A Hong Kong Story - Vienna (i)

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

Volksgarten, Vienna (photo by the author, 2018)

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?

Vienna

A few weeks later, it was more than just strong rains. The signs had gone up in all the apartment buildings the day before, first a T1, then quickly ⏊3, a short time at ⏏8 to show the gale force winds coming from the northwest. It then skipped the 9 to jump straight to +10, the highest level of storm. These were the big numerical signs that all Hongkongers knew: the signs of typhoons.

‘It’s a T8 now! Better stay inside, miss,’ the usually quiet doorman was alert in the pre-storm electricity. This was the colloquial language of the typhoons. It was a about local climate, but it was also about the culture of living in that climate, of finding solutions for all the challenges that came their way.

‘Thank you, Mr. Chau. I am working from home tomorrow. What about you?’

‘I am here all night! Maybe tomorrow, too. Best to be safe.’

Ivy noticed a sleeping bag in the corner and was quickly reminded of her privilege. She thought she should offer him her couch, but it seemed too intimate. Anyway, it was where Georg would probably be sleeping. Searching for something, she added, ‘Please, Mr. Chau, if you need anything or would like some more food, just knock on our door.’

‘Thank you, miss!’

She knew she wouldn’t see him.

In this city, there was nothing to worry about if you stayed inside. You raided the grocery store with everyone else the day before. You had plenty of water and cans of beans, rice, chocolate bars, and wine. But you also knew that even in a +10 there would be some restaurants and shops open. People would go out for hot buns and watch the rain pelter the cement outside. People would go on therapeutic runs without thinking of the branches that could fall. They would enjoy nature’s chaos.

The hillsides had been patched up. The mudslides of yesterday didn’t happen anymore. The earth was cemented, safe. An ugly price to pay for safety. Uninhabitable places made habitable for the seven million. Islands where tigers once roamed, cemented and solidified. The buildings met codes for typhoons and earthquakes alike. They swayed freely in the winds or unusual ground shakes. In the same storms that would murder hundreds in the Philippines, Hong Kong was safe, relaxed even. It seemed unfair. But then, maybe people on those islands wouldn't trade their safety for a skyscraper existence.

⬩

As the rain became heavier, the designation of ‘Black rain’ was also glaring at her next to the T8 when she looked at the HK Observatory website. Monster raindrops with wind, thunder, and lightening. She looked out the bedroom window and brooded. I feel empty.

She dared to ask herself why: There’s nobody to lean on. I don’t know where life is going. I miss the baby that grew inside me.

These cycles of thoughts continued through her, coming with the sheets of water against the panes. She yearned for the office to distract her mind.

Where was Georg? He had chameleoned himself in the apartment somewhere. I don’t really care where.

She let that thought sink in.

Then she tried to let it fly away. She tried to talk herself out of it.

Instead, it hooked into her heart and tightened. She had learned from one of the yogis that with tension comes release. But the tension just seemed to get sharper and stronger and move through her body, as if stiffening her blood outward toward the ends of her fingers and toes, congealing as if she had stared at Medusa. He might as well go out into the fucking storm. Where did he go when he went out anyway? She had no idea. He had stopped caring long ago and so, as a response, she had stopped. It was easier that way. In their busy lives, they had been able to ignore it.

She imagined the large windows in the other room being ripped open by the storm; the wind's arms reaching in to take him, shake him, wake him up.

But the storm had let him sleep last night. Both had woken up the same, in the same home with the same space between them.

Could she have said things to make him think she needed this much independence? It was possible that this was how he showed love.

They had been together for adventure. Originally. They wanted to move and experience, to travel and to try new foods, to go out and meet people. This had been a commonality.  

They had been good at dinner parties, the dance of conversation and culture. She wondered if that was why she had, in fact, married him.

As she finished preparing some food, achieving a small escape from misery through cooking and anticipating sitting together to eat and watch the storm and even talk a little, to try to let him in again in a different way, he was preparing a space in front of the television. She went with it, bringing the food to the coffee table, attempting to chat over the German football match.

‘Did they ask you to work from home today?’

‘Uh, yes. A little.’ His eyes didn’t leave the screen.

‘What about tomorrow?’

‘Depends on the warning level.’

