A Hong Kong Story - Causeway Bay (i)

From Part I Getting Lost of my serialized novel that accompanies the Truth in Fiction season of The Matterhorn podcast

Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, Photo by HE ZHOUYI on Unsplash

A Hong Kong Story is a work of fiction. If you’re just joining me now, you can catch up with the rest of the novel here —

Table of Contents

A juxtaposition of Ivy’s solitary navigation with Hong Kong's journey in the 2010's.  A story about divergence, culture, and love. What do you do when the future’s suddenly unclear?

Causeway Bay

Ivy’s office at The South China Morning Post was at the limits of Causeway Bay, not in the heart of its market stalls and skyscraper malls. It was in a multi-storey building, but toward Queen’s Road East, a quieter area. It was also on the edge of southern Wan Chai, away from the strip bars and harbour. In the week away spent mainly in the confines of her flat, Ivy longed for the freedom and rhythm of those normal working days.

She would often walk down Queen’s Road to get lunch at one of the cafes or on the new faux-European pedestrian street misleadingly renamed Lee Tung Avenue. She would walk by the rainbow buildings — five crooked apartment blocks, each in a uniquely vivid colour. Or she would go round to the fruit market before heading home, maybe stopping at Stone Nullah Tavern with a few people from work for their happy hour deals, depending on when they got out. The imbibers there spilled into the streets, mixing in alleyways of cement and odd angles. They almost flowed across the light traffic into historic Blue House: a preservation of Hong Kong culture in a 1920’s tenement building. They drifted in and out of conversation and contemplation in the micro-neighbourhood. At the end of the road, after passing by car repair shops and flats, was the hidden Pak Kai temple with its ornate, tiled roof, lotus lanterns, and hidden Ming dynasty statue all enshrouded by hanging vines from Banyan trees. There were small benches on the path up to Kennedy Road where she often brought her lunch, sometimes alone, sometimes near helpers with children or walkers resting after coming down from the nearby hilly paths.  

In Hong Kong, she felt the strangeness of always being surrounded by strangers. They became your friends. You learned how to be comfortable with them; sometimes it was even easier. You could constantly reinvent. Your past informed only you and not their perceptions of you. You could talk to all kinds of people about all kinds of things, and they would listen.

People bartered at the market, half in Cantonese, half in English. It could easily become a chat about food or hairstyle. It could get a little tense as well, but that was part of the game. Sometimes theatrics were involved: walking away to be chased back to the shop, heads rolling back in surprise, children popping up from behind the register. Ivy learned to keep up appearances until there was a deal, then laugh a little and shake hands.

At bars, too, people would talk. Not just to hit on you, they really talked. People regularly made new friends or business contacts (the line was blurred) or enjoyed a night out with groups of strangers, visitors or people on a sports team celebrating a local victory. If you let yourself go to the night, you would have a story every time.

During the week at home, she thought about the pattern of existence she had created here.

She often went out alone because she and Georg had different work schedules, at first that was why. But somehow their circles had become separate. Having a dinner party meant hosting his friends. Going out meant catching up with hers, and he never even seemed to care where she was. He never wanted to go out unless it was for work. Her friends told her this was freedom. She started to go out less. She thought it was probably a part of getting older or wanting to be healthier. It was true that sometimes the nights were repetitive, the stories predictable. Sometimes there was too much drinking; and sometimes people getting drunk was depressing.

But there was a sort of joy in being enveloped in life. People who weren’t afraid to be themselves - drinking or not. This made up for the sameness of bars or restaurants and city streets. And there was the occasional junk party, fancy rooftop, or live music club that kept the venues unique. The clashing of cultures in a creative sort of existence and optimism. Hong Kong often seemed a vision of what the future should be.

⬩

In these days on the couch, she had had some time to reflect on it all. Was she opting out of what the city had to offer? Was it a good life here? Had she taken the right path?

But before she could truly answer those questions (though more time never really would have given her an answer), it was time to go back to work. She couldn’t believe how much blood was still coming out of her body. She would have thought that coming back after a week would feel refreshing. But those big pads were a constant reminder, stripping her of the civility of walking decently. She swapped her signature slim jeans for a black shirt-dress to make it more comfortable. Even the looser variety of denim she had been wearing lately to make room for the tiny cells growing in her womb both couldn’t hide her evidence and made the pain in her abdomen worse. It was on and off at this point and she hoped that getting back to work would distract her. She hoped by popping pills before the pain came, she could keep it at bay. But she also realised that this was something in her life she had little control over. Where had that control of her destiny gone?

