by Paul Theroux
Illicit and luxurious, it was Bunt's secret dream for many years. Corkill, small and spotty, was ashamed of his father, who was a policeman, while at the same time pitying Bunt, whose father was dead. All that term in the schoolyard they added details of the Chinese nymphomaniac, who was a princess and a whore. They tantalized each other, imagining tickle fights and forbidden words and perversities. It was a vision of paradise. Corkill said, Spy on her when she's in the bog, Nev! and Bunt said, Pull down her knickers, Corky!
Later, as an adult, Bunt sometimes found himself searching for this woman in the Pussy Cat or Jack's Place or Fat-Fat Chong's, and he wondered what Corkill was thinking. Corky was back in the U.K., probably married, with kids, and pretty miserable, while Bunt still dreamed.
"Jumper weather," his mother called out as he bolted down his breakfast, setting off to see Mr. Hung. She clapped his raincoat into his hand and poked an umbrella at him—her umbrella, he saw, and was irked. She said, "Gamp. Don't leave it on the ferry."
But the day that had begun foggy and wet and cooler than normal turned humid by the time he reached the harbor. As the temperature rose so did the smells of Hong Kong: the gritty air and bus fumes, the stewed steam of the mottled sea water sloshing against the ferry pier, the foul dust from the land reclamation, all these stinks clawing at his face. Gray haze became yellow haze, and after half an hour—the length of time it took him to reach Hung's neighborhood, moving slowly in the heat—the din had worked deep into his ears. Street noise tumbled inside his head.
Crossing Waterloo Road he saw a Union Jack flying over the police station at the corner of Argyle Street. He smiled at it, as though at a circus pennant. Even now the flag seemed like an anachronism, and it was a foreboding of his own imminent departure. When it was gone, would the big red Chinese flag be run up the pole, or would it be the Hong Kong flag with the bauhinia blossom on it? "A bright, sterile hybrid," Monty had called the colony's flower.
As he glanced up at the flag again he felt a rush of anger. He didn't want the likes of Mr. Hung pulling the Union Jack down. The indignity of it! He would lower it slowly himself, fold it carefully like a napkin, and tuck it into his suitcase when he left.
On the police station notice board, in large letters on three placards, one to a window, were signs reading WANTED PERSON and POLICE REWARD NOTICE and MISSING PERSON. The last one was the category that Mei-ping must have meant when she had said, "They will put it in the window." But POLICE REWARD NOTICE was the one that caught his eye, because in addition to the rewards—sums of up to $100,000 were offered—the crimes were described in precise detail. They were peculiarly Hong Kong crimes, desperate, cruel, often comic, sometimes meaningless. He was reminded of the disfigured woman: Your face belongs to me ... I must take back your face.
In one notice he read of an army officer who had returned to his quarters at a certain time to pick up his briefcase, and on opening it was blown up by a bomb that had been slipped into it. A Gurkha soldier was wanted for questioning. Fifty thousand dollars was offered for information leading to the conviction of the person or persons responsible.
Another was recent: At about 7:50 a.m. on 13 January 1996, a woman, Mrs. Cheung Yee Chan, was attacked on the 3rd floor balcony of her apartment house on Lai Chi Kok Street while taking her small child to school. The child was also slashed. Mrs. Cheung fainted. When she woke she saw her gold jewelry was gone and her child bleeding. He was taken to hospital, where he later died. Anyone with information should contact...
Sad, violent, unexplained. Was Ah Fu a candidate for the stories in these windows? Trying to imagine her in the list under the heading MISSING PERSON, he saw Woo, Francis Mau Yung, and thought of his own Mr. Woo. This missing person was conceivably his own janitor, Frank Woo, who had not shown up at work for days. He scribbled Mau Yung on the back of one of his business cards; he would ask Miss Liu if that was Woo's full name.
He walked on to Hung's apartment house, but still slowly, because he did not know where to begin. It was no help to him to notice that Hung's building was on Waterloo Road where it ran arrow-straight north-south before it twisted past Argyle and Fat Kwong. It seemed no more than a coincidence that Hung's building lay in perfect alignment with Bunt's own building. He derived what he knew was pointless satisfaction in seeing, framed by Hung's stairwell window, in a canyon lined with buildings and stuck-out bamboo poles of drying laundry, the old-fashioned tower of Imperial Stitching.
