Kung hei fat choi!

Happy year of the dragon! An excerpt from my novel and an opportunity to read the whole book

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?

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Dear Readers,

Kung hei fat choi! Happy Chinese new year! It’s the year of the dragon, viewed as the most powerful of the Chinese zodiac signs.

Last week, I shared with you the changes for The Matterhorn in the year of the dragon. I’ve decided to cut the serialization of A Hong Kong Story short because, well, it is a very long novel. The other reason is that I am on to other projects and I think part of the wonderful aspect of serialization is the possibility to respond to feedback as I continue to write. Thank you for all the feedback thus far! Instead, I am sharing the opportunity to read the entire book as e-book or paperback.

I’m sharing one last chapter section with you today to coincide with Chinese New Year. Happy year of the dragon! This comes from the chapter called Wan Chai in which Ivy is set up in her own flat and considering how to start taking control of her life again.

Later on: there’s a new lover to come, questions about Ivy’s future juxtaposed with Hong Kong’s, and scenes on other Hong Kong islands and in the New Territories. Oh, and Ivy starts to surf.

Paid / Comped subscribers have received an email with a free e-book of the novel. Anyone else may purchase it below. The e-book is also available at places like Barnes & Noble and Amazon, but I decided to publish through Lulu instead of Amazon and therefore the paperback edition is only on the Lulu site. This was less cost-effective and with less reach, but I am trying to do my little part against Amazon.

If you choose to upgrade to paid at any time, you will also receive this e-book and, eventually, my next one. Patrons can access the e-book here.

I look forward to sharing the next phase of the project with you. I’ve already had an idea about the podcast to go along with my new serialization and upcoming Tuesday posts very soon. In the meantime, thanks for listening to and reading this ten-part series.

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Photo by Sergio Capuzzimati on Unsplash

From “Wan Chai” in A Hong Kong Story:

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It was quickly Chinese New Year. Just like last year, Ivy didn’t receive li xi, because she was married and only a few people knew she was getting a divorce. And even then, she didn’t know the rules about divorcees. Would they get money in red pockets as well? She didn’t want the money; it would be tokenistic anyway. But she craved some acknowledgment that she needed caring, needed looking out for.

Bali had been like an imaginative getaway, a delay of the reality of her life in Hong Kong now. The escape had been like a cliché after all and didn’t seem worth it anymore. Coming back, she had her own space to settle into, but she knew that she would also have to deal with it all. There was still the return to those same things that reminded her of the cycle of her life. The repetition of the alarm clock and the changing of sheets. The similar invitations to brunches and birthday drinks. The coming and going of important dates or holidays.

Chinese New Year is normally in February, but this year it fell in January. Time seemed to be swallowed up in the vortex she had created.

She used the absence of li xi as a reminder to call her parents. She hadn’t told them yet. Hadn’t told them anything. And less than deciding that they deserved to know, she felt she wanted their care, their protection. Or at least some kind of validation. It made her feel guilty before the call. Now doubly over: first for selfishly seeking divorce and second for burdening them with it. They would have to bear an emotional load when they explained it to their friends. The kind of Maine people who had generously sent gifts to Ivy even after so many years without seeing her.

She had been afraid, but then when thinking of those memories in Vienna, she realised how strange his family was and remembered what the lawyer had said about Georg. She decided to focus on these things as explanation to obtain her mother’s understanding.

The call lasted just twenty-five minutes.

In the end, there was no judgment and no pity. Those two things she had feared. Instead there was mutual sadness.

But it still made her wonder how she could have been so stupid in the first place. As the words came out of her mouth in a long recount, she wondered: how could I not have seen it long before?

⬩

Waking up in that bed that morning, she felt like she was on that beach in Bali with the warm sun shining on her between the curtains. Naked, she peeled the covers off one side to expose her skin to the light. She opened and closed her eyes a few times, not knowing if the dream about running through the New England woods of her youth or the present morning that would have seemed so foreign to her in the past were the reality. She flashed between these parallel universes like television stations flicked up and down, but with a soft transition, that of her knowing eyelid whose veins were moving blood that hadn’t been created when she was with her ex. It was new blood to replace all she lost in the miscarriage and those periods after that seems to purify her from the experience.

Now this blood was completely her own. It had nothing to do with Georg’s gene code that once lived inside her. She felt sure he was now fully expelled and hoped to bottle up his memory as a reminder only. She felt as if she had always unknowingly been distant from him; that it made it easier to turn the page. It could be only a moment of pain in the trajectory of life.