Work had always been motivating for her. It was her creative and purposeful space; it was a calling to a vocation. The job at the SCMP had been an exciting move. There were people from all over with a firm commitment to free press like no other due to their position in a post 1997 Hong Kong and proximity to the mainland. There were rumours Alibaba would soon buy the paper out and fears about what a China controlled news source would mean. But nobody really believed it would make a big difference. Although the protests a year ago had brought some of China’s infiltration to light, Hong Kong was to remain free until at least 2047. It seemed a long way off.

She needed a story, she realised, as she entered the MTR at Tai Koo station. Something to take her mind away. Headphones in, listening to The National, it almost felt like a normal day, but the melancholic harmonies were there in attempt to suffer so she wouldn’t have to. The grief had to stay at home. She couldn’t tell people what had happened, and she didn’t want their pity anyway. She didn’t want reflections of Georg’s eyes kaleidoscopically all around her. Ivy preferred to stay in her cocoon as if it were the unreal, as if she would wake up. She would tell her colleagues she had had the flu; Hongkongers were cautious with disease anyway after SARS and Swine Flu. They would be grateful she had stayed at home, her contagion contained. They wouldn’t give it a second thought. On the way in, she sent her boss a text to tell him the story, so he could back it up. He was in on the cover up.

Originally, she hadn’t known what to say to Bob about the time off. They had a good relationship; he joked with her and trusted her opinion even outside of journalism. They often caught up for a quick beer or whiskey after busy days, and he and his wife had invited her over for dinner a few times. He never questioned anything she did, but she never gave him cause to question. Would this week off be questionable? She knew she could get a doctor’s note and just give it to HR, tell him she had done it and it was her business and get on with it. But somehow, she felt that was too impersonal to keep trust and faith in one another. Or maybe she sought some understanding from someone, in the unlikely environment of the office.

So, fuck it, she thought, I’ll just tell him. When had miscarriage become so taboo? Or perhaps it had always been? Why was she afraid to tell anyone about it? It was not her fault, but the more she realised the secrecy of the experience, the more it felt like it was. Like some story she had created within herself out of narcissism or self pity or desire. Without telling others, had it even happened? And how could she cope when others told her what it was like to be pregnant or asked her why she didn’t have any kids yet? These kinds of questions came in droves. They had for a long time. It was painful when they hadn’t been able to get pregnant. And even before that, there was that female expectation of engagement, marriage, procreation that caused questions from people with whom she barely knew, projecting their own ideas of happiness on her. It was strange when she actually was pregnant and couldn’t tell anyone yet. She had avoided any personal conversations at work, or just tried to laugh them away, to redirect. As a journalist, she was good at this, and she had been confused but happy. Before, the questions had stung deep and her cover ups often seemed curt and cold to mask her emotions. It would be painful again now.

So she had told Bob. Straight out.

She had sent an email and set in to wait. To wait for the ping of a reply on her work phone that she didn’t expect would come for some time from this busy man who might not know how to handle such an awkward situation. And she sat there, afraid not that he would reprimand her for taking time off, but that he would skirt the issue and, just like her husband, give her that pity. Pity in silence or in regard, or perhaps in language, since her boss was such a clever writer.

Instead, his reply was swift. Raw in its swiftness. He was empathetic, not sympathetic. By the third sentence he had told her about his wife’s single miscarriage a decade ago that had them both in fear for so many things and in fear for life itself. Take all the time you need, he said. And let me know if you want to talk about it.

She felt brave. People didn’t talk about these things. Somehow that loss had made her courageous to speak the truth. That truth all of us are constantly negating through various performances of face. Hiding what we really feel or who we really are.

⬩

‘Good morning, Miss Ivy! Long time no see,’ a joyous voice rang out. The admin assistant greeted her from the grey semi-circular desk as she entered the forty-fifth floor.

‘Good morning, Michelle.’ Ivy managed a weak smile, then escaped into the tiny room that, thank god, was her own space.

