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.
As we climbed up the stairs, I asked Anna how she was, whether her old skin allergies were still giving her problems. She told me things were fine. She also told me that Dylan was just here, that I had just missed him. He had left on an early flight out just yesterday.
That’s funny. What was he doing in Hong Kong? I thought most of his business took him to Europe now. Mentally, I shrugged.
***
The first thing I did the next morning, was to wake up and stay in bed. Well, I had to. I had gone to bed the evening before at seven o’clock, completely exhausted. Now, as I woke up, thoroughly refreshed, I checked the clock and it said 2 AM.
I fiddled around for another four hours before I made my first telephone call. I rang up a travel agent I knew, a family friend, and asked her to book me a flight out to Hainan Island. She said fine. I could leave on Friday of the same week. Good, I said. That’ll give me a little time to adjust.
When the sun finally came up, I found that the weather had turned cloudy. I left the house, with an umbrella tucked beneath my arm. I took the subway across Victoria Harbour to Hong Kong Island, and then transferred via a taxi to the Christian Cemetery. I bought flowers from the shop set up conveniently near the entrance, and trudged up the hundred and fifty odd steps to where my parents rested together beneath the ground.
I stood in front of their grave and tried to picture again in my mind, that day when I was kneeling at my father’s deathbed in the hospital. I played back, over and over again, the words that he had shouted at me between his fits of violent coughing. Glancing around me, I remembered the people at the funeral, now a hollow piece of imagery floating around me like teased off pieces of candyfloss, riding upon the eddies in the hillside air. A legion of mourners, all dressed in black. The sun beating down on us from overhead. The sweat trickling down the back of my neck, as I listened to the preacher spill out his thoughts and tell everyone what a great man my father had been.
I heard footsteps from behind me. I turned around. A figure appeared from out of the early morning fog. An old man. An old man, all bent over, wearing a huge sun hat weaved in straw, and a large bottle held in his hand. He smiled as he approached.
“Tso sun, nei ho.” (Good morning, you are well.)
“Good morning, you are well,” I replied.
He stopped in front of me and craned his neck back to peer up into my eyes. “Mr. Chan?”
“Yes.” I frowned. “How did you know my name?”
“I…” His eyes happened to fall on the pictures on my parents’ headstone. “Oh! My apologies…!” He bowed. “I had mistaken you.”
“Oh?”
He chuckled. “I had thought you were your father. The two of you are so alike…”
I coughed. “Are you the groundskeeper here?”
“…father and son. So much alike. He used to come here in the morning as you do now…” He turned to the headstone. He smiled with his eyes closed.
“Sir?” I reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
He turned his face toward me and his mind drifted back to the present. “Hm?”
“You are the groundskeeper.”
He nodded.
“I would like you to take special care with this plot.”
He nodded profusely. “As I have always done! Just as your father had bid me do.”
“That’s good.”
“Oh, yes. Old Chau knows how to keep the place clean and tidy…” He rubbed the fingers of his right hand together. “There are wild animals about here after dark, you know?” He searched into my eyes knowingly despite the cataract in his right eye.
I glanced down at his hand for a second. I fumbled in my pocket and fished out my wallet. “How much did my father used to pay you?” I started to count out my bills.
“Three…ah…six hundred a year.” He smiled.
I stopped counting my money. I looked up.
“But what with the rising prices of everything, I think seven would be more adequate…”
I started counting again.
“Fresher flowers, more frequent watering…”
I handed him a wad of cash. “That should do it.” I turned around and began to saunter off.
He shouted after me. “But this is only five!”
I waved my hand and continued on my way.
***
The next few days, I slept a lot and didn’t do much of anything else. I did manage to go into town one day though, to stretch out my legs a bit and get some proper sunscreen before I would go belly flopping into the frying pan. I stopped by a restaurant on a street somewhere and bought some lunch. At the end of it, I called the waiter over for the cheque.
“Would you like some dessert first?” he asked, as he began to clear away my dishes. This waiter was not the same one who had first seated me and so, evidently, didn’t know that I could speak Cantonese. He had asked me about the dessert in English.
“And what can you suggest for dessert this afternoon?” I had locked the man’s eyes in mine and made it a point to reply to him in perfectly fluent Cantonese.
I always hated it when Chinese people did that to me. What was it about my appearance that always gave it away? To this very day I have yet to find out. It was especially bad on these trips back to Hong Kong. Somehow, people always spotted you as having spent time overseas and assumed that you would not be able to speak the language.
Though I must admit this was true. Many of my friends around my age were not able to speak a word of Chinese. Most people who had come to Canada before the age of seven or eight couldn’t. Those who had come after fifteen or sixteen retained the ability, but their English was then usually tainted with an accent. I was proud of the fact that I could speak both. I had worked hard for it. There came a point in my life, when I was about thirteen, when I had wished to be completely disassociated with the Chinese culture, feeling much more comfortable with my new adopted home and everything about it. I was no longer Chinese, I told myself, I was Canadian…whatever that was. It got to the point where I couldn’t speak the language even when I tried. My fellow immigrant friends at the time had felt the same and we were happy.
Then came the fear of 1997 and the Chinese take over of Hong Kong. Families began immigrating over in droves overseas to seek shelter. Those who couldn’t as whole families, sent their children over first, often to enrol in high school, so that they might graduate and find work, and then help to get the rest of the family over. Our schools began filling up with the visa students and unchecked Cantonese speakers inundated our then peaceful hallways.