Turning to him, only then did she notice the strange shape of his head. He had begun to lose his hair, which didn't really matter to her. Rather than go with the distinguished older gentleman look or shave his head, he had been experimenting with cover-up solutions. Without discussion, he had his hair styled into a spikey masterpiece that surrounded the bald patch as if it were a mushroom emerging from the grass. She didn't know what to say but felt she had to acknowledge it at some point, and at least it was something to talk about. She began, 'You've done something new…' in an optimistic tone.

'Yes, I have!' He responded, or rather interrupted, with a stylish flagrant flare as if it would be followed by the movement of his cape in a swirl as he disappeared into the night like a vampire or waved a bull on like a matador.

Whether desired or not, the effect was another meal in silence besides response to the match. It was a decent match anyway.

She wondered what he would have done if she had cut her hair short or dyed it red. Georg craftily manipulated her into the Viennese woman he wanted her to be. He was subtle and effective in changing her. He made her feel as if he were right and there was no way to argue. If she wanted to be better, she would follow his method. She would become his ideal. The very same suggestion from others in the past had repulsed her, had given her voice reason to speak up and take a stand or pack her things and go. But he was slow and decisive in his method.

There were other things she had to do the right way, too.

One day when she had arrived at home, he had held up a shrunk sweater of his. He had smiled, ‘Baby…’

She answered, ‘Yes?’

‘Who is going to wear this now? Do I need to teach you more about doing the laundry?’ He cocked his head and smiled at her, waiting for a response.

She knew enough about the laundry. She knew wool didn’t go in the machine. Why had he put it in the hamper? She had a separate bag with things she wanted to hand wash or dry clean. And even if it were fully her fault, who-the-fuck cared? It wasn’t like she would do it on purpose. She had nothing rational to say that would keep him from giving her another didactic lesson, so she gave him a silent ‘fuck you’ and a vocal ‘sorry.’

She became obsessive about doing the laundry the right way. She brought more than was necessary to the dry cleaners and looked up the best way to wash any item of his she was unsure of. He allowed her to do all the laundry so he wouldn’t ruin her dresses.

In a similar way it happened with the way she washed the dishes. Then her choices of television. What she ate for breakfast. His preferred symmetry of all items in the home. The noise she made in the shower when she got up early. She changed these things; she wanted to be a good partner and thought he would surely do the same for her. If not immediately, then in the future, sometime. Showers happened in the evening now. A square plate she had bought in Yangshuo on a trip to see the famous Chinese karst mountains was now always equidistant from each edge of a square end table, which in turn was only in parallels and perpendiculars to all other objects in the living room. She started to feel she was stupid or at least less refined or cultured.

Later, maybe soon after the wedding, he had started being nasty to her, but invisibly. She told herself it was adjusting to the promotion, that it must be stressful. Scathing criticisms of the way she spent her time or did her hair. Always stated in a calm, nurturing tone. So calm it made her question why she was angry. She thought maybe she had done something to deserve it, so she tried to distance herself, to be extra kind to him.

She wondered what was wrong with her.

Then she wondered why she had committed herself to him.

She felt stupid and alone.

⬩

She looked out the window again at the wind hurling through street signs and trees, at the odd taxi making its way gingerly through the storm, the driver’s face pressed into the windshield, trying desperately to see. Her body moved into the wind, with the swirling moisture, screaming silently with the hurling sounds, and she was carried off to a place of her memories. Wrapped in a blanket on the window stool, she could no longer feel the space where the wood met her cheeks nor the end of her spine. Her form was rounded around an idea she protected in the hollow of her concave.

It was an idea of escape.

‘I’ve got to get back to work. Let’s do delivery later. Fish ‘n chips?’

‘Sure.’

‘Ok, good luck with your work.’ He wandered off to his impromptu desk at the table, humming an operatic tune. Carefree and joyful. Ivy was reminded why she had fallen in love with him.

⬩

Her mind drifted back to other memories of Georg, of his roots. They were a Swiss family living in Vienna and she dared not ask where their money came from. They spoke a mix of French and German together in the family apartments that were stacked one on top of the other in the rich ninth district where Freud used to live. The grandfather claimed to have been a friend of Freud’s children, taking the tram with them to the river to play when it was frozen over. But Georg’s family had relocated to Vienna from Lausanne after the war, and Freud had moved to London just before it, for obvious reasons. She learned this in a tour of the small museum that was left.

