway through dinner there seemed to be a girl at our table. American. Named “Lucy.” Pretty girl, pretty dress. Wanted to meet me. Loved my Charleston accent. “Does he sound Southern in Chinese?” she asked Zhang.

  “No,” said Zhang. “His Cantonese perfect.”

  “Well, he certainly looks perfect,” said Lucy, who was now sitting down.

  I wondered if Lucy was making fun of me, but I decided not to care.

  “He speak perfect Mandarin too,” said Zhang.

  “Ni hao ma,” said Lucy. “‘Hello’ is all I can say ‘You, good, question suffix.’ I find it very strange saying the question mark.”

  “You are a beginner,” I found myself saying.

  “At Chinese I am,” said Lucy.

  An angry Irishman appeared at our table. “Where the hell have you been?” he yelled at Lucy.

  “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about,” said Lucy, half looking over her shoulder and then turning her back to him.

  “We had a date.”

  “We did not have a date.”

  He grabbed her shoulder but she shrugged off his hand.

  “Listen…” he said, grabbing her shoulder again.

  At this point I stood up and removed the Irishman’s hand from Lucy’s shoulder. He paused mid-sentence. People tell me I use my size well, but I never think of myself in that way. “I don’t think the lady wants to talk to you,” I said.

  “Yeah, right.” He turned abruptly and was gone.

  “Thank you,” said Lucy, putting her hand on my arm when I sat down. After a moment she went on: “The trouble with Kevin is that he thinks he owns me.”

  “Trouble with Patrick Kevin O’Brien,” said Zhang, “is nasty friends. Smart to leave before they waiting outside.”

  “Good idea,” said Lucy. “I have a car and driver,” she added grandly.

  “You go,” said Zhang. “I pay.” He had to pay, actually. I wasn’t a member of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

  The car was a “perk” of Lucy’s job, she explained, as the driver eased down Ice House Street. “I do luxury PR. Isn’t that just the perfect Hong Kong occupation? You’d never have heard of the firm – but you will. Good backers.”

  “Try me.”

  Lucy told me the names but they meant nothing to me.

  “What about Zhang Hai Ming?” I said.

  “Is that who he was?” said Lucy.

  “I thought you knew him.”

  “I know who Zhang Hai Ming is, of course, but no, I didn’t know that’s who you were with. I just crashed your party in order to meet a fellow American who’d been on TV. And listen, I’m really glad I did, because Kevin…And I just loved the way you towered over him, with your bright red suspenders – or I suppose they call them ‘braces’ here. You’re taller than I thought when I saw you on the news. And where did you get this amazing suit?” Lucy began handling my cuffs and lapels. “You know what I like about linen? It’s so hard to keep it looking fresh. If you show up somewhere in an unwrinkled linen dress everyone has to think you have a maid who does nothing but ironing. I suppose you have a terrific maid.”

  “We do,” I said, and immediately felt foolish. Song did our ironing, but she was far more than a maid.

  “I should introduce myself properly,” said Lucy. “Lucy Tompkins, from Columbus, Ohio.” She turned to shake hands, causing our knees to touch, which did not seem to bother her.

  We found our way to a “corporate apartment” with a lot of very new furniture, where Lucy’s firm entertained clients, and where Lucy also was living. “Temporarily,” she said.

  I sat down on a giant couch and agreed to Lucy’s giving me “the rest of the drink you had to leave behind.” If I knew Mr. Zhang’s cell phone number she would be happy to have her driver go find him, but I didn’t. I am not a cell phone sort of person.

  “I have an embarrassing confession to make,” said Lucy.

  “Go ahead.”

  “That little…episode with Kevin quite frightened me. I mean, I know he has some nasty friends, as your Mr. Zhang says, and – you know, a girl from Ohio doesn’t come to Hong Kong because she wants her life to be totally boring – but he w
as pretty rude last weekend, so I said I wouldn’t see him again, and he said something stupid like ‘that’s up to me to decide,’ and then he shows up at the FCC yelling at me and your friend Mr. Zhang says effectively, he is dangerous, and I was in a total funk for a couple of minutes – I’m fine now – but would you mind terribly if I went and took a shower and washed off my funk?”

  “Why would I mind?”

