Hainan Dao

Book I Chapter 03

HAINAN DAO BOOK I

CHAPTER 03

Traveling from Toronto to Hong Kong is definitely not a journey for the faint of heart. On this particular trip back, I again booked a flight with United Airlines, which ran one of the two most popular routes back to the Far East. It took me three hours to fly from Toronto to Chicago, and then fourteen hours from Chicago to Hong Kong. By the end, I felt like I had died. Twice.

It is my belief that whenever any traveler arrives in Hong Kong, there comes a point when all of a sudden, there is no longer any denying that one has now left fair North America far behind. For me, that point usually comes when I step out of the airport and start making my way toward the taxi area. The thick, humidity-laden air comes charging at me in full force, and I am run over as if by a cruel beast of invisible water and it takes my breath away. After that point, it becomes moot any difference between clean and unclean, wet or un-wet. Your sweat becomes your constant companion, your clothes and your body will reach new heights of previously unimagined intimacy, and the novels of Frank Herbert will take on strange new meanings to you.

For the first five minutes while I stood there, waiting in line for my turn to a taxi, I tried to concentrate on my breathing and let the heat pass through me.

I have this trick, you see. This is something that I had developed from the wisdom distilled into my brain as a result of my years of poring over comic books. Try this only after you have consulted your family physician.

Whenever I’m irresistibly caught in swelteringly hot conditions, I imagine myself to be an AI driven automaton. And I wouldn’t be far off. After all, though we may be complex machines, we are still machines nonetheless, with mechanisms for locomotion and systems for energy conversion and waste elimination and so on. When my sweat glands begin working overtime, and every breath that I exhale is two hundred degrees Celsius, I tell myself that these are only my sensors reporting in that the local conditions are hot. In fact, compensatory mechanisms have already jumped into place, and the status of all systems, though not optimum, is certainly deemed to be well within the normal limits of functioning. You see? It is only a status report. My body is just telling me it’s hot and I know that already. I can just discard the information. Without a second thought. It shouldn’t get to me. There doesn’t need to be the involvement of emotion or any other area even remotely bordering on the limbic system near the hippocampus. I can leave that completely out of it.

By another ten minutes in line, the trick had stopped working. I was sweating bullets and wishing to God I could have shot myself with one of them.

After finally getting into a taxi and half an hour in it, I arrived at the old house where my father used to live in Kowloon Tong. I got out of the taxi at the main entrance and walked the rest of the way in through the townhouse complex. As I approached my father’s unit itself, the metal gate to the house squeaked open and I stepped through.

I glanced around at the old masonry, the mould along the walls in the corners. The place had been left empty since the old man had passed away. Nobody lived here now, except his old housekeeper, Anna, the one who had opened the door for me. In his will, he had left this particular property to Abby. She hadn’t decided what to do with it yet, so she had left it here for now, just as before for the time being. Anna was probably returning to the Philippines once everything became settled again.

I can still remember the things they used to say about her, how she used to be so lazy, sleeping in almost every day, never doing all her chores anywhere near on time. I don’t know why the old man never did fire her much earlier on. I think it was because she was a relative of the old nanny that we used to have before her. It gets more difficult when they get too close.