On the eighth-floor landing, Bunt tapped Hung's telephone number into his cellular phone.
"Wei!" Hung snarled, sounding startled and irritable.
"It's me, Neville Mullard."
"How wonderful to hear your voice."
Bunt hated him for recovering so quickly.
"Cheers," Bunt said, at a loss for words.
"Where are you?"
"I am on the landing outside your door," Bunt said, smiling at the fold-out flap of the phone's mouthpiece.
Hung did not speak, and in that silence Bunt rapped hard on the door of the apartment.
Looking naked and slug-like and ambushed, Hung appeared surprised as he opened the door a crack, peering out. He wore baggy pajama bottoms of a sort that made Bunt avert his eyes. Hung's undershirt was frayed and his plastic sandals were as worn and cracked as Wang's—Bunt had heard them scuffing to the door. Hung was the picture of a Chinese man interrupted at home: mean, frowzy, damp, rumpled, dozy, like someone tipped out of bed.
"Yah?"
Even his English had become scruffy.
The way Hung slowly opened the door and kept it creaking, checking it when it was the width of his skinny head, suggested he might have been expecting trouble. He seemed anxious, his fingers gripping the door, his yellow fingernails pressed against it as he held it like a shield.
It had bothered Bunt from the first moment of their meeting that Hung was taller than he. He imagined it to be a fraction but was perhaps as much as an inch. That seemed unnatural—wrong, anyway, as Wang's height also seemed wrong—because the Chinese were supposed to be small. Today it bothered Bunt again, because he could not see past Hung into the apartment.
"Have you forgotten something?" Hung asked, finding his proper voice.
"I happened to be passing by. I thought we might talk."
"If only you had called."
"I jolly well did call," Bunt said, and waved his cellular phone.
"This is not a convenient time," Mr. Hung said.
The Chinese newspaper in Hung's free hand showed a photograph of a Chinese official wearing an insincere smile and standing next to the governor of Hong Kong. The flashbulb dazzling the lenses of the official's glasses blanked out his eyes. It was a frightening picture. Somewhere in the room behind Hung a television was on, quacky voices and zany music exploded from it—a children's program, the violent and silly cartoons that were broadcast all day long.
"I need to see you."
Hung looked unprepared for this. You could not drop in on them, Bunt knew that. Nothing was more menacing to a Hong Kong Chinese than a sudden knock on the door. Nothing was more menacing to a Hong Kong English person either. No one except Americans ever dropped in. But this was the only way of answering Mei-ping's question.
"I am very busy at the moment," Hung said. Watching kiddie shows? Reading the newspaper? "We can meet somewhere."
"Here is fine."
"I do not entertain at home."
"You entertained me the other week," Bunt said. He remembered it clearly, because he had found it unusual at the time to have an invitation to the man's home.
"I mean in business matters."
"This isn't business," Bunt said, clinging to the argument, going closer to Hung, who was still squeezed between the doorframe and the partly opened door. "It's man to man."
With a sigh that was almost inaudible, Hung said, "All right then, come back in an hour."
Another glimpse of a Union Jack; a stack of cages in which frantic twittering birds leaped from perch to per
ch; a gaudy shrine with a statue of a crazed red-faced devil goddess and a string of fairy lights, this in a glazed-fruit shop where a clerk howled into a cellular phone; the squeals of doomed pigs in a passing truck; a family eating a large meal in the middle of a welding shop, the dainty white tablecloth thrown over a table saw; big gleaming passenger jets flying low overhead into Kai Tak (it seemed the whole of Kowloon was on the flight path)—all this occupied Bunt's idle hour.
On his return, Bunt found Hung transformed, looking remote and almost unapproachable in a melon-colored suit with a Pierre Cardin label on the sleeve. It was a formal visit now. To signify it, because he had been expecting something like this, Bunt carried a pound of glazed fruit under his arm in a bright red box. He handed it over to Hung on his way in, as though it were a permit to admit him to a sad little ceremony in a foreign country.
