A Hong Kong Story - Quarry Bay (i)
From Part I Getting Lost of my serialized novel that accompanies the Truth in Fiction season of The Matterhorn podcast
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 —
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?
*Trigger warning*
I’m not generally keen on trigger warnings, but I realize that by nature of receiving this post as an email, you might be quickly glancing at it in a variety of spaces and contexts. Therefore, I will warn you that there is a description of a miscarriage at the start of this passage.
Quarry Bay
The bleeding came one day and wouldn’t stop.
Looking down into the hospital-white toilet bowl, she saw the red translucent orb. Grape-shaped, but with a trailing tail of blood that moved in the water, like a Chinese lion dance at the mid-autumn moon festival. The orb glistened and swirled through the long stream of blood; it maintained insoluble ripples of deep red threads. The ball was unmistakably foreign but familiar…uncanny, unnerving.
Ivy wondered for a moment if it had actually come from her body or if it had come up from the pipes of her old apartment building, like the start to a Fruit Chan horror film. Unbidden, she recalled his images of dumplings created from human foetuses and the bloody suicide in the bathtub. He seemed to be writing this scene.
She stared down continuously in curiosity until the dark realisation washed over her and she flushed it down, out of sight.
Sitting completely frozen a few moments, she closed her eyes, unwilling to believe this was real.
She knew it had been her baby. How long had she even bothered to look? The beautiful cellular structure alongside the colour of death — life and death all in one space. The image would be forever imprinted in her brain.
She didn’t know what else to do. Part of her had wanted to scoop that baby out of the toilet water and bring it to the doctor and ask her to put it back inside where it was supposed to be for the next seven months.
But she knew it was gone.
Dead and gone.
⬩
She was momentarily cocooned in the compact bathroom, inside the carefully designed one-bedroom apartment on the twenty-third floor of one of many high-rise apartment buildings on Quarry Bay’s busy King’s Road. Even herself, a full grown and conscious woman, was a mere speck of existence. The window was cracked open despite the oppressive humidity; she could hear the hum of buses and smell the fumes of the city’s breath beneath. Like a poison, they reached in for her. Still, she left the window as it was, unable to take further action following the flush.
She retreated into herself in an interior of an interior of a massive urbanity that continued to flow through its curving and undulating streets.
The city that surrounded her was unaware of this pivotal moment.
Ivy sat in the bathroom and bled. She bled in sticky patterns on the glassy surface that dissipated slowly. While it continued, she cradled her chin in her hands. Her eyes moved over the cold objects around her.
The bathroom was pristine aside from the still-tainted water below her. New white ceramics and glistening silver, rose-marble tiles and tall mirrors. The lights were bright but cold coloured. At this moment, all that newness seemed inside out. The whiteness of a hospital screamed at her, impersonal and filled with hidden diseases. A space where people pretended to care for you as part of their jobs.
She was completely dissociated from these fixtures that had been a part of her daily life for nearly two years.
There was no love in that space, not for the baby nor for her own particular place in the universe at that moment. She forgot who she was, why she was there, who else might share this space with her.
She forgot all this and felt completely alone.
⬩
They had moved to Quarry Bay for his job. Georg was working at the new finance centre in Taikoo Shing and bought the place as an investment. It was only a one-bedroom flat, but it had cost eight million Hong Kong dollars, or about a million pounds. He believed it had everything they needed.
She liked the quirky coffee shops and the promenade by the harbour sandwiched between the old North Point Ferry Pier and the Shau Kei Wan Typhoon Shelter. Across the water, she would look at East Kowloon – the site of the old iconic airport and the Ma Wan fishing village. She had visited once; the alleys were lined with fish restaurants and two-storey boxy homes. On days off work, she explored the hiking trails up from Mount Parker Road that spiralled up the hill from the busy street they lived on. The end of Sir Cecil’s Ride, the hidden temple with iconoclastic figures and incessant incense, the pagoda at Tai Tam Gap. Its ornate ceramic roofing and intricate golden Buddha inside contrasted with the many plastic icons set on the boulder face. There were different routes and destinations from there, upward on never-ending stairs to several peaks, down a road to Stanley Market, through overgrown paths to Shek O beach.
He used to go up and over them with her. At Stanley, they might meet friends for fish and chips with a pint at the Pickled Pelican on the tiny balcony overlooking the bay. Or on a hot day, they would sit under the outdoor fans that had once been moved by hand at the Vietnamese restaurant on historic Murray House’s long terrace and pretend they lived a hundred years ago in a romanticised vision of colonial times. At Shek O, it would be a local place with red plastic chairs to order whole fish in ginger and garlic. They would savour the sweet cheeks with a second can of Tsingtao beer while the beady eyes floating on a skeleton were staring up at them. After, they would head to the beach to drink coconut water and sunbathe.
