Planet Lolita

by Charles Foran

  “Your friends?” he said of the rows of Asian girls with black hair, dark eyes, and regular features. “I can never tell them apart. How come they don’t come around anymore?”

  I chewed more lip to stop myself from answering his question. Because we don’t wear masks. Because they think we’re infected. “There’s Miriam,” I said, “and there’s Chelsea Ho. That’s Xiaolong Chan, from Stanley, who did come to our house when I was little. And Clara, and Brittany, and Rachel …” When he failed to react, I added, “Your older daughter?”

  He squinted to view the tiny screen. “Of course.”

  “And here she is.” I pointed to the special page I had made for her. “Mary, with no last name.”

  He took the phone from me. “Really? This photo is causing all the fuss?”

  “Not that one.”

  He waited. I didn’t want him to ask for the other image. I didn’t want to show it to him.

  “We shouldn’t be the last people in Hong Kong to see it,” he said.

  Now flushing—I could feel the same heat in my cheeks that I’d felt in the bathroom stall at Dr. Wilson’s office—I retrieved the phone and Googled “Mary, Tai Long Wan.”

  Dad examined the photo for five minutes—or so it felt. I shouldn’t have studied him studying her. But although he knew I was, he allowed his expression to change. Jacob Kwok had a long hard look. He definitely liked what he saw. He also suddenly dropped—was this possible?—those same years that had crept back onto his face. “I was too distracted on the beach to really notice,” he said. “But I get it now.”

  “Get what?”

  He hesitated.

  “Tell me, Dad. I need to know.”

  “This girl almost certainly belongs to someone. Bought and paid for. We can’t be interfering with this.”

  “Oh.”

  “And we’d better show your mother.”

  Being on my knees, I had no trouble snatching the iPhone back. “It’s still private.”

  “Hardly, Xixi.”

  “I’m not showing her Mary.”

  “She can Google too. We’re not that last century.”

  “I’m not …”

  At the doorway he stopped. For a second I thought he was going to demand that I delete “Finding Mary” from Facebook. But instead he asked if I’d go to Mass with him tomorrow. “We haven’t been in a couple of weeks,” Dad said, “and I know I have plenty to confess.”

  The next morning we were the only passengers on the 6 to Stanley not wearing SARS condoms. The driver gave us a dirty look as we paid, Hong Kongers on the lower level muttered gao cho ah while we made for the stairs, and even the upper-deck amahs, usually insta-members of the Cool Kwok fan club, showed their disapproval by not devouring him with their eyes. But at least we weren’t swarmed. The noisy Net—Twitter, Facebook, and websites set up by bored Hong Kong teens—was loud with stories of deepening weirdness. Girls were being hired by malls to bottle-spray customers who passed through their doors, masked or not, a minty disinfectant that triggered sneezing fits. Grannies were brushing by security guards to storm apartment buildings and banks and wipe down elevator panels and ATM machines. Gangs were roaming streets in Kowloon and the New Territories, chanting “No to SARS!” and hunting the unprotected. Surrounding the troublemaker, the gang members, named “N-95s” by the blogosphere, would force the person to choose from a selection of masks in white or grey, and then snap a cell-phone photo of the newly converted for posting, like police mug shots, on their website. YouTubes of N-95 interventions were attracting a half million viewers a day. On TV and YouTube, Cantopop idols, some of who did look like Dad, were asking the vigilantes to remember to be courteous.

  Though we told no one, Gloria and I had been swarmed earlier in the week, and also ended up on the Net. Ready to pull out my hair from watching the Peak Tram climb up and down the hillside all morning, I convinced her to ride the trolley to Causeway Bay. Starving models on the outdoor stage in Times Square wore particle masks the same colours as their designer dresses—closer to towelettes, tugged over their flat chests and barely covering their behinds, each cheek no bigger than a pork bun—while they paraded beneath the usual pollution sun. Many of the girls wobbled doing the angry catwalk, as if balancing, never easy on an empty stomach and six-inch heels, was impossible due to the extra weight of gauze. I had been explaining to Gloria how the models were taught to pout onstage, and so were likely choking on fabric, when a granny with bow legs and tiny feet started yelling at me. I wanted to ask if her feet had been bound when she was a girl, but never had the chance. “You infect us!” the lady kept shouting. Soon a crowd, most with salt-and-pepper hair and spots over their skulls, blocked our escape. “If she spits, you’ll get sick!” another said. Someone pushed someone, who knocked into me, my sunglasses almost flying off. “Hey,” I said, “watch the Vuittons!” Onstage a model about my age, hearing the brand name over the techno beat, halted her strut. Her mask was canary-yellow with cherry lips outlined in sparkles.

