The Year of the Woman (16 page)

Walking to Tung Loi Street, KwayFay turned away from the harbour. She was aware of so many things, quite like they said happened to the mind when you faced death.

There was no sense of premonition. Grandmother had definitely predicted death. Spirits or ghosts could do what they liked within limits set for them by the Jade Emperor, the Supreme Spirit. Presumably Grandmother was being truthful?

She waited to cross. Hong Kong’s traffic ran in stupid one-way systems she could never get the hang of. She had run wild in these very streets as a little girl, helping old people with their belongings, thieving, earning sums as little as the one-cent paper money, so beautifully printed (only made now for accountants worrying how to adjust their books with 0.0l of a Hong Kong dollar). Still, the lovely miniature notes had kept her alive more days than one. She had been lucky.

The streets were crowded. She realised this with astonishment. She had not thought how strange
weekdays
would be, out in the open, wandering about
aimlessly
. It had been a terrible decision not go in to be humiliated by HC and Alice and Beth and Felicity, and Tony, and Jimbo Yip who kept telling KwayFay he loved her. Yet he’d already done the thing to Alice in the stores cupboard, at least he boasted so. One day, Jimbo Yip told the world, he’d pull off a great scam in futures. He had it worked out in gold, copper, and coffee futures. His secret measures would hit the Brazilian, DAX, and the Nikkei. He’d use the Hang Seng, and do it in the exchange in Ice House Street. It would take him a single
afternoon. Unlike Mister Nick, the English scammer who’d done for Barings Bank in Singapore to the tune of a billion American dollars, mighty Jimbo Yip wouldn’t get caught. He said. KwayFay knew Jimbo Yip.

Dowdy, she felt today, dowdy and tired. She knew this was because she’d come on that morning. During her first day she became dispirited. All the other females looked so glamorous, and her feeling so shoddy. They seemed so colourful, their conversation doubly loud about night clubs, dancing with handsome spend-money sailors or share-brokers from Australia. This happened every month, never troubled other girls. She felt so tired, but couldn’t remember if Ghost Grandmother had lectured her during the night. She felt the money in her handbag, twice had had to turn aside when some
pickpocket
had done his usual sidle to her left. It was easy switching the handbag to her other arm and lifting her jacket flap over the clasp. She did this mechanically
several
times a day among the office crowd. Office crowd! When would she belong again to an office crowd, able to chat with friends? Now they were remote from her life. They had never been friends.

No job now. Only doom.

Wing Lok Street West, with crazy traffic roaring into Central District. Just to make it difficult for pedestrians, the parallel Bonham Strand West traffic ran the other way, westward towards Kennedy Town. She paused,
buffeted
by hurrying people. Not a foreigner among the teeming schoolchildren in their uniforms – probably the Ying Wa Girls’ school further uphill above Seymour Road, she thought enviously. How she’d have loved to have gone to a school where, she’d heard the others say
at work, they sat in desks in rows of seven, the teacher walking along the aisles while the girls wrote their sums and words.

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.”