The Year of the Woman

by Jonathan Gash

  The crowds were thicker by the lanes near Hollywood Road, because tourists were unloading to enter the Cat Street Galleries, or to walk, complaining about the sapping heat, to the Man Mo Temple. She always felt off colour until the start of her third day, when the sense of oddity lessened and she could straighten. Odd how her shoulders drooped every time she came on. She’d looked for similar signs in other girls, but none seemed affected that way. It was her penance. The one day she could have done without this, when she’d lost her job and felt vulnerable, on she came. A sentence. She entered Possession Street, taking her life in her hands to cross the junction of Queens Road West and its Central run, the traffic maddened at the traffic-light pauses. Of course the narrow lane – it was no more than that – had become far steeper. She slowed, realising she hadn’t had anything to eat since she’d got up. It was time she had something, but with what? She possessed a few dollars, no more. The notes in her handbag were a hateful embarrassment. Money you dared not spend? An insult.

  The singing birds would be arriving about now. And Ah Hau would be serving tea. At least she could sit, get her breath, perhaps cool down. There’d be shade from the scalding sun. She made the last few steps to the corner, and there was the Café of the Singing Birds.

  She saw Ah Hau’s garish sign, still on its one nail, rusting against the wall. It had slumped there after one of the great dai fung winds, that struck Hong Kong the previous year. Ah Hau had never had it repaired, not caring if potential customers saw his sign. His custom was always the same. Come what may, old cage-bird fanciers came up from Sai Ying Pun to compete. Any minute.

  KwayFay walked slowly up the two steps, avoiding the offal careless cooks had thrown on the pavement. Flies were much in evidence, but Ah Hau wouldn’t care. The café inside was shady, no more than eight paces square, the tables rickety bamboo with rings of moisture. She brushed away the flies and said her good morning.

  “Jo san, Siu Jeh,” Ah Hau replied.

  Whatever the circumstances, Ah Hau always greeted her the same way, “Good morning, Little Sister,” as countless times in the past. It did her good. He was a worn cripple of, what, thirty years, the jokey age he claimed, having made a birthday up for himself when she’d been about fourteen.

  “How are you, Ah Hau. Ney ho ma?”

  “Cheng chor,” he said, as if she was a valued customer. “Please sit down.”

  Ah Hau indicated a small stool. She perched on it, remembering the days when, a little girl, her feet swung high off the floor. What had she been, six, seven? Ah Hau fed her, kept her alive. She felt ashamed as she watched him limping behind his counter, preparing for the tribe of bird fanciers who would bring their cages ready for today’s competition.

  Many of the old men she recognised. Ah Hau was trusted for his responses to individuals. He never reproached her, as she believed relatives, especially mothers, did to offspring. Hear Alice Seng talk in the office, you’d think parents were nothing but trouble, vicious invigilators of behaviour who took perverse delight in shaming daughters: Where’ve you been? What were you doing? Do this, do that…

  Alice explained how her mother – living in Yuen Long, New Territories – had given her solemn rules before going out with a boyfriend: “Now listen, Ah Ling,” which was Alice’s real name, “above here, is your own, understand?” And on here, Alice had graphically placed her open palms at her midriff, grinning at her listeners in the office. But the angry mother had gone on, “Below here,” again the palms, “is mine, understand?” The account ended in gales of laughter, for by then Alice had already been working hard four months or more, to hear her tell, under a boy whose only wish was to become a famous DJ in Australia. Alice still spoke wistfully of Faz, a Eurasian Sino-Portuguese, her first, who’d broken her in one day after the Dragon Boats Festival at Little Hong Kong that tourists called Aberdeen Harbour facing Ap Li Chau.

  KwayFay sat watching Ah Hau. He was lame from some childhood injury. A little girl cadging scraps to stay alive, she’d asked why he limped, and he would reply, “I fell.” That was that. He rolled rather than limped, from something high in his leg. She thought him handsome once, but hated the pigtail of sleek black hair he wore. Cantonese didn’t do ponytail hair any more, seeing in it a remnant of the queue, from the past of Imperial history. Speaking of which, Ah Hau’s Kitchen God was just the same as it always was. This testified to Ah Hau’s superstition, something he denied. He saw her eyes go to the Kitchen God poster and said loudly, “I only keep it there as a joke. The real one’s over there.”

