by Leigh Lyn
Feeling disoriented, I asked, “What are you doing and what time is it?”
“Playing an online game. It’s six,” she replied.
“Where is Mimi?” I asked.
“In the kitchen, pretending she’s cooking.”
I hurled my battered body to the side kitchen to find Mimi perched on a barstool. She was cracking eggs in a large pot of boiling water.
“Look, Mom, I’m learning how to poach eggs.”
I leaned over the pot to stare at a dozen or so white, threaded blobs, not unlike pictures of viruses they show on TV when there’s a pandemic.
“That’s a lot of eggs.”
“Yap, it’s hard to get it right.”
Mimi nodded. “Feel like eggs tonight?”
“We better. Now you’ve cooked them.” I returned to the living room and slouched into the sofa.
“Mimi’s cooking us dinner,” I told Maxy.
Maxy grunted. “I’d rather die.”
Ever since watching Masterchef Junior, Mimi was obsessed with cooking, much to Maxy’s distress.
“Even Pho won’t eat what she cooks.”
Pho was our Persian cat.
“Where’s Maria?” I asked.
Maria was the fifth member of my household; a young, kind maid from the Philippines, who made it possible for me to juggle my busy job.
“Don’t you remember you asked her to go and buy painkillers just now?” Maxy frowned.
I didn’t, but I was glad on account of the agonizing pain grinding the left side of my body. “How long has she been gone?”
“Half an hour.”
Maxy’s skin bunched around her eyes. “Hey, Mom?”
“Yes?”
“I’ve reconfigured and installed anti-spyware on your computer,” she said.
I frowned. “What for?”
Maxy hesitated. “Remember what I told you earlier?”
Hair rose on the back of my neck. “When?”
Wide-eyed, she gazed at me. “Half an hour ago?”
“Was I not sleeping?”
“You were wide awake!” Her brows rose toward her hairline. “I told you someone hacked into your computer. How do you not remember?”
“What?”
“Don’t you remember?” Maxy inspected my face.
Lost for words, I replied, “I’m a little under the weather, but who hacked into my computer?”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she said, “It’s nothing serious, but this idiot, who fancied himself a hacker, planted a half-baked virus.” She rolled her eyes and waved her hand dismissively. “I’ve taken care of it, but in case you see any suspicious icons or messages: Don’t touch them. Let me know, and I’ll fix it.”
“Maxy! I’ve important files in my drive I have not backed up!”
I had discovered Maxy’s “talent” when she was seven. I came home one day to find my computer reformatted with her as the Administrator. All my data was gone, including records of old projects, my student portfolio and everything that came after it. I was livid and impressed at the same time. From then on, these incidences piled up. My solution was to give her and Mimi their own computers. She followed hacking blogs, messed around with classmates’ accounts, and built up a reputation at the school for it. A year earlier, she had done something to a friend she met online, and he retaliated by hacking into all computers linked to hers. I knew she secretly loved it, even though I gave her hell.
“I know, Mom. I’ll try to fix it. Nothing is sacred for this dude, but I’ve got him by his balls this time.”
I gasped. Seeing my contorted, speechless face, she excused herself.
“Where are you going?” I shouted after her.
“Putonghua,” she said and rushed out the door.
Putonghua took place two floors above us where their Beijing tutor lived. Mimi too came rushing out of their room, shooting straight past me, and scrambled to the front door.
“Bye, Mom!” Mimi then turned and asked, “Will you be here when we come back?”
I cringed as a sharp pain shot from the left of my neck all the way to my temple.
“Are you alright?” She ran back and, wrapping her arms around me, gave me a kiss.
After the twins were gone, I walked into their room in the eerie silence of the empty apartment. A wonky line divided the space through the middle. It went up the wall from the floor, across the ceiling, and down the wall again, marking their separate territories, yellow on Mimi’s sunny side and a rich purple on Maxy’s. My eyes wandered across to Mimi’s wall, plastered with photos of friends and birthday cards. She was the bright one. Maxy’s side was packed with jars filled with insects amongst a pair of tarantulas. They were Maxy’s only friends, except for Mimi and me of course.
Sometimes, I wondered about the twins’ extreme differences but, like me, they both had an urge to make their mark; my mother used to call that my subversiveness, although I was just being my own person. What worried me was not the twins’ differences but the wild card that was passed on to them through my genetic code.
Dr. Wen said that brilliance and mental disorders often run in the same family because they’re carried by the same gene that inexplicably switches and results either in genius or mental illness. Tracing back the family history, Dr. Wen had said our genes were making us vulnerable. I pushed away the possibility that I belonged to the latter of the two outcomes, and I couldn’t help worrying that my fragile genes would get the better of Maxy eventually.
When I had spoken to Frieda about it, she’d shrugged and said, “Dr. Wen had this patient with dissociative disorder and multiple personalities. If one person can develop multiple personalities residing within the same brain who have no knowledge of each other, then why can’t a person develop a normal personality—even if he or she has less than perfect genes?”
I thought about that a lot on nights when sleep kept me at bay.