  “Run!” Gloria said through her mask. Crushing my hand in hers, she shoved old people from our path, not stopping until we were three streets from the square. Though the N-95s would have expired chasing us, she wasn’t taking any chances. In a laneway beneath the overpass she wept. “I know no kung fu,” she said. “How can I protect you?” “You don’t know kung fu?” I answered. “How’d you get this job?” In the taxi back to Mid-Levels, I Googled “Flash Mob, Hong Kong” and clicked onto a jittery forty-eight-second video, filmed from a window overlooking Times Square, showing a swarming from eighteen minutes earlier. Two victims, one masked, one Vuittoned, busted out of the mob and took off up the street. A teenager in a towelette, watching from an outdoor stage, must have misstepped, and when she toppled off the ramp the camera settled on her.

  Dad and I reached St. Mark’s two minutes before Mass. But on pushing through another crowd to the front doors, we found Father Romesh blocking entry, arms crossed and scalp sweating. From within the church came the bleat of air horns, the kind used during rugby games.

  “Fumigating the joint, Father?” Dad said.

  “You missed last Sunday,” the priest replied from behind his protection.

  “Business trip.”

  “And you, Miss Sarah?”

  “My mom wouldn’t bring me.” When I had asked Gloria if I could go to the amah Mass with her—I liked humming the Tagalog liturgy—she said she couldn’t attend. Not with the shame of Miguel on her conscience. Not with God so angry with her.

  Father Romesh patted his skull, nice-doggie style. “We have a problem,” he said. “Two, matter of fact.”

  The first problem was the flock of sparrows that had got trapped in the church earlier in the week, and which, unlike the resident swallows, zigged when they should have zagged around the ceiling fans. Six sparrows so far had been clipped by wood wings, emitting sprays of feather and plume and, most distressingly, kamikaze-ing onto the confessional, the sacristy, the baptismal font, and Mrs. Leigh-Jones. At the amah Mass earlier that morning, a sparrow had plopped onto the altar just as Father Romesh was preparing to turn the wine into the blood of Christ. He yelped and swept the bird from the surface using the first tool that came to hand—the Holy Book. About this reaction the priest was ashamed and, on being told that sparrows hated loud noises, ordered the fans turned off, the windows flung open, and all the air horns in the market bought and put to work.

  “Such carnage,” he said with a sigh. Sweat now streamed from his skull, staining the mask like the underarms of a T-shirt.

  “Why not leave the fans off during Mass?” Dad said.

  “The swallows must still be exiled, Jacob.”

  “What’s the second problem?” I asked.

  The second problem was us. At Mass last Sunday the priest had announced that, effective immediately, any parishioner yet refusing to don an N-95 particle mask in sober, responsible precaution against the lethal airborne contagion would be asked to worship from the mee
ting room in the adjacent rectory. The room had its own entrance and washrooms, both of which could be scrubbed down afterwards, and a flat-screen TV to broadcast the service from a virally safe remove. Taking communion, sadly, would not be possible.

  “Any blood smeared over the rectory door?” Dad asked.

  Father Romesh patted his head, his eyes gone black. “That was to protect those within the house from the evil passing outside.”

  “Exactly,” Cool Kwok said, lighting a tumour way closer than the ten-metre rule.

  “Your daughter will remember the rectory from Sunday school,” the priest said, “including Christmas pageants. Didn’t you play a lamb one year?”

  “I was a goat.”

  He turned away from us.

  “‘Do not fear,’” I said to his back, “‘for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’”

  “Isaiah 43:1,” Father Romesh said. “Well done, Sarah.”

  “I like to be called Xixi.”