Working at this newspaper was a busy job in a busy city. The urban sprawl could implode inside you for reporting it if you weren’t careful. But Ivy saw it differently than many of those at work who complained incessantly of being busy. Rather, they boasted of their busy-ness, thinking it would bring them to higher esteem by their bosses or at least to greater acceptance by colleagues in their commiseration. She complained sometimes, too, when it got difficult. But she saw reporting the news from this city as a way to re-organize and make sense of the world’s movements. Actions of people and of typhoons, of building projects and festivals, of stocks and of Chinese policies. Policies that threatened the SCMP’s very existence.

She realised she felt the most busy not when there were more assignments on her desk but when she was the loneliest. Not the most alone in physical solitude, but alone amongst humanity.

She was an editor now; she had climbed the ladder in Hong Kong. She helped her interns and writers perfect fascinating stories. Other days, she found the beat for them. She worked on headlines and layout, functioning online in many areas that used to be niche jobs. Online, she could do it all. Her start had been for a small local paper in Maine that she had brought online out of necessity. Then she became a one-woman-band, doing everything for the local site. The pay had been shit but she had learned how to do it all. Now, on the big scale, she could still dally in captions and layout when she wanted to. There were some people for that sort of things, but she had free rein and Bob trusted her.

Bob was the big boss, the Culture Editor, though they all frequently crossed beats and job descriptions. He was an old British expat, Welsh, who had lived in Hong Kong for decades, since before the Handover. He saw himself as a protector of Truth. That was how he had first introduced himself to her. Bob took life very seriously which was why he also made a lot of time for his family and for pensive time over whiskey.

He was one of the big bosses, but he was still a writer. He wrote a feature or two every year when he found something worth the extra time, and he encouraged her to do the same. It kept them fresh, he said. He had recently done a piece on all the new Mexican taquerias in town; of course it gave him a chance to also eat at all of them. He almost convinced the chief to send him to Mexico for comparison purposes, but this was deemed a little too extravagant and, really, the chief couldn’t do without him. He also wrote features on Hongkongers from time to time. There was the sweet and clever professional pianist for the rich who popped from penthouse to penthouse on the weekends to give performances to Hong Kong’s elite. There were the Indian brothers who built a restaurant empire on the assumption that people wanted a place to go that was filled with a concept of a place; they named their restaurants and bars after cities all over the world. There was the filmmaker - Ann Hui - decorated over the years who had now turned to a project about a true tragedy in a housing estate that had ended with a father killing his twin daughters. Bob was interested in Hong Kong’s people, music, fun, food, rich-poor gap, beauty, and tragedies all the same. He had a love affair with the city, which determined the way he chose his stories, interacted with people on the streets, and spoke of himself as a Hongkonger.

Luckily, Ivy had kept up with her emails, but there were still over a hundred from the day before. She began with this task, simultaneously creating a to do list.

The silence was quickly broken with a knock. Jared, one of the writers on her team, stuck his head in, ‘Morning!  Hey, do you want me to do that story I told you about last night?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh right, you’re probably getting to emails.  Sorry.  Hey, but it’s a good story.  It’s about this shoe design industry across the border and this lady from New Zealand who is really up and coming…’

‘Why is it interesting?’

‘Oh, sorry, yeah it’s because her husband was this local business tycoon who was murdered last year – you know, Jimmy Cheung?’

‘Oh, him. Did she kill him?’

‘Ha ha. No! Well, I don’t think so. Unsolved.’

‘Ok, let’s not go there,’ she winked. It felt good to talk stories. ‘But sure, let’s run it.’

‘Awesome, thanks,’ he quickly closed the door then opened it again, ‘Good to see you back, Ivy!’

She simply waved her hand at him and he was gone.

A few more moments of quiet space passed as her to do list got longer.

Another knock came and Bob’s face squeezed through the open door as if he were in one of those historical-figure cardboard cut-outs.

‘You ok, champ?’

‘I think so. Thanks.’

‘Alright, well I’m here if you wanna talk. Or if you want me to grab some of your work this week, just give a shout.’ It was a ridiculous offer because he was always busier than any of them.

‘How are you? How was your week?’

‘Oh normal, normal. You know. Let’s grab a beer next week.  You take care of yourself and just lock your door if Monica and Phil start being a pain.’ He winked. ‘Oh, your flu story is on. Nobody will question it. You sure you’re ok? Don’t need anything right now?’