Chapter 12
On the first beep, my hand reached for the alarm clock I’d been watching for an hour. Outside, stark silhouettes of tall buildings assumed details like photographic paper developing in a dark room. I came from a family of monumental sleepers, but one of my fears was to wake up one day and realize I’d slept my life away. Whether it was anxiety or insecurity, I rarely slept more than five hours a day and got up in the small hours to catch up, do competitions, or write. But I hadn’t seen a sunrise since Dr. Wen had put me on medication. Leaving the vial of bad boys untouched on my bedside table, I entered the living room and settled in front of my Mac.
“Architecture has a biblical beginning,” my professor had told us in the first lecture of my architectural course. “Light was the first thing God created when there was only darkness, and light is what gives form to buildings, whether it is a hut, or a skyscraper.”
I was eighteen, mesmerized, and eager to learn how to capture the light, but my obsession had shifted to writing. As a writer, light was at my command. It was not an issue. Instead, I needed to capture the human soul, but how could I if I didn’t know what had happened to mine?
I gazed at what I’d typed:
Lin’s Memoirs
My English name is Lindsay Lee. No one except my mother ever called me by my Chinese name, Lee Le Yi, which means “Happy Child.” As a child, my nickname was Lemon, because of my yellow complexion. Lin, Le Yi, or Lemon; what did it matter?
I gutted the page and typed:
The Confessions of a Soulless Woman
I leaned back, contemplating the accuracy of the title. An unsettling feeling crept into my stomach, but I should not give in to my emotions. Staring at my crunched fingers suspended over the back-lit keyboard, I told myself to throw away whatever preconception and concern I had about what I was or was not; what I should or should not write. I should expel all scruples from my mind and let the words flow out of me without interfering.
I am a spring child born in March 1966, the year in which riots burnt their marks in the collective memory of Hong Kon
g. I was too little to have first-hand memories of these events and only knew it from Wong Ka Wai’s movies in which women are demure and men forlorn. The less stylish documentaries showed police barricades holding back angry mobs shouting forceful slogans. They shook their fists in front of a plastic flower factory in Kowloon. A youngster with black sunglasses picked up a brick and flung it at the police who had formed a human chain. People looted shops at the periphery of the footage. The crowd turned over a car in the corner of the screen. A flicker ignited white flames, and the vehicle exploded. The force of the blast knocked over the mob surrounding it. Elsewhere a man lit a cloth in the neck of a bottle and threw it at policemen, who used their shields to ward them off. A blanket of flames covered the shields as the bottle splashed to pieces. The policemen threw their shields on the ground and chased the man, waving their batons in the air. The crowd started running, and the sea of people, activists, troublemakers, looters, police, and innocent spectators washed the street like whitewater.
Weeks after my birth, events like this captured the daily scene of Hong Kong and continued well into ‘67.
“The uprising started because the Star Ferry doubled the price of a ticket from twenty-five to fifty cents,” my mother told me, when I asked her about it.
“The price of a ferry ticket?” I asked. “Didn’t people have any real problems?”
Clutching a handkerchief in her fist, Mother explained, “It was the last drop. The British claimed leftist elements from communist China were setting the people up against the Colonial government.”
“It still seems trivial.” I shrugged. “Considering that, just across the border, people were murdered and tortured by Red Guards amongst whom were their friends and relatives.”
“We didn’t know about the degenerate fringe activity of the movement. That was kept from us. Instead, we were led to see the noble goals of the revolution,” Mother said, shaking her head melancholically. “People were poor and angry at the British government for providing bad living conditions while the glory of revolution was blowing from across the River Delta. It promised the seductive possibilities of a new era.”
The new era my mother saw was a horrible déjà vu for others, including my dad, who had seen it all in his home village. He belonged to the first batch in a long diaspora that flooded out from China after the birth of the People’s Republic into Hong Kong and then from Hong Kong to the rest of the world.
He arrived in Hong Kong as an eight-year-old to escape the dire persecution by Communists because his second eldest brother was a soldier in General Chiang’s Kuomintang army. His family was not well off but had money for him and his eldest brother to make the trip. Every time I asked about it, he withdrew into himself, and a dull gaze would wash over his eyes. His silence about what had happened to his family or himself piqued my curiosity even more. One day, when I was in my teens, I looked it up in the library. Seldom had I seen such cruelty as on those photos. There were images of men and women with noses and breasts cut off; some showed limbs with large chunks of flesh carved out and haunting expressions on their face with hollowed eyes. It was horrendous to see these gruesome pictures of strangers. I couldn’t possibly imagine what it would be like to be there and see it happen to your loved ones.
I was surprised my father didn’t lose his mind altogether. I guess my father avoided having to deal with what would be unfathomable emotions by sealing off that part of their past. My mother, on the other hand, would not shut up about it once I opened the gate. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she never witnessed communist atrocities first-hand even though she said she saw dead bodies float down Pearl River to Hong Kong.
“The British government here and back in England had no clue about the sentiment amongst the Hong Kong people nor did they care. I remember one day, a British warship arrived and docked in the harbor. Among the tiny junks, the foreign battleship looked humongous and hostile. It reminded the people of the Opium Wars and how the British had turned Hong Kong into a colony. The Communists knew and used that to fire people up.”