⬩

Maybe he had seen it all completely differently. Maybe he thought she was unfair, had broken a promise. Maybe he thought she was selfish. She started to question if she was. She started to question her reaction to setback. Loads of women have miscarriages. So why should hers be a big deal? He slept in the other room so she could sleep. This was caring. He had helped her to be more sophisticated.

Wasn’t it? This is what he told her.

But she never felt like she could share these details with her friends for fear of embarrassment. That told her something, too.

In her home now, she felt so happy to be alone. So free in her every action. The house she kept, her food, her clothes. The way she spent her time. Maybe she just needed a break from all people for a while, not only Georg.

She would often go to the corner cafe to write. She rewrote her existence in fiction. She made her life a metaphor and saw metaphor in her life.

⬩

Sleep came, at times, but was hazed by thoughts that kept her from moving deeply into it. Creative energy bristled out from her hair to the pillow as she peered out the window to the quiet streets.

Was the happiness of solitude real or was it a mask?

⬩

And then as light was approaching again, she went for a walk in the hills behind her new home.

She felt suddenly like her life was more complex than the storylines she was fiddling with. Perhaps the Kafkaesque adjective applied after all. Did that mean she was living to the utmost or lost in some strange land of stories, merging like messy swirls that break each other in the ocean, until a single whirlpool swallows them up? But maybe this was living.

⬩

Some days she felt like getting up, some day she had to for work, and other days she just stayed in her pyjamas, working from home whenever possible. One such day she stayed in bed for the entirety, listening to music and reading bits and bobs. She didn’t tell anyone, afraid they would think she was depressed, but she knew she wasn’t.

One day at around seven, she got out of the house to get some takeaway food and wine at the grocery store. As she waited for the pad Thai to finish sizzling on the wok and then be wrapped up, she propped her chin up on her hand and must have been staring into space. The old Thai man came around the counter and placed a tea in front of her with a little smile. He lightly touched the top of her hand, a kind of humanity often left forgotten in the busy city.

⬩

On the way back into her flat, Mr. Mak had taken over for the night shift. ‘Kung hei fat choi, Miss Ivy!’ It was now the main evening of the New Year’s celebration. The Cantonese phrase that meant she should get rich – make big money – was all around her but hadn’t been uttered to her directly in such a heartfelt way.

‘Kung hei fat choi, Mr. Mak!’ She had already given the doormen their red pockets of money. ‘Did you celebrate with your family today?’

‘Yes, yes, thank you,’ he smiled that warm, wrinkly smile she loved. ‘And what about you? How is your family?’

‘They are fine, thank you.’ Although it wasn’t her tradition, she quickly felt the absence of family celebrating around her.

‘Ok, you enjoy your food. Take care and let me know if you need anything.’ Since her hands were full, he went over to press the button for the elevator. He stayed until she was in and waved good night.

The pad Thai was still hot. She could smell it through the styrofoam and the plastic bag. She took out a big white bowl to dump it in and broke apart the disposable chopsticks, scrapping the ends together in the way people sharpen knives to get rid of the splinters. She squeezed the lime and scattered the peanuts. A few hefty bites held her over before tending to the wine bottle that needed opening.

But then she realised there wasn’t any. She had only had a screw tops since moving in. And she was already in comfortable clothes and it was really out of the question to go back out tonight, but it was also out of the question not to drink that wine.

There must be a way, she thought. The thought of asking neighbours never entered her head. She had convinced herself she was in some kind of solitary sanctuary. With Google to the rescue, she looked up how to open wine without an opener, wondering why she hadn’t just bought a screw top again. Although she knew the answer was that she had wanted a good bottle, a decent bottle of Bordeaux. The response from Google was to stab the cork with a knife and pull it out. Stab it at an angle and then it would be like an old school opener anyway. Another site said a fork, apparently less dangerous. Ok, she thought, I got this.  She decided to start with the fork.

On first try, she didn’t put enough effort behind it and it barely dented the cork. The next try, she took a knife instead and really went for it. The immediacy of the response was not what she expected. Suddenly red liquid was flying all over the kitchen. For a flash, she thought she must have sliced her hand open. But no, the cork had pushed into the bottle and the entire tiny fresh white space was now spattered in red. Even the ceiling had little droplets of wine. Her face for a moment was like a baby after a bad fall; the baby would look up at its mother to question if he should cry or laugh. Even though she had no one to look to, somehow, she chose the better path. Laughter. Her joy filled the tiny kitchen and perhaps leaked out the cracked window as well.