My best friends turned to them in interest. They found their new wave jeans, haircuts and music fascinating. They jostled their way in for a spot to be with them. They went to movies together. They went roller-skating and bowling together. And they worked hard to re-learn their Cantonese just to mix in with them better.
I had felt no urges to regain that culture, but I did start to re-think my life a little bit, whenever I flipped onto the Chinese channel on TV when no one was looking.
One of our new visa student friends and I once had a discussion. We had talked over whether the Chinese culture, with its time enduring traditions thousands of years old was better, or the ways of the new world, with its openness in thinking and forward views and technology.
She was convinced that the East will always hold the ultimate answers. I had suggested that it might even be better, if one could synthesize the two and take the best of both worlds to form a new community of wise thinkers, cognizant of the past but still looking forward to the future.
She had smiled and shook her head. She said that it certainly sounded ideal, but alas, in the real world, such idealistic notions were impractical.
We had had this discussion in English.
In the end, I made myself re-learn my mother tongue. I even learned to write it again.
The way that I went about it, however, was a touch unorthodox. I started out with Chinese comic books. I found these interesting because the themes were usually centred on men and women who knew Kung Fu as opposed to superheroes who could fly through the air. I studied every word and looked them up in the dictionary. I learned their meaning and incorporated them into my speech. In record time, I no longer had any difficulty conversing with my visa student friends, although I think they did wonder at times why I always spoke as if I was reading from a comic book.
With the passing months, after I had accumulated a sizeable working vocabulary, I moved on from comic books to Chinese Kung Fu novels, especially those by Louis Cha. If you have never heard of him, the influence of the works of this man is not to be underrated at any cost. When his words first became popular, teachers and learned professors in the institutes derided his novels, ridiculing them as harmless romantic fluff at best, and dangerous distractions for students, luring them away from their proper study materials at worst. These days, however, there are courses taught in the universities of Hong Kong and China on his books, and an unspoken tradition of filming a renewed version of his work on television once every ten years.
After the very first paragraph of my very first chapter in one of his books, I fell in love with the man. By the time I finished all twenty volumes of his most popular works, even my written Chinese was passable.
Naturally, I don’t tell this to everyone that I meet, but what I have accomplished in my Chinese language proficiency, I owe to this one man alone. And with that proficiency, I could now speak to anyone in Chinese, including teachers, sales people, and even rude waiters in Chinese restaurants.
Unfazed by my question, the waiter standing by my table smiled and reported that they were serving the green tea ice cream for dessert today. I said all right, and off he went.
***
On the way home, I managed to get off the Subway, or what is called in Hong Kong, the MTR, a few stops early and strolled past the spot where the old factory used to be. The delivery entrance was swept and tidy and even the windows were fairly clean. Well, of course. It was under new management now, and definitely not Hainan.
I turned away and continued on my way home. After a shower, I plopped down into the bed and flicked on the TV.
Over the last few years before his death, my father had been winding down most of his business, selling off some of what he had, transferring the rest into trusted hands whenever that was feasible. One of his main regrets in life, made plain to all of us every time we were within earshot, was that he had not been able to hand off his work to one of his own children. It was with utter futility that he had had to sell off even the sweater factory at long last. He had always had a burning desire to keep as much of the family business going as possible.
I never saw the reason for it. I didn’t know why he always felt it so imperative that the business should remain up and running. Why did he always feel so responsible for all the people who worked in the factories and the restaurants anyway? I mean, they weren’t really family. And if anything did happen to the business somehow, I was sure that these people could just find other jobs elsewhere. Sure, the economy was bad, but people always survived somehow. Didn’t they?
If you checked all the establishments that my father had been involved in over the years, you would have found a person who spoke fluent Hainan at the helm of every one of them. I still remember what happened one time while I was vacationing in Hong Kong for the summer, and I had gone up to the factory to visit my dad.
The knitting machines had been going full tilt and the phones were ringing off the hooks when suddenly, a silence gripped the entire floor. Someone had been hurt in a car crash, one of the relatives of one of the workers on the line. Without another word, the entire operation smoked and winked out. People were flying everywhere. Men grabbed their coats, women their purses. Inside of two minutes, the whole floor was cleared of personnel. Nobody was left to man the machines. The phones were left ringing on their cradles. Everyone to the last man had bolted off to see the young girl now being whisked over to the hospital. The only person left was my father, because he was still stuck in a meeting with a client. You see, nepotism was an unspoken code of honour in the factory, and everyone was related to everyone else.
So technically, while in Hong Kong, even now I could be surrounded in a room full of relatives, if I had really wished it. But instead, here I was, sitting alone at home, watching on television some episode of the Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner Hour dubbed into Putonghwa. Now, I knew for a fact that these people were out there, somewhere, all sharing the same last name of Ying, the last name that my father had abandoned when he first arrived in Hong Kong, but did that mean that they were really my family? I knew that we had all come from the same village back on Hainan. I knew that we must have shared some genetic material. We even looked alike in many ways. But how did that make me closer to them than some other stranger who happened to walk by on the street?
I shook my head and sighed. Turning off old Bugs, I lay back in the bed, closed my eyes and waited for Friday.