A Hong Kong Story - Sheung Wan (ii)

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

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong (Photo by N C 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?

Sheung Wan

(continued from last week)

She began going to yoga classes whenever she could. To heal. To find answers. It was something to do when she wasn’t at work or out drinking.

She learned different things from different teachers. One taught her how to breathe, about pranayama, another about loving herself, another about twisting, another about letting go, another strength, another freedom, another joy…deepening, testing, challenging, not challenging.

Inversions welcomingly disoriented her soul. They gave her peace and strength. She would have stayed upside-down for hours if her head would not explode.

They learned about om. They learned that it is three sounds - ah - ou - mm - then silence, which is just as important. It connects us to the universe, our inner self, God, gods. In fact, these are all the same thing. They practice dying. They practice dying every time they take savasana at the end of the practice.

Their minds stay focused and free. They let go, wilfully. It is hard to let go.

⬩

On one such day, Joy — ironically, seemingly joyless, though it was just a tough facade — walked into the room after they had already set up their mats. She floated in with angel wings and skeleton yoga pants, lighting candles, straight faced and silent.

Ivy liked her because she was not what you expect.  She called people out when they did the wrong thing: ‘Why are you on that leg? The rest of us are not! Pay attention!’ Or when someone felt weak: ‘We’re not done yet! Get back up in that plank.’ She wanted her class to focus, to be strong. She pushed them deeper. Ivy was constantly laughing inside: these classes seemed to manifest Absurdism.

In the middle of class that day, the students was given a new version of Joy. She apologised and said she had to check on her puppy. Reaching into a ventilated gym bag just next to her mat, she pulled out a brown, wrinkly apple-sized dog. Her face changed; her character removed. Joy’s spine moved fluidly as she brought him out in her palm to the centre of the class.

‘You guys, I found him in the park. Can you believe it? The vet said he’s just a few days old.’

Everyone abandoned their mats and moved inward like a group dance.

Too young to be passed around, they gazed in awe and delight at something so vulnerable and innocent.

Ivy, too, was enamoured. She felt at once two urges: to take care of such a lovely creature and to be this looked-after thing. Though she rarely spoke in class, she asked, ‘Will you keep him?’

Joy’s smile was immense. ‘Yes! Oh my god, I’ve never taken care of something though,’ she laughed, ‘Even my plants die.’

Ivy saw real fear. That fear that she felt when she had first been pregnant, to take the responsibility for life. ‘Have you given him a name?’

‘Qush. Leela told me it’s a name that means strong in Hindi.’

They all ogled a few moments longer, until Joy cut in again: ‘Ok! Back to your mats, everyone!’

They moved through their vinyasas rhythmically, repetitively. Her fierce expression had returned. Her movements around their mats, once threatening, then felt compassionate.

And at the end, with their own absurd emotions, they all circled around the puppy again, silently.

‘Thank you, everyone. I feel so much more capable to take care of Qush after this class. Have a wonderful day.’

The message was always (truly) one of joy, and of love. She taught them to find the strength within that they didn’t know they had.

⬩

These sequences went on through autumn. Ivy attempted to purge the pain and replaced the void with love.

One day, during more pouring rain, her mother called her. It was finally the right moment to share her burden.

‘I knew something was wrong. Oh, I’m so sorry, sweetie. I know how much you and Georg want a baby.’ Had she told her mom this was true?

‘Thanks, mom. I just don’t know what this means. I feel like I’ve messed up.’

‘Ivy, no! Don’t say that. Lots of women have miscarriages. I had one between you and your brother. It doesn’t make it easier, but it happens because there was something wrong with the baby, not you.’

Ivy wasn’t sure if this was medical science but thanked her mother anyway for trying to absolve her from guilt and shame.

‘I just don’t know…what’s going to happen next.’

‘We never know, honey, we never know what’s going to happen. But we all love you very much, and Georg loves you. Let him take care of you a while.’

‘Ok, thanks Mom. I love you,’ was all she said. Because the strangeness she found in Georg felt like her fault as well.

We are all, always will be, children if we allow it. Ivy’s mother hadn’t known the answers this time. She hadn’t really known all the problems either. But Ivy let herself cry like a child, feeling the weight of the world’s strangeness consume her.

⬩

Almost compulsively, she continued to go to yoga classes largely due to the motivation of stopping her brain from thinking. It was something to do. She would leave feeling lighter, alone but one with the world. It began to feel like a drug. The surrounding city spoke to her through her headphones. She would zone out the entire way back, only observing the colours and movement before her. Flashes of green and orange T-shirts, dark suits, polka dot shopping carts, and little brown dogs continued at varying predictable paces.

Some days, the walking paths were a sea of sharp, clustered umbrellas, each fighting for the space to exist. Other days, threatening obstructions would jump into her path, breaking the consistent and predictable flow of human foot traffic. An asynchronous workman, a woman pulling heaps of newspapers, even a missing brick…colour blocks of yellow and grey as well as negative space…expected patterns were broken in her brain.

⬩

Sometimes, instead, she would take the Star Ferry back and forth between TST and Central to feel the tumultuous harbour waters. The malleable surface gave her solace but the cement on the other side, the cars, the dense sidewalks -- these then hit her more strongly, frighteningly.

She wondered what she was doing there.