Before Quarry Bay, they had explored from a different starting point. She had quickly moved in with him from her tiny studio in Central. Living on the other side of Hong Kong Island in Pok Fu Lam, they would hike up the quick Morning Trail to The Peak and eat a big buffet brunch at Cafe Deco with huge angled glass for walls or sit at the little Pacific Coffee balcony with the same king’s view: just over the jungled tree-line of the Peak were the double flowing skylines of Hong Kong Central and Tsim Sha Tsui with the harbour in between and the layers of mountains in the distance. They would watch the tourists who had waited in a queue for hours at the bottom of the hill coming off of the red Peak Tram and running around taking pictures before going to the little mall on the hill. It was touristic but it felt local and personal if you arrived by the trails, through the morning mists. Once or twice they had hiked the two hours there from Quarry Bay as well. It became a new experience: arriving at the same viewpoint from elsewhere.
While hiking or at the destination, they used to look at the views, together. They would explore the paths the Hong Kong mountains set before them, toward spaces where buildings were not visible and cars not audible. Where they might not even see another person for an hour in the middle of the most densely populated city in the world.
⬩
But that was at the start.
In Quarry Bay, too, they had finally gotten married. It was just a civil service. They vowed to have parties in Vienna and Maine with their families, but they never happened. Each of their groups of colleagues toasted them with champagne, but separately, without even the other spouse present.
Then he quickly had a promotion, an opportunity. And with opportunity came responsibility. The hiking trips stopped. He came home later, from work or from client events. Home to his place, as he called it. He had bought it after all. His place to inhabit and manipulate. His place to control.
She thought marriage was a responsibility, too. It turned into a tokenistic expectation. They were playing conjugal charades. She realised she didn’t even know what she had wanted from it, or what she thought the value was other than something everybody wanted. Isn’t it better to be married once one is past one’s twenties?
Before they got married, they still seemed to have time for dinner. One would cook, the other would set the table. They would talk about their day, the funny moments and the challenging ones. They would talk about news or sports as well, or recall some memory from before they had come together in this world of convergences. ‘What was it like before you moved here?’ she often asked him. ‘What was growing up in Vienna like, how was it living in Shanghai, who were the people who made him who he was, the family, lovers, friends? What was it like to be Austrian?’ She wanted to know all these things. She thought she would love him more.
But after a while, he stopped reciprocating. It was a one-way conversation and after more time still, she gave up on inquiry, lacking curiosity since the answers were shallow. He only gave her the tide pool of his life while the ocean held tumultuous treasures. Maybe. She thought of herself as the Adriatic and told him so once. She loved to make metaphors of life, to make life a piece of literature, richer in discoveries. But he just brushed it away, pretending it was lost in translation. She started to live more like she was inhabiting a flat biography as the rich conversations ended.
Instead, they organised holiday plans. They discussed what they wanted the cleaner to do. They selected a film to watch.
They decided to have a baby.
⬩
When thoughts like this swirled in her mind, she knew she was being ungrateful, unrealistic. They had started - at least more clearly - just after she had realised she was pregnant. That was only a few weeks ago. She reminded herself to be thankful for her husband, her job, living in this amazing city. If she didn’t, and she was visibly upset, her husband would remind her to be grateful. It was difficult to argue with. They say gratitude makes you feel warm and purposeful everyday. She told herself this was true.
⬩
The feeling of the cold ceramic seat, now sticky with the sweat under her thighs, came back to her. She was holding her full face from temples to chin with her hands, letting her neck and skull go completely heavy. But her eyes remained open this entire time, gazing down at the tiles and at her pedicured bare feet. It was as if all these body parts had come apart from one another. She sat like a Picasso painting, dissociated and discombobulated, trying to connect in order to move and make sense of this scene.
⬩
Eventually, her body was able to perform simple functions again. It started with wiggling her toes. Then washing her hands.
She went back into the living room, just steps and moments away but a completely changed space. In her soft-footed return, he didn’t even seem to notice she was approaching. The hum of the air conditioner matched the serenity on his face.
Only moments ago, she had felt a little funny and had been lying on the sofa. She had thought it must be part of pregnancy. That’s what it was like, so many unknowns. They kept telling her it’s different for everyone, different every time. Anything strange was normal. She was told to trust her instincts. What a way to incite anxiety in anyone: just relax, feeling bad could either mean it’s dying or you’re reacting to those wonderful hormones. How many times in those first few weeks had she quieted that voice inside her head that worried? Suppressing it made her crazy; she suddenly couldn’t trust a body she had learned to understand.