The country was China. Entering the room, crossing the threshold, was like crossing a frontier. The apartment, so far as he could tell in his swift first glance, was substantially the same: stark, Chinese. Hung was ushering him to a chair, to keep him captive, but Bunt walked to the window and saw again, near a winking Belisha beacon at an intersection, the Imperial Stitching Building up Waterloo Road—the upper windows, executive offices, Miss Liu's office, Lily's cubicle, the cutting floor, the old finishing room, Mr. Chuck's office where the shades were drawn.
Turning back to smile at Hung—at having frustrated his attempt to seat him—Bunt realized that something was different in the room, but what?
"Please." Mr. Hung shoved a chair at him.
Seated, Bunt keenly felt the difference, something missing at the periphery of his gaze.
"Tea," Hung said. It was a command. He smiled. He withdrew across the shining floor—the afternoon sun blazed there in the varnish.
Where was the white shaggy carpet that had lain there?
"Notice the flat leaves," Mr. Hung was saying—back so soon and already explaining that this was the rarest tea in China, this batch especially, picked from just a small number of bushes on one hillside outside Hangzhou, and all harvested in the month before the Ching Ming Festival.
"Lovely," Bunt said, deliberately imitating his mother. "Thanking you."
"Lung ching," Hung said.
His bony finger pressed on the teapot lid as he poured, and though the nail was a yellow claw, the finger was as pale as the porcelain.
"Dragon well," Hung said.
"Right you are," Bunt said.
"Perhaps it sounds familiar."
"It's all Chinese to me," Bunt said.
"Oh, yes," Hung said. "Lung is dragon in Mandarin, as loon is in Cantonese."
"I think I knew that."
"Kowloon. Nine dragons."
"Makes sense."
"Tong is—"
"Secret society, like a triad."
"Where did you hear that?"
"I've lived my whole life here," Bunt said.
"Tong is pond."
"Tong is no such thing," Bunt said. "Tong is the sound a bell makes. Tong is like tongue. Tong is a verb like gather—you can tong logs. Tong is one leg of a pair of tongs—what else?"
"Not English," Mr. Hung said. "Tong is pond. Kowloon Tong. Nine Dragons' Pond."
"Oh, I see."
"Where the dragons drink."
"Of course."
Hadn't Mr. Mo, the feng shui geomancer, said something of the kind? Chinese was Chinese. All the words had the same sound, all the people the same face. But avon meant river, and the Belisha beacon, like the one out the window, was named for Leslie Hore-Belisha, an M.P. and minister of transport, and did Hung know that?
"Everything means something," Bunt said.
Hung stared hard at him as if trying to discern the subtle significance of that statement.
"Green tea has made us healthy," Hung said.
The cup in his hand, brimming, he placed on the arm of Bunt's chair. He had spread the tea paraphernalia on the little table and that too, the clutter of it, evoked the room as it had been, as Bunt remembered it, not so bare as this. Bunt drank the tea, saying nothing. He had remembered the white carpet especially, for its whiteness and its shaggy pile—and more, but what?
"May I use your facilities?"
Attempting to mask his annoyance, Hung looked twitchy and unsure, and it was apparent that he hated Bunt's asking to penetrate the apartment again. Yet there was nothing Hung could do.
"It's all your bally tea!" He liked the travesty of his mother's manner as a way of baffling Hung.
No carpet in the bathroom either. He was certain there had been one, white, shaggy, inappropriate. Strange, these people threw nothing away. The lid was still down on the toilet, to prevent the energy from escaping.
"This tea is brewed with water that has not reached the boil," Hung said as Bunt returned. The man was refilling his cup. "Eighty degrees Celsius is sufficient, unlike the Indian varieties that need to be steeped and brewed."
"My mum says you're well spoken, and that's a fact," Bunt said. He was raising himself on the chair seat to look out the window. "I can see my building."
Hung moved his head in a sliding manner, sideways, as though beginning a dance step.
"Feng shui," he said.
