A Hong Kong Story - Quarry Bay (ii)

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

Hong Kong taxi, Photo by Callous Gee 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?

Quarry Bay (continued)

She slept deeply in the fatigue of her suffering. Then she woke up and put on comfortable yoga clothes. She had thought many times in the last few months, ‘How many times can I wear my favourite Lulu top before my life is taken over by motherhood? Or before I die?’ For some reason mortality, her own specifically, was mixed up with the whole notion of getting pregnant. It proved some passing of time that was at once beautiful and shocking. Of the body’s changes with that time. If she were to be a mother, would she give up parts of her life she was meant to have? Could she endanger herself even through the physical process? Was this selflessness really the right thing to do in a world that seemed to be getting darker…and hotter every year?

Maybe it was just pride or narcissism. Maybe it was fear. Fear of losing herself. Fear of dying in childbirth. It had seemed inconceivable that the baby, instead, could perish.

Living in mourning of something that was not, it felt selfish. ‘Is the new mourning of the baby for the baby or for myself?’ She wondered why she even wanted one in the first place. She felt passive to the decision though she knew it had been her own.

But the grief was fresh. Her hormones were speaking through her. Like chemical nodes. Were they tricking her or were they finding the truth produced inside her womb that would speak through her mind? Where was the truth? Where was the right answer in all of this?

There wasn’t one. There were only questions. Questions in place of conclusions, which she loved as a way to write of philosophy, like Jacques Derrida, but these questions as conclusion of her existence and state of being would haunt her. She was sure at that moment she was in for an age of suffering, and she hoped it could move through her to find the other side. Was there a reachable horizon to the suffering? The first step, she knew, was to go to the doctor to deal with the harsh scientific reality of what had been and what was to come. So she moved out of the bedroom and toward the coffee machine.

He was there, eating some eggs and scrolling through Twitter or emails. He looked up and smiled, said good morning (jovially), and went back to what he was doing.

⬩

She took the train to Central then went up the outdoor escalator to her doctor in Mid-Levels. The human-sized conveyer belt placed her in a long, passive line and let her gaze drift to the banks, bars, and nail salons that she slowly moved by. Others were dressed in business suits, hoping to reach a chilled interior soon. Filipino maids were running errands in floral shorts. Others wore uniforms for shops or delivery. The sun was magnified through the plastic roof over the escalator, but it somehow seemed better not to walk up the hill. Either way, she would be slightly sweaty (drenched if it were still summer) and have to stand all limbs spread in the waiting room before sitting down. This journey felt particularly uncomfortable with a big blood-soaked pad between her legs. She hadn’t used a pad in decades and was deathly afraid of a mishap somewhere so public. It seemed that, in secret, the grief would dissipate quickly. This was an error, but perhaps part of the subconscious element was to hold on to the promise of a life. Every bead of sweat that trickled down her legs she was sure was blood. But when she checked at the doctor’s bathroom, she found that it had all been in her head. That the tragedy was still a private affair.

⬩

The doctor was a local woman who loved Italian opera and drifted in and out of corners and curtains of the examining room as if they were parts of a stage. She had asked Ivy where her partner was today, then gave her a look of pity when she naively revealed he was at work. A kinder one than his but it was thorough and deep. Ivy wondered what she had done to herself to deserve all this pity. Was it fate or was it her fault? How had she grown so weak?

Those cold instruments, then the jelly and the ultrasound. She felt suddenly like an animal, then instead human but psychotic. It was as if none of this had ever happened, but she felt pain for an absent memory. She needed someone to share this pain with her. To unburden her.

She hadn’t called any friends or even her mom. Only Julie knew she was trying to become pregnant. With Georg's lack of response, she was ashamed, confused. She kept the information secret. And she realised that she wasn’t even ready to tell Julie about this tragedy. The father had never acknowledged there was hope of a child. How could they mourn?

‘Luckily there is nothing else stuck in there, no complications. You can just let this happen naturally,’ the doctor paused, looking for the right words, ‘Don’t worry, this is normal. Maybe wait a few months before you try again though for your safety. Usually people need a little time to feel ready.’ She gave a sweet charitable smile, hoping this would sooth her patient.

But Ivy couldn’t even a fathom a next time at this point. And she certainly didn’t feel normal. Still, she remembered to show gratitude, ‘Thank you for your help, Doctor Yau.’

She journeyed home with thick pads between her legs, hiding her sobs behind sunglasses. She couldn’t face the curious eyes on public transportation nor the long walk, so she hailed a taxi. 

‘Quarry Bay, please. I’ll show you when we get to King’s Road. Mm goy.’ 

‘Ok, ok. Thank you, miss.’

They started a few moments in silence. She glanced at all the phones stuck onto various parts of the front of the cab.  Some were lit up, others beeping or humming. The driver answered one in Cantonese with a few nonchalant replies then ignored the rest.

‘Hey, lady,’ he said it affectionately, even softly, ‘Do you have kids?’

What a question for the moment. Of course, he would have no way of knowing, so she tried to be polite, ‘No. Do you?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got two. See?’ He pulled down the sun visor and pointed to a few photos.

They were little. ‘Cute.’ She took out her phone to try to stop the conversation.

He persevered: ‘What do you think about this Mandarin thing in schools?’

‘Oh right. I heard about that.’ She didn’t want to say more in case they disagreed. She just wanted an easy ride.

‘Yeah, I don’t like it. I moved here from Guangzhou so my kids could learn English. And my wife and I speak Cantonese. What a mess.’

‘Yeah, do you think it will really happen?’