  So she went out of the room and there was the sound of running water. I studied the heavy glass that held “the rest of my drink,” wondering why a girl like Lucy would “of course” have heard of Zhang Hai Ming, and thought about how I should perhaps go home. Then I studied the glitzy decoration, which included a lot of chrome and glass and a large smoky mirror with an ornate gilt frame directly across the room from the sofa I was sitting on.

  After a bit the shower stopped and there were the unhearable sounds of someone drying themselves off with a large new bath towel and combing their hair and applying lipstick.

  Lucy came around the corner into the room wearing exactly nothing and sat down on the couch. As she did so, I stood up and walked away from the sofa.

  “Oh, I feel so much better,” said Lucy.

  She was so pink and gorgeous it hurt to look at her.

  I threw my half-empty glass hard at the mirror, which shattered into a pile of glittering pebbles to reveal a video camera on a tripod, operated by a skinny Chinese kid in a tee shirt, who almost fell over from surprise and then turned and ran out the door behind him.

  There was a short silence.

  “Lucy’s a nice name,” I said finally.

  “I thought so. Chose it myself.”

  “When do you leave?”

  “Right before midnight. Cathay Pacific to Los Angeles. If you let me.”

  “First class?”

  The girl whose name wasn’t Lucy gave me a wry smile. “Business.”

  “So, you want to tell me your life story,” I said, “or shall I just leave?”

  “It’s not a pretty story.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said, “because you’re a very pretty girl.”

  “Thanks. You’re not bad yourself. Big handsome guy, capable of violence, interesting clothes.”

  “It’s all pretense.”

  “The suit, maybe.” She sat there nude, appraising me. “But not the man.”

  Nice words.

  3

  I walked up the winding path from May Road to the house Amanda and I shared with Henry – and the twins, and an unspecified number of servants and rodents and reptiles, and Henry’s books, all supervised by the aforementioned Song. It takes about five minutes to get to the house – just long enough to sweat, just long enough for one’s clothes to absorb the moisture in the heavy air under the trees. I could have called the Gurkha guards and had one of them come for me in the golf cart, as Amanda and Henry always did, but I’d walked all the way from Wanchai already, and I didn’t want to bother them. To be honest, I was feeling strangely fragile after my encounter with “Lucy,” and I didn’t want to face the Gurkhas’ unquenchable cheerfulness.

  All the way home, I’d been invaded by film noir daydreams. “There will be a penalty for your misbehavior,” I’d watched myself say with a snarl.

  “You might as well have me,” says Lucy with a shrug. “I’m paid for.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of something you’d enjoy,” I reply.

  Patrick Kevin O’Brien turning out really to be her boyfriend, showing up to rescue her. Beating him up. Lucy begging me to stop.

  The adrenalin wore off and I felt foolish by the time I reached the foot of the path. I had nothing against Lucy, really. I would need to stay calm to defend the Bank. Anyway, I was home.

  Our house – “Wong Castle,” the tabloids call it – has nearly twenty rooms. We live on the main floor and use the upstairs rooms for storage. The Castle can be approached not only from below, but also from Barker Road by descending one hundred and seventeen moss-covered stone steps. I assume that the silk merchant who built the house in 1910 tolerated its awkward location for the typical Chinese reason that the site, halfway down the mountain and commanding a spectacular view of the harbor, had excellent feng shui.

  I climbed the steps to the heavy front door, let myself in, and put the oversize key on the table in the hall, beside a pot of orchids and a child’s drawing, evidently meant for me and evidently of a monster. Then again, it might have been a picture of me, since the monster appeared to be wearing crimson suspenders. There was also a note in Chinese about someone with a funny name who wanted to have coffee later in the week.

  I went down the hall to the boys’ room. They seemed to prefer sharing one, though there were plenty of empty ones available. I laid the drawing on the nightstand between their beds, so they would know I had seen it, tucked the blankets around each of them, and stood there studying them. They weren’t identical but they both had the Eurasian “look” Helen Fong had referred to. It would be nice if they started talking soon. They’d turned three already.

  There was a light under Amanda’s door, but no invitation was implied. She’d asked me to sleep in another room when she was pregnant, and after the twins were born she never asked me back. The light only meant she had fallen asleep reading a magazine. I could have insisted. Amanda would have acquiesced. “Lucy” had certainly left me aroused. But a duty fuck had no appeal.