  It was their old contest. Long since, Communist China took control of the printing offices throughout the entire Middle Kingdom. They hated anything to do with gods, spirits, old customs. They changed the very days and dates, would you believe, so that paradoxically only shreds of old traditions remained clinging to the China coast enclaves of Hong Kong, Portuguese Macao, and that strange business going on in Formosa, the island the Kuomintang government there now called Taiwan, Big Bay Country. So the only way you’d see ancient festivals was here in Hong Kong properly, for the Taiwanese were, according to Ghost Grandmother, unreliable and unable to think straight because they sang songs in the streets about owning Imperial China when they hadn’t two copper cash to rub together and were running dogs of the USA.

  Ah Hau’s Kitchen God poster was the Communist one manufactured half a century ago, would you believe. She felt her lip curl in contempt. What government is compelled to print what it does not wish? Despicable! Yet China had done this, to satisfy the farmers and peasants. She had, as a little girl, traced her fingers along the very foreheads of the two grossly coloured people represented in their garish yellows, reds and greens with their blotchy red cheeks. The man, the woman, were seated behind an altar with the customary five vessels in a hideous green with the two gods of Happiness and Longevity in front.

  She’d always liked those two; small old men, one wearing blue, one red. She’d pretended to pull their beards, much to Ah Hau’s amusement, when she’d waited here on the linoleum floor, idly catching cockroaches while she’d hoped for a little old spoiled rice. Ah Hau had never let her down, though some days she’d been too tired to come this far after carrying buckets of water from the standpipes on Ko Shing Street to the gate man at Sai Ying Pun Hospital during the droughts.

  Those days, nights, she’d slept with other rat children in the market alcoves off Hollywood Road. She’d never shared Ah Hau, or his kindness, even though some of the other children, especially the girls, ailed so badly they knew they would die before many moons came and went. She had been afraid for herself. Still was, and now she was here. And in her bag a wad of money, and a watch robbers would kill for.

  Ah Hau’s crack about the Communist version of the Kitchen God made her smile. It was faded now, its edges spotted with mould, insect droppings smudging the faces of the Eight Immortals, four each side, in their gaudy long attire. As an infant, she’d longed for coloured chalks and to draw those fabulous people (sorry, Immortals) – on virgin white paper this big. She’d often imagine coming in when Ah Hau was about to close at night, and she’d imagine that the poster was there without a single mark on it! Blank! And there beside the poster in her imagination would be a box of crayons, all colours you’d ever heard of, in rows, just like the English crayons you saw for sale in Whiteway’s on the harbour road in Central! And how she’d take one, always red, unwrap it and then start to draw. And the Kitchen God would be proud to be done like that. And Ah Hau would say come and live in this lovely café where there was always food and have a box of new crayons every day and a stool of her own…

  “The Stove Prince,” came Ghost Grandmother’s icy voice, querulous at having been roused by her errant granddaughter at this unconscionable time, “Ts’ao Chun is the real Kitchen God, and don’t you forget it!”

  “Yes, Grandmother,” KwayFay thought miserably in answer on her stool by the wall in Ah Hau’s café, while Ah Hau served the first old caged-bird man carrying his
singing bird.

  “Don’t heed the rubbish they talk nowadays in the Middle Kingdom, either!”

  “No, Grandmother.”

  “Thoughtless girl! Any mood comes along, your head turns.”

  “Yes, Grandmother.”

  “I was told by that whore from Cheung Sha Wan,” Ghost Grandmother said, “who I won’t name because she says she’s our third cousin who used to sweep the ancient tomb at Lei Cheng Uk, where you should have gone a week ago to lay flowers and rice and red papers but you were too idle, lazy girl, to respect ancestors in the way that’s proper – I was told by her who says she can read and always puts on airs, that there are words saying Against America, Help Korea! on it.”