He had offered to pause the movie when she said she had to pee, but she told him to continue. For this reason, he had no idea of the duration of her absence or what had transpired just a few metres away.
As she came back, the living room had morphed into a place of tragedy. The white curtains looked like an ancient Greek chorus with stagnant sadness adorning their faces in the patterns of crumples and folds. The only thing to do was to relay the information to Georg and hope for some magical insight or perspective or perhaps even consolation to realise it hadn’t happened. Maybe it could still be just part of the process she hadn’t known about.
She blurted it out in one swoop. The voice couldn’t have been her own.
The chorus held its breath, watching for his reaction.
‘There, there’ was his reply. Then he turned toward the television and hugged her a little.
She was crying, softly. At first it was drowned out by the actors on the screen, but as the reality of the moment and her grief started to set in, she was audible.
He slowly turned his head toward her again as one of the Greek chorus members might do, and put a look of pity on his face, ‘Baby…baby...there, there. We knew it was still early; that’s why I said don’t get too excited yet.’ He patted her head like a puppy’s then put an arm back around her and turned back toward the screen.
By the next commercial, the fault line between them was back in place.
Only deeper.
He picked up his phone and noticed his tweet about Chinese stocks had been retweeted twelve times, so he opened up his Twitter account just to look at the original tweet again. He scrolled through, retweeting without reading articles or opening photos. Hoping to gain hits and followers.
After a few minutes, he seemed to remember she was there next to him. He turned with that look of pity back on his brow. ‘How do you feel? Are you in pain?’
She was still crying but managed to speak, ‘I think I need to stay home tomorrow.’
‘Sure, no problem!’ He gave her another little pat on the head and she got up to go to sleep in the bedroom.
Dutifully, she said good night and added what she hoped would be taken as care, ‘Don’t stay up too late.’ Selfishly, she really knew it was in hopes he would comfort her to sleep. To rub her back or play music for her, things she kept hoping would begin first as their relationship had developed and then through the start of pregnancy. But she had no reason to think he would change. She was no longer willing to ask.
He replied: ‘Night, night!’ He would finish the game he was watching and sleep on the sofa, so he wouldn’t wake her. She knew she should feel grateful to him for letting her sleep so well. Since the wedding, he rarely entered the bedroom before finding his clothes in the morning, not wanting to disturb her. And on days she would go into the office early, he was grateful that she separated herself from him and got ready quietly in the private bedroom that had become her own. His insomnia was real. Sure, she knew this. But the biggest question was not about where he was sleeping or why he was looking at his phone. It was a far greater one about where he put information in that ocean of activity, or how it dissipated from the dried-up sandy floor.
Somehow that night her tears brought her to sleep and allowed her dreams to fill her soul with hope and with love that she couldn’t feel in the apartment while awake.
⬩
It started with a dream. That night. That was where I met you.
⬩
I could let go in that dream. I could be free, weightless. I lost my inhibitions and my fears and loved freely. I loved physically. I loved openly. I loved vividly and blindly.
⬩
It was only fragments of you; I never saw your face. I first felt the way you would lift me up. Your arms - or your breath - grabbing me firmly. As I tensed up, a whisper, indecipherably sweet. Comforting or warning.
Your voice came through, abstracted. It echoed between the walls of a cathedral. I was running around its walls, looking for an exit, until I arrived at a small alcove. Like an ancient cave or the inside of a womb.
⬩
As I travelled through the cement encased alleyways or looked out the open window of the old, slow tram, I felt you call to me. You were caught up in the wind. You moved with her and ran away again just as quickly.
⬩
I wanted to find you again. To take you out of that parallel universe and into my own reality. I wanted an authentic experience. But my search seemed futile; my life seemed cemented into what I had created, even in that dream. I had to let go of that thing I had created in order to find you. In order to love you fully.
⬩
Your body whispered to me, stay with me.
[to be continued next week - Quarry Bay (ii)
Join me Tuesday for a podcast about layering fiction with the cinematic and a Spaces & Places focus on Quarry Bay / urbanity outside city centers. Thanks for reading!
What an amazing beginning. Congratulations, Kate. Just marvellous. 💛
Kate, this is a phenomenal first chapter. It belongs in a hardcover book prominently displayed with 100 other copies stacked in the windows of all the bookstores that no longer exist. All this to say, it’s something special. I look forward to the rest.