‘I don’t think my kids’ teachers even speak Mandarin! Not well at least. Well, that’s what they told us. What are those poor teachers going to do? Such a mess.’

She decided to engage but change the direction slightly. ‘Why do you want them to learn English?’

‘Oh, come on! English is money!’ He chuckled.

‘Some people think Mandarin is money.’

‘You speak Mandarin, lady?’

‘No,’ and then to ward off her shame, ‘Only English and French. A little German. A very, very little Cantonese.’

‘You know it’s just like what the French did, right? 500 years ago, something like that, somebody decided Parisian French was the right one.’

‘True. Well English is a colonial language, no? Especially here?’

‘No way, nobody owns English anymore.  I mean, history, yeah, agree. But isn’t it everybody’s language now? Do I sound British?’

He had a point. But it was time to go. ‘Turn right here, please.  You can let me off at the corner.’

‘Sure, sure.’

‘Thank you.’ She paid him with a tip.

‘Mm goy. Hey, sorry for my English!’ he laughed again.

‘No way, your English is great! Sorry for my Cantonese,’ then she added, reflectively, ‘I really hope your children get to study what they want. Good luck.’

⬩

There was a rotation of doormen at Royal Terrace Apartments who mainly watched videos on their phones or napped during their shifts. But as she entered with trepidation at encountering anyone else to make her reality feel true, she realised it was unfortunately the one doorman who sometimes spoke who would greet her today.

Today, he didn’t make a sound. He just stared at her, possibly glaring. He made her feel a stranger entering a foreign land.

Hong Kong doormen are gatekeepers of the castles they protect, but the difference to medieval times is that they don’t live within the castle walls; instead their abodes are sometimes far far away in public housing estates or distant villages in the New Territories. They leave an hour and a half before their shifts to take combinations of buses and trains to make it on time. While working, they eat their delivered meals out of styrofoam containers with hot local food: curry fishballs or siu mai or stinky tofu.

This was the one doorman at Royal Terrace who did engage somewhat with the dwellers of his castle. He had teeth the colour of the oolong tea he drank from a large thermos all day long. His standard issue uniform hung and crumpled off of his skeletal figure. He muttered unintelligible things as she went by which she imagined he meant to be helpful. It didn’t quite sound like English nor Cantonese and definitely not Putonghua. It was his own language. She thought of the Porter in Macbeth who strayed from the play’s iambic pentameter and delivered the audience a melange of crude jokes and sharp but muddled wisdom. Ivy wondered if this nameless doorman also held this covert clairvoyance.

Later she would wonder if he, too, were a gatekeeper to hell. This hades, like Macbeth’s, was one of the mind, of perspective and expectation, of desire and trust. She felt that if she stayed, she would turn evil and it would be nobody’s fault but her own.

The lyrics from Beck flowed through her ears, ‘…It’s time to move…you’re almost dying…Nobody’s fault but my own…the moon is a counterfeit…’

⬩

When she arrived inside her apartment after the sticky claustrophobia-inducing elevator, she first washed her hands. Like Lady Macbeth, she wanted to cleanse herself from blood and her mistakes. She blasted the AC so she could curl up in a large blanket on the couch. The TV was on but she wasn’t watching it. She got up to hang on the window ledge that overlooked the busy streets. Invisibly, she counted red taxis or witnessed silent pedestrian stories. Buses and people went by over cement and brick.

Disorientation suddenly struck her, uncannily in her home. Turning back to the living room furniture, different shades of brown, and the small devices — a television, several lamps, her laptop by the door — the familiar items became foreign. She didn’t move to the grounded safety of the couch. It seemed too difficult to navigate the negative space, now strange and much larger than before. The blocked rectangle carvings of IKEA furniture formed a beige and white maze with dangerous crevasses between them, threatening to swallow her up. The threshold that had once been an entry to home motioned to her, but she could not make it across the room and, anyway, she did not know where else to go.

She was wondering why this had happened. She was wondering what to tell her boss at work. She was wondering if she could ever have children. She was wondering if she even wanted them anymore.

She wasn’t thinking of Georg at all.

He came home eventually. He fed her and he watched the TV from the other end of the couch, looking at her occasionally with those pitiful eyes. The food was hearty. She knew it was given out of love. It began to fill her emptiness but made the emptiness of their communication even more tangible. He only asked if she were in pain. He meant physical pain of course, and she said she was fine. She took more ibuprofen and closed her eyes to the disappointments in her head.

Why wasn’t this his pain, too? Why couldn’t he try to be a part of it? He didn’t seem to realise that he had just lost a child. Or if he had, he must have only felt relief.

He went to sleep at the normal time and in the bed for a change. She wasn’t ready to be with him, close to him, so she stayed on the couch and mourned through the night. The cathartic cramps that came and went reminded her of the loss.

⬩

A week at home, more or less like this, went by. Though determined not to ask, she kept thinking about why Georg hadn’t offered to come with her to the doctor. A week of reflection and bleeding. Purging. Her body still felt pregnant and swollen. She had thought five days off work was crazy; he had dismissed it as such. But she was in pain, the physical reflecting the mental. A reciprocal arrangement of suffering in isolation.

⬩

A voice inside her whispered: maybe things happen for a reason. People said that a lot. But she knew from experience it wasn’t quite like that. She didn’t believe in religious bullshit. Things happened; you had to make them part of your story.

She meditated on that thought, hoping for sleep again. Hoping for the dream to return to her. Hoping to slip into that dreamworld forever. The place where love enveloped her, where she was free.

---

[to be continued next week]

Join me Tuesday for a podcast about layering fiction with multilingualism and a Spaces & Places focus on apartment buildings. Thanks for reading!