  KwayFay said nothing, not wanting to help Ghost Grandmother, though she’d pay for it later.

  “Is it there? Read it and tell me!”

  The four characters were there on Ah Hau’s poster. KwayFay knew them by heart. “Yes, Grandmother.”

  “And what else?”

  “The poster also says, Defend country, protect home.”

  “How have they written Country?”

  “In the old way, Grandmother.”

  KwayFay heard Ghost Grandmother snort with derision. “Hah! See? They daren’t even spell it their silly new way!”

  The name for China had been given a different ideograph, a different character. The word Middle remained the same, but Country was now a mess of straight lines, unlike the old way with the mouth and spear in a box as KwayFay always thought it when Ah Hau had taught her to read. His first words for her had been Middle Kingdom, Chi-na, the two characters one above the other. He’d burnt a match, having no pen, and used the charred end to write characters on the linoleum floor. She’d drawn them beautifully, Ah Hau said, clapping in applause.

  Spelling and characters were too absurd to argue about. Begging from university students along Babington Path – best place was just where it joined Lyttleton – she’d heard the strains of a violin, badly played, as university teachers tried to teach students the inflexions of English speech, up and down cadences everybody would catch instantly if only they’d listen. There was no other way for the sounds to go. It was so stupid.

  “You do well to visit Ah Hau, lazy girl.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother.”

  “Death stays the far side of Hong Kong. Two in Philippines, one Singapore. Good, a?”

  “Yes, Grandmother.” KwayFay almost woke from relief. The deaths were accounted for!

  “You should eat old rice when your period is bad, lazy girl. They sell it in Kennedy Market, by the last water-pipe. Never pay more than twelve cash a half-catty, you hear?”

  “Yes, Grandmother.”

  The catty, the local weight of food, would be eliminated when the Chinese mainland marched in, KwayFay knew, but cash – Imperial China’s copper coins with a square hole in the centre – had long since vanished except on barrows in Eastern Street for tourists to marvel at. KwayFay would have sulked, had she dared. Three months before, Ghost Grandmother had made her learn the money tables, driving her mad, night after night the chant, “Nineteen cash make one old English penny; a thousand Imperial Chinese cash make one tael, four thousand five hundred and sixty Chinese cash make one English pound …”

  Long gone before KwayFay had appeared out of nowhere, of course. She wondered if she herself would become a querulous crone making some poor mite lose sleep learning stupidities.

  “Sixteen taels make one catty,” KwayFay chanted inwardly, dozing against the wall in Ah Hau’s café. “One-and-a-third English Imperial pounds weight to the Chinese Imperial Catty …”

  Slowly she roused. The place was suddenly full of caged birds, every table occupied with bamboo cages, the birds excitedly calling and singing. All except two were minah birds, sparky black eyes alert and feathers shining.

  Some old men had to unfold canvas seats to sit down. Ah Hau had a stock of discarded folding seats, rescued from the waste bins outside the antiques emporiums on Hollywood Road of a night. She had helped him stitch the torn green canvas with sailor thread got from the ship chandler in Sheung Wan where they collected the waste bins in the great barges during the dark hours. He had eighteen, he’d once told KwayFay with pride, as many as St Stephen’s College! She didn’t believe him, false praise being cheaper than truth and more rewarding.

  This way, with the eight dang-ji, little bamboo stools he already had, he could seat most of the bird fanciers who came of a morning for tea and maybe a small amount of rice and green vegetables. Ah Hau also served locusts in bamboo and net cages, but this KwayFay hated because each of the cricket cages and locust containers meant something horrid would happen. She had to go. Her squeamishness always caused immense hilarity among the old men, who shouted advice after her, making jokes about women.

  There was no way Ah Hau could delay it, though. The singing birds were fed by way of reward. Some old men kept to the ancient way of feeding their birds for having sung so beautifully, lifting out a particularly plump locust or cricket with their own chopsticks and placing it lovingly into their singing bird’s open beak, there to be snapped and ingested. The other birds went silent with envy as the winning bird ate the live crickets and grasshoppers. No singing then, only jealousy.