‘Nope, all good. Thanks a lot, Bob.’ The first part was a lie but the gratitude was real.

‘Cool, I’ll get out of your way.’ And his head disappeared like a gopher’s.

She didn’t lock the door; it felt trapped.  But with the manageable to do list finished, she moved her mind to select a story to keep her motivated.

Causeway Bay, Hong Kong during the Umbrella Revolution Protests (photo by the author, 2014)

During the Umbrella Revolution just a year ago, she had gotten back to her reporter duties, wanting to feel the beat directly. These protests - however you want to call them - were developed in the undertow of Occupy Wall Street, a statement on the rich-poor gap which was massive in Hong Kong. It was about skyrocketing apartment costs and the cage-like rented spaces, or ‘coffin cubicles’, some locals were paying about $2000 HKD for. But it was about more than that. It was about Hong Kong’s identity as a place, whether a nation, a colony, a city, or a Special Administrative Region. Hong Kong had never really been its own nation and many looked at colonisation with rose tinted glasses. It was about that identity of its people, about the invisible culture. Akbar Abbas wrote about this. But it was, as he called it, a reverse hallucination. People didn’t see what was really there.

Well, now on the streets they could see it, but only if they really looked. Many media sources world wide only saw the clashes between citizens and police, not realising the police were often on the side of the protesters. What did China have to do with these protests? What did overcrowding have to do with it? High apartment prices? Pollution (coming over from the Mainland or from international cargo in the harbour)? A strange border with split families. Were Hongkongers also afraid of foreigners? After all, a local advertisement had called Chinese who crossed the border ‘locusts.’ What was the universities’ role – in privileging languages, in mental health? There were the appointments of chancellors that had sparked parts of the grievances; the lack of transparency; the infiltration of China on the once free University of Hong Kong, which had remained a safe haven of knowledge and writing even during the Japanese Occupation to some extent. What did it have to do simply with transportation or with boredom?

Causeway Bay during the Umbrella Revolution Protests (photo by the author, 2014)

The answer was probably different for each person out there, sitting or making art, holding signs or marching, or even just visiting to talk and look and listen. She was in this category. Though she had had some easy initial opinions: anti-China, anti-rich…she took the role of an unbiased journalist and found the many layers of the movement fascinating, heartening, and ultimately tragic, because the answers were so unclear, were so grounded in Hong Kong becoming a free and transparent society and in the cost of living coming down in this densely populated city.

The heart of the movement had not been far from their office. She weaved through people, barriers, and ideas on overpasses that she had only set foot on while plodding through the Standard Chartered Marathon. There was a similar sensation of people overtaking the machine: the cars and cement that connected information between buildings. Through posters in English and Cantonese (for foreigners, for themselves) and colourful paintings, the streets looked more human than ever. In daylight, at least, the feeling was celebration arrived at through outrage. It was as if alchemy had been achieved. But it was a humanity at risk - one cannot live on a highway overpass forever, and this ephemeral art had the lifespan of only three months.

As she spoke with activists — students, artists, academics, lawyers — it was hard not to be completely biased toward the protestors. She came to detest the people who complained that their commutes had gotten longer, especially the expats, those who largely already knew freedom and democracy in their home nations. She thought of the Marquis in A Tale of Two Cities who runs over a child with his carriage and is angry at the delay in his commute to his castle in the countryside. After reporting a few stories of marches and police clashes followed by assigning several interviews to her reporters, she wrote a long opinion piece alluding to Dickens. Without blood, she knew the protests would eventually just fade into the city and be swallowed by the incessant sounds of demolition. These stories would be made into a simple narrative: east meets west, capitalism meets communism, or rich meets poor. But it was much more nuanced than that.

The deconstructed dichotomy provides dissonant experiences beyond the simple juxtaposition. She used to witness it all from tram windows. Slow moving in a fast city. Taking in all the culture, all the life. Neon lights, crowded restaurants, anything you could dream of buying displayed in a window.

Some said Hong Kong was dying a slow death. They called it the space of disappearance. There was nothing they could do.

Looking out at the life of the city, she couldn’t believe in this disappearance. People seemed to be involved in a continuous creation, as if the city herself were a mythological child.

Could they simply not see the invisible, or was she one of the foolish believers, like the emperor with no clothes?

⬩

A tweet popped up about the Central land reclamation project. She gave the story to one of the interns.