  We agreed that Mom shouldn’t find out we’d been chased from St. Mark’s by air horns. With an hour to kill, Dad and I walked over to the waterfront. He drank beer and sent texts, smiling so often I didn’t bother asking if he was texting Leah. I sipped orange juice and zipzipped the cross along its chain, keeping my music low in case my phone buzzed like his did—or hers, constantly. To my surprise, neither parent had mentioned “Finding Mary” at breakfast. I checked the page twice for new visitors. The morning wasn’t sunny or warm, first signs that winter was clamping down on Hong Kong, a pot lid of cloud and rain that could stay sealed until late February. Even so, both of us wore sunglasses.

  “I wanted to pray for Mr. Clark,” I said.

  “Hmm? You still can.”

  “I have better luck praying in a pew with Jesus hanging over the altar.”

  “How about the Tin Hau?” he said, still not looking up from his phone. The Stanley Tin Hau temple, built ages ago for fishermen, had been renovated when I was a girl. The building sat at the rear of an open plaza facing the sea, near a Starbucks and a McDonald’s.

  “I dreamed about Mrs. Ma last night,” I said, amazed by how our minds meshed. “The old woman who looks after the temple. She lives in the Tin Hau, with the gods, and incense sticks, and piles of fruit. Remember Mrs. Ma?”

  He shook his head.

  “They won’t give Mr. Clark a funeral. They’re keeping him in a jar until SARS is over.”

  “A jar?”

  “Miriam Tsang posted it.”

  His attention strayed when a woman in a short dress paraded her dog along the promenade. A cat perched on the breakwater, and the dog lunged for it. To keep control the woman had to grab the leash with both hands, her leg muscles going taut. Dad watched that too.

  “They’re driving us away, kiddo,” he said. “We may soon have no choice.”

  “Because of the Triads?”

  “No. Or only partially. It’s SARS hysteria that’s making me want to get the hell out of town.”

  “Can we stay in Asia?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  After a pause, I said, “What about Mom?”

  “She talked her way off the first flight. Had to threaten to quit unless they let her stay. But she still may end up back in Canada, or at law firm HQ in London.”

  “She doesn’t care about me, does she?”

  He gulped some beer before speaking. “You’re going to break that chain.”

  “What?”

  “Stop sliding the cross so hard.”

  I stopped.

  “She adores you, Xixi. I’m the problem.”

  “She’s mean.”

  “It’s tough for everyone.”

  “Face it, Dad—Leah’s a bitch. Rachel has.”

  His wince was real, as if from a gut punch.

  “And she doesn’t understand anything. You said it yourself—she doesn’t get this place. And she doesn’t get me and Mary either. She keeps calling her a prostitute!”

  “And when exactly did I say that?”

  “What?”

  “That she didn’t understand Asia. When did I say that to your mother? I don’t remember you being in the room—or on the balcony, to be exact—during the conversation.”

  I decided to check “Finding Mary” one more time. A seventeen-second video had just been posted by Jonathan Rhys-Jones, one of the few boys I had accepted as a friend. Jonathan, a nerd teen with gorgeous eyelashes but dental needs, posted the file in the comments with the caption Is this her? He shot the video last night. The footage, jumpy and rain-streaked and made stalker-creepy by of his heavy breathing, trailed a young woman in a T-shirt and leather skirt for a block, until she noticed, or maybe heard him panting behind her. Going by her height, hair, and leggy legs she could be Mary. When she turned to scold Jonathan for being a pervert, her face was definitely familiar, even in a nighttime Hong Kong street blazing with neon. But she could also be Nicole Jardin dolled up for a dance at the Yacht Club, or Suzie Wu high-heeling it to Lan Kwai Fong. She could be me too, I supposed, on a stupid dare or becoming Mary for a while—as I’d offered.

  “What are you looking at?” Dad said.

  “Nothing.”

  “She wanted to confiscate it, you know. The phone, and the laptop. Your mom said we couldn’t trust you any longer. I said we could. I said you’d been frightened into thinking clearly. I was right, wasn’t it?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “I’m trying to be patient, Xixi, trying to be a good guy.”

  “You’re a great guy. You’re Cool Kwok!”

  He didn’t smile, although I thought he might. “So you won’t make me look a fool for standing up for you?”

  I considered lying again. But then I found a middle truth that kept my expression from betraying me. “Facebook is all I have left for friends. Facebook, and Gloria. But I won’t try contacting Mary on the computer or phone, okay? I won’t.” Later I’d have to thank bucktoothed Jonathan Rhys-Jones for the plan. So long as he didn’t expect us to become girlfriend-boyfriend.