  “Oh, Wendy, really?” she would have said. “You weren’t even here for dinner.”

  “You weren’t home when I was home,” I could have said. “I’d had a success and I couldn’t share it with you.” I disliked that sort of entreaty.

  Amanda kept telling me the boys would start talking “when they were ready,” but that wasn’t particularly reassuring. To be honest, she didn’t pay much attention to them. I’d come home with birthday presents the previous month, to discover that she had forgotten.

  I went back to the library and sat down in the enormous chair Henry had had made especially for me. “Wendy scale,” he called it. Moonlight came in through the palms on the porch and through the French doors, casting jagged patterns on the floor. The tiger on the Tibetan carpet looked up at me. The house was quiet the way a person sleeping beside you is quiet: breathing, moving a little, trusting you.

  The way the library was furnished – polished wood, thousands of books, pink and yellow and lime-green walls, ample dimensions, nothing fussy – all told you Henry Wong would have liked to be an Englishman. He knew he could never pull it off, though, and he didn’t pretend he could. He was a Hakka, a permanent outsider. It’s an identity I can easily relate to.

  The Hakkas are a special caste – “guest people,” their name means – who were pushed gradually south from northern China and learned over the centuries how to cultivate hillside land that no one else wanted, how to defend themselves in circular fortress villages. Deng Xiao Ping was a Hakka. Lee Kwan Yew, creator of modern Singapore, had a Hakka mother.

  Henry grew up in a village somewhere in Guangdong Province. At the age of twenty-one, with the Cultural Revolution raging, he “swam through the sharks,” as the saying went, and became a guest person in Hong Kong, where he managed to learn remarkably good English, acquire legal residence, and marry a girl whose family had money. At an opportune moment, Henry persuaded them to buy Pearl River Bank. Agnes had no brothers. Henry ran it. Agnes produced Amanda. Hong Kong grew. Agnes’s parents died, and then so did she. So there was Henry with a glamorous nineteen-year-old daughter and a very successful bank when he found me on the mezzanine floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, both of us looking at the fabulous diamonds and sapphires in the windows of Ronald Abrams and K.S. Tze.

  “I suppose you’d have to have a wife to buy that sort of thing,” I’d said, hoping to start a conversation. “Or at least a mistress.”

  “Come meet my daughter,” Henry had said.

  Harvard offers a few of its top graduates something called a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, which pays the
recipient enough to design his own year-long “grand tour,” but does not permit him to stay anywhere more than a couple of months. I’d won one, and headed for Hong Kong. I knew I should really be going to Taiwan. People speak Mandarin there, which is what I had studied. The Cantonese of Hong Kong is virtually another language in spoken form. But from what I’d heard, Taipei was pretty drab. Hong Kong had a spectacular harbor and a living colonial past. And I thought it would be easier to get a visa for the mainland there.

  My excuse for staying in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel was that I liked it, and that I’d move out soon. I had some money of my own. I ate in inexpensive restaurants and looked for a furnished room. The ones I was shown were depressing. I got out my flashcards, bought Chinese newspapers, left the television on in my room and tried to understand the Cantonese. Having the ear I do, I made progress. But I was lonely. Hence my wandering among the hotel shops.

  Amanda Wong paid no attention to me at all the day her father brought me to the Castle for lunch. She had her own friends, whom I eventually came to know. They all had expensive cars and important gossip. Explaining that she had promised to help someone choose a dress, she left me with her father.

  “You interest her,” said Henry, after she’d gone.

  I hadn’t known how to respond. I was interested in Amanda’s body but I wasn’t about to tell her father that.

  “Just kidding,” said Henry. “Seriously, my failure with Amanda is not that she is spoiled. That was inevitable. She was twelve when her mother died. But she knows nothing. She has twenty friends and they are all the same. She thinks she is in love, but how she can remember which boy it is I cannot imagine. Come, let me show you the house.”

  He did know which boy it was, but I didn’t realize that at the time. Henry had a sunshine quality that made it easy to forget how much his survival had depended on the ability to dissemble.

  We started with his library. Bookshelves rose to the ceiling. Sunlight came through the tall windows. There was a long table in the middle of the room, with a vase of flowers and neat arrangements of periodicals. Beside a leather chair there was a 30-inch diameter globe in a wooden stand.