⬩

The city is mad. Your body becomes a part of her.

⬩

The hidden spots were like those in a body. Second floor private kitchens with strange ceilings and long wooden tables are like the belly button your new lover discovers again. An ancient cart on the steep end of Graham Street will mend your umbrella; the undulations near your collarbone can mend a relationship if someone takes the time to touch them.

⬩

Whenever she got home, tired, she would go straight into the tiny kitchen, close the heavy fire door, turn on some music and start cooking. She had recently resumed cooking meals Georg wouldn’t eat. He was rarely back in time anyway. She chopped peppers, carrots, and onions, stir fried mushrooms and mini Thai eggplants; she opened coconut milk and curry paste, boiled water for the rice noodles. Her only focus was the minor movements of her hands and torso and the senses she was taking in.

She would open a glass of wine while it was all gelling together and sit up on the counter space next to the stove, just big enough for her bum. This way, she was out of view from the kitchen door window but could see out the other side to the street. No one’s eyes were on her. She would drink the wine quickly at first until she felt a buzz and then relax, topping off her glass. She felt calm, even happy, there in her little oasis of sensory delights and views of passer-by with their children or their grocery carts, all unique and story-laden.  All safely far away.

But one day she realised that the feeling was created from cutting herself off in that tiny kitchen. Dreading the thought of her husband entering the space to break the plane of calm but also dreading the thought that he wouldn’t dare cross the plane because he had little interest in asking how her day was or talking about plans for the weekend, she suddenly felt very depressed about it all.

She topped off her glass again and stared out the street window. People looked weary and burdened. But every now and then she spotted laughter: children telling dramatic stories about field trips, friends rolling their eyes together, lovers teasing each other with glimmers in their eyes.

It was a muggy day in late October. She turned off the AC and opened the window to hear these people, to capture their secrets. Leaning out the window from the third floor, not many people saw her. She wasn't like that guy in Rear Window looking sneakily into others’ lives. No, she wanted to be invisible as she watched, but she did not hide in the shadows. If they wanted to look, they could find her. She thought of herself as the observer of beautiful things. A part of the painting, like a portraitist who includes themselves in the corner.

She began to sweat softly and the playlist she had on changed to something pensive and melancholic by Bon Iver. It made her feel like she was in a film and this soundtrack was a bridge between her experiences. She let herself slide down to the floor, hoping to exit the scene and be free from it, to melt into a puddle that would evaporate into the universe. But as she sat crouched, still sipping the wine, the tears came. Looking at the fake tiles absently, she cried, not even knowing what she was thinking about.

She looked blankly at the beige floor as her body became a hollow shell.

Suddenly a buzzing sound from above snapped her out of it and brought her soul back to Earth. A cockroach had flown through the window. In disgust, her arm moved swiftly, intuitively. She snatched up a spatula and smashed it to death. The life juices flowing out in gross, grey globs. She scooped it up and threw it away.

Closing the window again, she finished the stir fry and checked the rice cooker before opening the heavy fire door to join Georg in front of the TV before bed. He had been out there all along, eating a chicken from the rotisserie.

⬩

Her past, present, and future began to mix in the many poses of her existence. That was when clarity snuck through. But she didn’t know what to call it yet. She didn’t have a name nor the answer. Reality felt painful but necessary. She could see herself -- it would lead her to the future.

⬩

I am in savasana. Corpse pose. I am trying to empty my mind. I think I do; I can barely feel my body’s presence on the mat, the floor. I have no weight and am off in a metaphysical world. The sweat has evaporated. My teacher lights incense then comes around to rub each shoulder in the classroom with a kind of minty oil that feels like bliss. Her arrival surprises me out of the emptiness and you simultaneously appear as if coming through my nostrils with that essence. Straight through my eyelids and to my rested mind. You are holding me and counting my freckles. You are moving your fingers across my arm hair, not touching my skin. You are watching my closed eyelids in love and in protection. 

Waking up in the middle of the night, I have the same experience. The dream blends with my conscious thoughts. Have I created you at this moment or have you entered my mind unbidden? You speak with your eyes and fingertips only. They manifest as light and electric shocks.

When someone is far away, is it the same as death? When someone is imagined, is it something to come or a conglomeration of what has been? Who are you?

The elusiveness overtakes your dreamy presence.

And then: I feel your absence. There is a pain in my abdomen. Blood is running down my legs. Haemorrhaging, I could drain the life force this way. Nobody knows. This secret life is escaping me, leaving the world, and I shrink with it. Shrivelling and shrivelling until I can no longer lie flat and twist into a ball, trying to grab the blood and push it back inside me to stay alive.

Then I stop fighting. I let the emptiness wash through me. I am weightless again, no longer aware of the feel of the sheets and the duvet.

I get up to crack the window and moonlight shines in. Sweat, not blood, covers me. But a mark of you remains on the pillow next to mine. I take it and hold on and let it absorb the rest of my sweat. I hold it as I fall asleep again trying to allow those visions to take control of my mind and let me pretend I’m in your presence once again.

I need your guidance. I need to follow you.

---

[to be continued next week with Vienna]

Join me Tuesday for a podcast about layering fiction with ideas about the Pharmakon in literature and a Spaces & Places focus on yoga studios. Thanks for reading!