They didn't talk about the war. Ivy inferred that Georg’s family had arrived in Vienna rich and strong, capitalizing on empty homes like the Freuds’. They lived in a grand apartment with two levels. The furniture had been brought over from Lausanne, eventually. It had also been refurbished but maintained an old-fashioned quality that was at once appealing in its nostalgia and repelling in its lack of comfort. The chairs’ bulbous cushions threatened to bounce you off with the wrong word. Even the rugs were from Victorian times, though the family walked over them in high heels or boots as if unaware of the effects of use and time. Sometimes she thought they wanted to use them up, erase the memories held in the wool. Or perhaps it was simply to walk over again the traumas of the past with the protection of their shoes.

One never knew where to sit or stand and somehow it was because the story of the family was preserved in all the spaces.

Eventually after the war, the family had also bought a ski home near Salzburg and a river hut in Vienna. The ski home was in a little village near Schladming. Ivy and Georg had been only in the summer to hike and see the glacier. There was a chasm between the villagers whom you could spot by their doe eyed regards and traditional dress and the Viennese vacationers, who were brazen. The house had animal skins spread over the floors and the 1980s teak furniture; a huge fireplace raged at its centre. Georg was more relaxed there; his face lit up in the mountains and he enjoyed tending the evening fire. To Ivy, it felt like a home: warm and slow. They made day-long roasts that slowly filled the cabin or sat reading with their legs stretched side by side from opposite ends of the couch, cocooned in a single wool blanket.  She had imagined them coming there with their children and that perhaps even more of Georg’s shell would be broken by their laughter and their frolicking in the woods. 

The river hut didn’t have the same appeal to Ivy. It had thin walls that were lined with bunk beds, a kitchenette and a few small partitions for privacy. There wasn’t a need for more than this because the idea was that you would spend time down by the river…just lying around or possibly swimming. Many Viennese did this. They lived in a relatively small city and in the summer months, rather than heading to the countryside or the seaside, moved riverside within the city to a place only twenty minutes at the most from their actual home. She often wondered if they were the most content people in the world or the most fearful.

⬩

High society Vienna was filled with boredom and rules. At least that’s how Ivy interpreted it. It was filled with getting ready for the next ball or selecting one of three or four boring meals. It was entrenched with a lack of smiling, a lack of many friendships. She always felt a chill when people exiting a room filled with strangers (or friends) stated the words Auf Wiedersehen crisply in the proper tone. In a learned chorus, everyone in the room would respond the same. Unlike the Parisian relaxed and customary au revoir, this one felt forced and militant. They didn't seem alive somehow; their shells repeating phrases robotically. A lack of rebellion or warmth present in every word.

But maybe, she told herself, I just don’t understand.

As if these visits were all a performance, she remembered the constant dramatic irony. From her early career in Paris, she spoke French quite well. That person she had been seemed a long time ago, but it was reactivated when she spoke in the language. She always knew what Georg’s family was saying in French and had no idea why they thought otherwise, since they had long conversations together. True, she didn’t know some of the Swiss idioms or particular vocabulary or the German they would throw in now and then, but she was used to that with her Irish grandparents. On one particularly brutal occasion, Georg had been discussing their future children with his sister. They were seated together on the red velvet settee, surrounded by countless trinkets handed down from ancestors or bought at the antiques shops. It looked as if any quick movements would cause something to break and Ivy had learned to move slowly and deliberately through the family apartment.

‘I think the children should be brought up bilingual,’ Georg was telling his sister.

‘Yes, but you must make sure she only speaks English with them!’ She seemed to forget that Ivy could understand the French she was speaking. Or maybe she didn’t care.

Ivy probably would have spoken mainly English with the child. But it wasn’t the first time the sister had talked about Ivy as if she weren’t even there.

‘Anyway, you guys haven’t even had kids yet.’ Then she turned to Ivy in English, ‘Don’t you want to have children? It’s getting late for you.’

Ivy sat dumb, horrified. Georg didn’t save her.

The sister’s voice cut in again with what Ivy could only hope was poor English translation, ‘Don’t you know what your period is for?’

Georg laughed while Ivy sat dumb in shock. They were all called into the dining room for supper.