  Dad studied my face for almost as long as he had studied the porn photo of Mary. “Go pray for Mr. Clark in the temple. I have to make some calls.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Be back in twenty minutes.”

  I strutted down the sidewalk, angry as a model forced to wear a canary mask and flaunt her pork buns.

  Standing guard out front of the Tin Hau were the twin stone Shih Tzu, ancestors of meek Manga. Carved into the red doors were the temple bodyguards, fierce men with black beards, blue robes, and sabres at the ready. Inside was a tiger skin spread over a wall and rows of statues fronted by pots stuffed with smoking incense sticks and pyramids of oranges and apples, bananas and persimmons, along with flowers gifted by worshippers hoping for a favour in return. Also to be found in the partially roofed outer chamber, usually in a side room, was Mrs. Ma, older than the tiger and bent into a permanent question mark, whether or not she was sweeping the floor with her broom.

  I hadn’t been lying about the dream. In it, Mrs. Ma sat on her tiny stool peeling a mango and feeding me slices. I ate several, careful to slip them off the blade, the juice trickling down my chin. In the outer chamber this morning, movie-set bright despite the sky, a maskless Mrs. Ma greeted me by name. “Kwok Xixi, nay ho,” she said, even though I hadn’t been by in a year and didn’t look much like the half-half girl who used to hang out here, more interested in the cats than the gods. Stranger still, she waved me to her corner and, having extended a bowl of hard candies, also mango, proceeded to say that, contrary to what most people believed, the temple wasn’t devoted to Guanyin.

  “Only a single statue of her,” she said, indicating the hall to the main chamber.

  I’d Googled Guanyin after Rachel got a tattoo of her, and read about Tin Hau. Other statues, Mrs. Ma said, were of sea captains and army generals, popular opera singers from history. But the majority were devoted, like to the temple itself, to Mazu, or
Tin Hau in English. She was the protector of sailors and fishermen forced to challenge the sea.

  “Everyone knows the story of Mazu,” Mrs. Ma explained. “She was just fifteen, your age, when she rescued her fisherman father and three of her brothers who’d been caught in a storm. After that, Mazu waited by the shore each afternoon, her red garments guiding boats to safety. Sadly, being only a regular girl, with regular limitations and problems, she wasn’t exempted herself. When about a year later her silly fool father insisted on going fishing one dark, angry morning, and needed to be saved again, Mazu swam out, ignoring the dangers. She drowned. He survived.”

  “That lady isn’t Guanyin?” I said, sucking on a candy.

  “Mazu was her reincarnation. Lots of brave girls are.”

  “I’m sorry she died so young.”

  “You’re a brave girl,” Mrs. Ma said.

  Something occurred to me about our conversation. “How come I understand everything you’re saying? And how come you’re not wearing a SARS mask?”

  I was thinking about all this—Mazu’s death at sixteen, mango candies versus mango slices, how Mrs. Ma looked like the less-evil spirit sister in Spirited Away—when my phone beeped.

  Dad: You lost? It’s been an hour

  An hour? I decided to ask Mrs. Ma the time. But she wasn’t on her stool by the door any longer. I barely made her out in the gloomy side room, lying on a daybed with her eyes closed and the rest of her face behind N-95 gauze.

  “Were we really talking for that long?” I said to her. My Cantonese didn’t come out so fluently now.

  She opened her eyes. “Can I help you?” she said, as though she didn’t know who I was.

  “My parents love me,” I answered. “They’re just super busy.”

  My phone beeped again.

  Dad: Kiddo? You’re scaring me now

  Me: You and Mom are super busy, right?

  Dad:??

  Me: Aren’t we late for Mass?

  Dad: Mini-Me uninvited us. Don’t you remember?

  Me: I took my medicine this morning

  Dad: Are you still at the Tin Hau? Don’t move

  Back outside I stopped in surprise at the livid ocean sky beyond the breakwater and the droplets streaking the Shih Tzu directly in front. Between stone dogs and wooden bodyguards, I felt protected from Triad kidnappers who might be angry that, at last check, “Finding Mary” had 7,842 “Likes” and 2,801 “Talking about this.” But I didn’t feel protected from the rain, now slanting across the plaza in sheets that could have been thin sails, strong enough to pull a temple out to sea, with no hope of return.