"I know that," Bunt said. He meant the concept. Everyone talked about it, even Mr. Chuck had—the good feng shui of the Regent, the bad feng shui of the new Bank of China with its triangular thicket of walls and windows.
Hung's head was still sliding, perhaps to capture Bunt's attention, perhaps to emphasize the point.
"They must move back and forth. No obstruction, good feng shui."
"They?"
"The ch'i of the elements."
"Mr. Chuck found the site for the factory. He had his reasons, I reckon." Bunt was going to mention the annual visit of Mr. Mo, with his compass disk and his charts and his calculations, but why bother? He had come here to find out what had happened to Ah Fu. "The factory's well situated. You know that."
He reasoned that this was probably why Hung had been so persistent: Imperial Stitching was perfectly sited, in the belly of the dragon.
Challenged, Hung merely tightened his features, as though facing a high wind—the sort of look that came into Miss Liu's face when she adjusted the fan in Bunt's office.
"As for our business arrangement," Hung said, "there is nothing more to talk about. The deal is in place. More tea?"
"I want to talk about Ah Fu," Bunt said, feeling that he was flinging himself upon Mr. Hung.
"Before you do," Hung said smoothly, not reacting to what Bunt had said, "I would like you to see something."
In his odd, loose-jointed household shuffle, so different from the way he marched outside, he hurried to a sideboard, his feet flopping in his sandals, then knelt and opened a small pair of doors and hovered, rattling papers. Canted over to get a glimpse, Bunt still could not see what the man was doing. The Chinese sideboard might have been an altar.
A large noiseless clock stood on the sideboard showing the wrong time, and it was another intimation that Bunt was in China, where he imagined it was always the wrong time. The hands indicated three-fifteen, but it was now four-thirty. China was late, China was slow and inaccurate and outmoded. It was a mechanical clock, imitation French, on gilt feet, in a sun-faded or perhaps fake wooden case the color of a pumpkin. The roundness of the clock was in marked contrast to Hung's narrow skull.
After closing and latching the doors of the sideboard—no, it had to be an altar—Hung got to his feet and hovered over Bunt, passing him an envelope as though dealing a playing card.
"For you."
The red lai see packet, stamped with gold Chinese characters, was familiar to Bunt as the sort of envelope Hong Kong Chinese presented on festivals when they offered gifts of lucky money. Mr. Chuck had given him many such envelopes, but always at Christmas and on birthdays. It was more suited to the formality of Hung's apartment, to this whole ritual of unanswered questions.
"Open it,
if you please."
Bunt squeezed the edges, then blew on the open end with a puff of breath. The inflated packet revealed a folded piece of paper, which Bunt withdrew and unfolded. It was a Bank of China check made out to him for fifty thousand dollars. That was about forty-two hundred pounds.
"And I've already given one to your mother."
"Thanking you," Bunt said. She hadn't mentioned it.
But it was a check. A Chinese check, like a Chinese everything else, was so much an imitation it was probably unusable, just an exercise in mimicry. This was no doubt rubber, and even if it was not, it was symbolic money, not negotiable, only a tentative promise that might never be fulfilled. They were all paperhangers, the Chinese in Hong Kong, check kiters and price grubbers and pay gougers. The check in the red envelope meant nothing to him, even antagonized him, but so that Hung would be placated, Bunt made all the appropriate noises.
"Not for Full Moon receiving company," Hung said, nodding furiously. "This is a personal gift. A little present between friends. To show gratitude and trust."
Handing over a chunk of money at an awkward moment was another example of Chinese subtlety. As usual, there was no mistaking its purpose: to obligate and encumber Bunt, to distract him—in what?
He was sure that Hung had interrupted him in something, but he could not remember precisely what it had been.
He smiled in confusion and then, wildly looking around, he caught sight of the clock and saw that it was still three-fifteen. The hands had not moved. Not slow—it had stopped. And another disturbing detail: the glass was gone from its face, probably smashed when the clock stopped at that hour. Calculating in this way, Bunt remembered his question.
"Ah Fu seems to be missing."
"Yes?" Hung's way of showing indifference or denial, Bunt saw, was to hold his hands at the level of his waist and shake his fingers in a twinkling fashion as if drying them.