On other occasions she was told by his aunt that her culture didn't know how to eat the right things or do things correctly. She said these things with a smile as if Ivy had seen the light by marrying Georg. She was having her cultural education in Vienna -- lucky girl! She did things wrong from time to time, not calculating tip immediately with the bill in a restaurant or eating a semmel on the street or pronouncing something awkwardly. She was always told exactly what she was doing wrong. ‘They are being helpful,’ Georg said. She stayed quiet and put her sunglasses on to hide her tears.

It all wouldn’t have seemed too bad if Georg had understood, had been stronger. Sure, he listened to her pain, and often understood, but simply gave her a hug and fought his own personal battles with his family, never publicly supporting her over them.

Between the mixture of French and German and the strange formalities between people, she felt like she was in the middle of War and Peace. This was a kind of high society built on shame and trauma, the kind Freud would have loved to analyse. The long and winding narrative shifted between the spaces of the apartment often unbeknownst to her. Wallpaper adorned with flowered vases and hunting scenes crinkled or smoothed with the languages spoken between walls. It absorbed the personas of the family home and haunted others who came to inhabit the rooms.

⬩

It often snowed when they were in Vienna but not enough to stick, the sky reserving the large masses of snow for the mountains where she yearned to be. Away. In the city, it mixed with the harsh pebble-sized salt to make it safe, make it practical. There was rarely ever enough to sled or to Nordic ski. And every time, the family members complained of it as a nuisance while she looked longingly out the window at its beauty, seeking a shared perspective.

⬩

She remembered one morning a few days after a Christmas at the family apartment. She had woken up for an early jog, waiting in bed until just after dawn so the parks would be open. Normally, she would go from the ninth district, Alsergrund, down to the canal and turn left or right alongside it, depending on her mood or the way the sun was shining. But this time she went the other direction around the ring road, for the sole reason of change.

She put an underground hip-hop play list on to counteract the austerity of the city. The tree-lined path alongside the wide street was easy to follow mindlessly, as if she could have been anywhere. But the grandiose nature of the buildings and pathway for the traffic to follow through spaces of historical significance reminded her of where she was. Or maybe what she was running from.

She moved around the road for about a kilometre until reaching Volksgarten. It was a park known for its many roses of all colours and some Greek-style monuments contained within, like Parc Monceau in the eighth arrondisement of Paris. Within the gates, one could see some of the beautiful Viennese government buildings but filtered, merely beautiful rooftops rather than institutions.

As she entered the park, alone, save a few early walkers and gardeners, she was struck by the winter fate of the rose bushes. Someone had covered their heads with burlap sacks. They were standing victims of a crime, lined up beside the winding paths. She could still see the shapes of their unique branches being crushed by the covering. Underneath, she imagined they were afraid, their colours were blocked or gone. And on the main stalk, each bush held a sign of a person’s name or a quote. Reminders of the dead. She wondered who these dead were and if the shapes of their bodies would have matched the outlines of the burlap sacks.

In the near distance, just over the gates and treelines, she could see the Hofsburg Palace. The prominent balcony protruded from the slightly arched facade in grandness. It was where Hitler had loved to give speeches, she remembered from the tour. His threat had been erased but his ghost lingered. She tried to focus on the space and feelings immediately around her instead.

As she weaved in and out of narrow pathways and made different types of circles through the park, she was faced with more and more of the burlap sacks. The trees surrounding her had also been cut back to the largest branches. A haircut that seemed more like an amputation.

Sleeping / hibernating / healing — maybe we all need some time to retreat. After all, this was done with purpose. Someone was taking care of the plants.

Maybe that is what happens when people leave their natural environment. Someone puts a bag over their heads to help them…but they can’t see. We are blind as we leave our nests, but that is also how we grow. And maybe we all need some time in the winter or the winter of our lives to retreat like this and get ready to show our full colors. She remembered growing up in the beautiful and haunting autumn of the Maine woods and its harsh winters, both still filled with the promise of life in its ubiquitous evergreens.

The beats of The Grouch’s “Breath” came through her ears, and she felt the cold air surrounding her enter her lungs and heat up in exhale. Loving her body from within. Waking her up.

And she ran on. Alone and alive. Happy to be free.

That was a few years ago. When had she felt that way recently?

---

[to be continued next week - Vienna (ii)]

Join me Tuesday for a podcast about layering fiction with pathetic fallacy and a Spaces & Places focus on reclaimed land. Thanks for reading!