Interestingly, these riots ended in 1967 when a twenty-three-year-old Hong Kong student called So Sau Chung went on a hunger strike. They arrested and sentenced him to two weeks’ imprisonment. The unrest died down but, in solidarity, another youngster Lo Kei joined So Sau Chung’s hunger strike. Hundreds of people took to the streets, although it was nothing like the scale it had been before. The unrest flared up again the next year when Lo Kei was found hanged in his flat.
The police claimed it was suicide, but So Sau Chung challenged that and it ended in another mass uprising. This time, So Sau Chung was arrested and sentenced to two weeks at Hong Kong’s psychiatric hospital in Castle Peak. He might have watched TV in the same common room where I watched TV.
The riots eventually stopped and peace returned, but my dad no longer deemed Hong Kong safe. He planned his second escape, this time bringing his family.
Chapter 13
We left Hong Kong in the early seventies when the end of British colonization was barely in sight. The exodus didn’t begin until the mid-eighties, but stories of whole villages starving to death because of the Great Famine had soon reached my father’s ears. He figured that staying in Hong Kong would undo his painful escape as a child. The thought that his three children might have to live through the same ordeal was too much to bear, so he convinced my mother—who kept her patriotic views to herself—to leave.
Luck had it that my grandpa from my mother’s side was in the food business. He was the first pioneer in our family who had both adventure and entrepreneurial acumen flowing in his blood. I only remembered him in his old age. After he retired, he returned to spend the sunset of his life in the walled village in the New Territories where he was born.
The original Lee clan, which consisted of five hundred people, built their first settlement in the 1500s. It had a protective moat and wall of which only traces remained. An ancestral hall added in the 1700s had Lee’s family tree, ominous paintings and portraits hanging from its walls. The first time I dared to look one of them in their ghostly eyes was when my grandpa’s portrait was added in the late 1980s. After a lifetime of heavy drinking, the lining of his stomach was affected, and most of it had to be surgically removed. Undernourished, his cheeks and temples were hollow, while his limbs were stick thin. Later, I saw a photo of him from the 1950s in which he wore a Panama hat, and realized he was not much heavier when younger. The murky, soulful eyes, which reminded me of runny green yolks of eggs preserved in ash, had not changed either.
Rumor had it that Grandpa had been quite a player in his heyday—losing a factory or two in a single poker game. After that, he set his mind on a seafaring career. The idea of a job that would take him across the seven seas to see the world lured him away. He left my grandmother to mind the fields—the only thing left after he had squandered the rest of the family properties. He had friends in the restaurant business in England, but it occurred to him that Holland was a virgin market compared with Britain. Despite the language barrier, my grandfather’s dream came true, and he soon opened his first restaurant. Grandpa returned to his family once a year, which was frequent enough for him to father eight kids over a period of 16 years, many of whom would follow him to the new land. Thus, ties came about between two places halfway around the globe.
I was grateful we had left for a different reason than my dad. Tradition had it that boys were diamonds and girls were the pitch axes with which diamonds were unearthed, the chisels that shaped the diamonds, and the ringlets that carried them. When boys didn’t live up to expectation, they were polished until the end of days in the hope they would sparkle one day, make their ancestors proud, and pass on the family name—as if the longevity of the family name compensated for the mortality of all its ancestors and descendants. It was a Confucian belief Mao tried to get rid of, but getting rid of tradition was not simple, even for Mao.
My grandmother’s firstborn was a boy who came into the world with t
he umbilical cord tied around his neck. It must have been traumatizing as my grandmother never talked about it. It would be five daughters and ten years later before she gave birth to the next son, my poor Uncle Hua. She was so worried demons or ghosts would take away Uncle Hua that she named the boy flower or “Hua” to deceive the gods. She even dressed him as a girl. Born two years later, my Uncle Mel was luckier to be raised as a boy and grew up to be handsome and smart. Spoiled to the core, he became such a juvenile thug that my grandmother passed him on to my mother.
“You are the only person fierce enough to tame him,” she said.
Now, New Territory indigenous villagers were renowned for their cantankerous attitude. They were Hakka people, who were purged and chased off their land by a new emperor who feared their loyalty to a dynasty he had dethroned. What was resistance to systematic discrimination and expulsion at first became second nature, and the caustic belligerence of these villagers was legendary. Amongst them, my mother’s ability to talk and argue was second to none. So it was that the responsibility to stop her youngest brother from mingling with the other village thugs fell on her shoulders.
We were preschoolers when Uncle Mel moved in with us. Niang took away all his pocket money so he could not gamble in the cool and dark village alleys. Instead, he commanded us around like his foot soldiers and compensated us with sodas. He would go on to study in the UK, return as a lawyer, and make a name for himself for his contributions in legal reforms. He had a spark in him someone just had to ignite and guide to good use. Uncle Hua, on the other hand, was remarkably unremarkable, considering the attention, effort and work that went into the making of him. I guess the cross-dressing had messed up his head.