  She felt ill at the thought, though the old men had not even yet settled down. Some were outside under the Cola awnings while another arrival was still shouting his greetings through the window and finding a place to sit with his riotous black minah bird.

  Ah Hau served her a glass of water. This was his trick, to show she was a genuine customer. He’d done this for years ever since she was little, and the old men knew it.

  “You want anything else, Little Sister?” Ah Hau asked, quite as if she’d just finished breakfast.

  “Nothing else, thank you, First Born,” she said, and everybody relaxed. Honour was satisfied. Face intact.

  “My bird did a double-trill with a paradiddle and a flam,” claimed one old gentleman, adjusting his cheong-saam.

  “Go on, then,” another said, amid laughter. “Again!”

  “It did, I promise.”

  “Then go on. We’re waiting.”

  This one wore a suit with an oily tie and no shirt, and had managed to grow three or four long chin hairs quite as if he were a mandarin. He had toes as gnarled as walnuts, the nails piled on each toe as if trying to grow upward in ugly slabs.

  There was a gust of laughter at this, the lot of them, inside the café and outside on the steps, swaying and laughing and coughing, some of them hardly managing to breathe from showing how ridiculous they thought the old man’s claim.

  “Minah birds can’t do a paradiddle.”

  “Mine can! I heard it only last night.”

  “Make it sing it again then.”

  “And a flamadiddle? No bird’s ever done that!”

  “Mine does!”

  The bird fanciers used the English words from the drum school out in the English soldiers’ barracks, applying them to the birds’ trills, mixing the terms they felt came nearest. This was how they went on each day, challenging the others to believe or to disprove their claims. If KwayFay ever came to love anyone it would be these old men with their fantastic claims to have the most marvellous singing birds on earth, and Ah Hau who ran this cockroach infested café with its shop-soiled Kitchen God poster.

  The aroma of the food, rice and vegetables, made her almost faint from hunger. When had she last eaten? This was becoming serious. She drank the water, but even the first swallow felt so bulky inside her that she almost gagged. She felt the weight of the money in her handbag, wondered if she might at least borrow – only borrow, for heaven’s sake – a little for a meal, but that was too perilous a step to take. She rose, with a single dollar.

  “Please bet on the smallest bird,” she said quietly to Ah Hau.

  “Very well, Little Sister.” He took the dollar.

  “It will sing beautifully today.” It looked a scrawny
little thing, yellow feathers torn, evidently a refugee from the hungry kites circling the main harbour.

  “Thank you, Little Sister.”

  “Good morning, First Born,” she said back, and left the place. The old men approved, for they continued talking loudly over the exchange.

  She set off down the slope towards Des Voeux Road. Down there, she might catch a tram down Connaught Road West, make Central District before noon, and get her final payment. It would be withheld, of course. HC was venomous to those who failed him. Maybe he would give her an insultingly trivial amount of money that would make the whole office smile. Nobody could give a smile like the Chinese, or hide it so successfully that the world would see, so doubling the disgrace. Shame was a pure industry in Hong Kong, the product of two great colliding empires. One empire would have been bad enough. Here, two had colluded, their beautiful rituals empowering their subjects to rise to the very height of social elegance. The dispensing of shame was its epitome.

  Only a few steps, and she wished she hadn’t stirred from Ah Hau’s café. At least there she’d been in shade, with water.

  A man was standing by the tram stop in Connaught Road when she got there. It was Tiger Sin-Sang, the old man. He wore the same ancient long cheong-saam as when she had last seen him in the Sports Stadium. Plainly still a captive hoping for escape. Two threat-men stood near him.

  “Jo san, Little Sister.”

  “Jo san, First Born.”

  “You have not eaten, Little Sister.”

  “No. I am not hungry, First Born.”

  He considered this. A taxi slowed, honked its horn, then accelerated swiftly away with a screech of tyres. KwayFay noticed terror on the driver’s face, his right elbow lodged on the window retracting instantly as he hunched down. She looked into the face of the old man with surprise. A taxi driver, afraid? Then she noticed the suited threat-men had moved to the kerb. His captors, never far away.