She allowed herself to gently collapse to the floor and looked into the bottle to see that about half of it still remained, plenty of salvageable sustenance for the evening. Putting it aside for a moment, she took off her wine spattered sweatpants and T-shirt and wiped down the cabinets with them before throwing them into the trash. She got on a chair to wipe the ceiling as well.

She took her bowl of noodles, now cold, with a glass of the wine into her other room and sat to eat and to drink with nothing but her own thoughts for entertainment.

Giggling just a little at her ridiculous solution, she wolfed down the meal and poured the rest of the wine into her glass.

But before drinking it, she decided to throw on a cap to be incognito and do a little lap in her new neighbourhood at night.

She had always liked walking at night. Especially in the sultry warmth. Her best journalism came to her that way and her best thoughts about life as well. But this time, Ivy was aware of the weight of the world. She wanted it to lift and drift away…

⬩

You speak to me then, through the music in my ears or the insects in the trees. I haven’t conjured you this time; you arrive when there is space for you. I walk around and up Robinson Road to Pokfulam Road where the wind reaches me and I see the harbour between skyscrapers and root-lined walls. The banyan trees occupy this walk with me.

In a place so busy, I crave the emptiness. The void. Silence, at least of human sound — on a windy cement street.

Home: you tell me this is what it’s become. A new space to occupy as myself. I was afraid you were trapped in that old space, but you accompany me.

This is when I realise you are a part of me.

⬩

The next day she woke to harmonies drowned by the air conditioner. Many ideas were blossoming in the solitude. She took out her journal to capture them.

Being a writer felt like a privilege and a curse. It was a compulsion, which, when left unsatisfied, ate at her moments of living.

She felt free when she was writing, even if it was for work. To be free is to acknowledge your attitude is your own. After lamenting the loss, she realised she could choose to be happy, to be more forward. But choosing to be happy and achieving it were two different things.

⬩

You, the animals in the trees outside my window who remain hidden from view, inhabit my apartment, too. Those frogs that only come out at odd times. Later in mid-January, I will realize that they are gone. Is it the weather or has a python eaten them up? The other morning, I woke up to the sound of a bird in terror. It sounded as though she was being swallowed alive. But then it seemed worse than that and continued on. My next thought was that her babies had been eaten, were being eaten as she watched. By that python I imagined or something else, a mammal like a rat perhaps. Whatever it was, it reminded me that though the cycle of life continues, it can be harsh; it can be tragic. It depends on our perspective of the story. But I was there with her so maybe the pain was a little less. I heard her cry and sent her my love.

⬩

When she walked out the building door that day, there was newness. There was the beginning of something different. It was cemented and grey, but it was quiet and there were cafes and design shops. There were hidden corners of the street with hangout spots for locals, herself. And yet, it was all so foreign. Could it really be her destiny — this place? Hong Kong. Most people didn’t look like her and her Chinese wasn’t even any good. When her brother had come to visit, he had said, ‘It’s fun, but it can never really be home, can it?’

She let the voices that loved her come to her with offerings of wisdom and love.  She walked down to the cafe, drank a coffee with both hands while glazing out the window, but the images in her mind were elsewhere and anachronistic. Memories or visions. Parallel universes. Dreams. Imagination. Premonitions or nostalgic re-creations of the past, or someone’s past. Whatever they were, they were becoming a part of her reality. Time was collapsing its hold on her.

It became a continuous pattern, the way she passed time on her own thoughts.

She spoke to herself in the second person as she wrote in her journal. She thought of never being home and in some ways that made everything fresh. But it also made things hurt. She always ached a bit for home. For the comforts of the Maine woods. For the only local seasonal changes. For the heavy, earthy accents. The sounds of the coast and wind in the pines. The people she would run into. For family nearby.

She made it work. She kept in touch and visited and loved from afar. But it was never the same. Because of her job, she hadn’t been home for birthdays or weddings in a decade.

Sometimes, she knew, they thought it was just an excuse.

Airports and movement, a constant in her life. It had simply become a way of life.

She is never settled. This is the joy of her life, the youth on her visage. But it is also her sadness. Especially now, alone. She can’t see a way out that would make her happier though. She had chosen a partner from a faraway land. A profession that was built on internationalism. There was no going back.

A quick shower was steaming off the pavement as she went home. Unused to the undulations of the pavement, she took a slip around a corner, landing on the same damaged knee. Unaware of the pain, she looked down to raspberry skin, just beginning to ooze bright red beads of blood.

She gingerly walked the rest of the way home to clean it in the shower and elevate it until the blood would stop.

Again.

Rest. You just need to rest, she told herself.

Could I somehow enjoy the process of suffering as a part of life’s experiences?

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