Another head popped through the door. It was Phil.

‘Ivy, help. I’m late with this story. Can you take a look at it in the next ten minutes?’

Normally she would have been annoyed, but all she said was, ‘Sure.’

‘Thank you! I’ll send it to you now.’

⬩

Her mind drifted again. Trying to make sense of where she had made her home.

Ivy often thought of the power of words, hoping they were doing something meaningful in those little cubicles way up in the sky.

She had interviewed the local poet Leung Ping Kwan a couple months before his death, just after the protests. His friends called him PK and many others called him by his old pen name: Ye Si. She had interviewed him before and felt that somehow he had become a fast friend. He must’ve been a friend to a great many. The multilingual professor-artist had terminal cancer and chose to do final readings and celebrations in his former home in the Main Building, or Old Colonial Building, at The University of Hong Kong. The entrance was high up above Bonham Road. To get there, you got off the number ten green minibus, took an outdoor elevator, and followed paths through jungle-like trees. The entrance to the columned building that had survived as a university during the Japanese Occupation had a plain brick terrace.

The inside held a large open courtyard surrounded by classrooms and offices. One could feel the ghosts of the past in the koi pool or on benches. It was a place of reflection and a symbol the resignification of colonial relics now completely owned in a Hong Kong identity that seemed dangerous to understand. Because if you understood it, you understood real freedom.

On stage, he didn’t look like a man dying of cancer. His wrinkles danced with his words and his eyes emitted light through his professorial glasses like moonbeams. He read from many poems, but at this time, he came back to the one named after the building they inhabited that evening: ‘Might all the pieces of ruins put together present / yet another architecture? Ridiculous the great heads on money, / laughable the straight faces running things.’ His voice sang out in Cantonese, then English. Then he read from ‘Bittermelon’, ‘Postcards from Prague’, ‘Tokyo Story’, and ‘At the North Point Star Ferry’.

Others - students, professors, one of his translators - read poems in different languages or performed artistic interpretations: a dance, a concerto, a gallery of sketches. His poems were sometimes of Hong Kong, sometimes elsewhere. The night captured this idea that here is everywhere: Hong Kong’s intangible culture was really a performance of culture’s celebration of life.

At the end, PK said to her, off record: ‘I am dying with this city. She has a disease that cannot be beaten, and I cannot see her succumb to it. My lungs have taken in this toxicity long enough.’ He touched her shoulder softly, like a sage passing on his wisdom. ‘But, my friend, it has been a wonderful life…’

Looking into her eyes with sadness, he turned to leave. She would never see him again. He would become one of those characters who lived in her mind.

⬩

But even though she was not into busy-ness and money-focused work, all the pieces of her job and her life could shift in an instant from hopes and successes to that same toxicity. She couldn’t work out if it was Hong Kong or her own free will that was poisoning her.

These movements were controlled by loneliness.

Several new pings on her computer and phone again called her back to her tasks quickly. She finished editing two stories and assigned two more. Then she posted to Twitter and scanned the airwaves.

Sometimes the noise in her head was just too much. She thought about the expectations at work, her expectations, not necessarily Bob’s or the Editor-in-Chief’s. A standard of writing, communication with contacts, and organization that was her best level under all the best conditions of health and colleagues and time. She couldn’t seem to ease off of it. The ideas of how to do it better were always there in her head, moving around with the ideas for her novels, her thoughts about surviving daily life - the bills or groceries or friend she should call, and the heartache.

The pain inside her seemed to empty out the base of her existence. It was like there was no shelf on which to pile her thoughts. They collapsed inward to the void, becoming disorganized and meaningless, so that pain was not only associated with a memory or a negation of a future but also combined with her to-do list at work and the feeling of needing to contact her friends at home and even the friends here that she hadn’t seen in a while, too consumed with trying to reach in and pull up the end of that black hole into something solid and meaningful.

She welcomed the interruptions to thought the rest of the day, taking only a fifteen minute break at lunch to grab sushi for her desk. It wasn’t unusual nor was it unenjoyable. Stories moved in front of her eyes as documentation of humanity.

---

[to be continued next week - Causeway Bay (ii)

Join me Tuesday for a podcast about layering fiction with ideas about censorship and a Spaces & Places focus on the newsroom. Thanks for reading!