Everyday movement, p.12
Everyday Movement, page 12
It was always the same few Hong Kong movies playing in rotation. Either cop-and-gangster shootouts or incongruous slapstick comedies. Either Bang bang bang! or Wah wah wah! Nevertheless, they watched them over and over again, picking up a bunch of swear words and slang. Hung Yi started to notice some common tropes. For example, whenever a gun went off, a flock of white doves took flight. Also, shootouts always happened in shopping malls or on busy streets; knife fights, on the other hand, tended to occur at late-night alleys, under Yau Tsim Mong district’s massive neon signs, where the redness of the lights and the redness of the blood blurred into one.
Back then, she was mesmerized by the vivid plotlines. It wasn’t until much later, when Ah Mak took a film course, that he told her those white doves, shootouts, and neon signs were all symbols. Scholars loved studying these, calling them the characteristics of the city.
Hung Yi’s favorites were the Stephen Chow and Ng Man-tat comedies. Even though she had watched the reruns enough to know every line by heart, she still giggled at all the jokes. Ah Mak, however, just sat there stone-faced, forcing her to swallow her laughter in embarrassment.
Out on the streets past one in the morning, she awkwardly offered him that squished bun, marking another failed attempt at winning him over.
* * *
—
In the past two weeks, she had spent most of her days on the sofa with Ah Mou, the family dog. Ah Mou was also twelve. They were both bored and waiting. Ah Mou waited for the moment Mom or Dad opened the door so he could welcome them back by wagging his tail. Hung Yi waited for a phone call.
That May, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake hit the mountainous heartland of Sichuan Province. The death toll eventually rose to nearly seventy thousand. For weeks on end, the disaster and its aftermath took over the news. At Hung Yi’s school, students were asked to each write an essay titled “In Memory of the Wenchuan Earthquake.” Their submissions were entered into a citywide competition. Hung Yi had always been a top student. Usually, she didn’t need to work too hard to score the highest in her class. Perhaps because of this, when she occasionally failed to do so, it grated her.
She was determined to win the competition. In the ten days before the assignment was due, she consumed every piece of content she could find on the subject. And she had plenty of sources. Several TV stations sent reporters to cover the rescue-and-recovery efforts on the ground. Cameramen followed firefighters as they struggled through the rubble and debris in search of survivors. There was also footage of a villager frantically digging through the mud and gravel with his bare hands, screaming and sobbing as he tried to recover his loved ones. Neighbors and relatives pulled him away from where his house used to be. He collapsed and wailed. Not far from him, a few survivors who had just been rescued were wrapped in shawls. They sat stoically.
Hung Yi studied these clips and tried to place herself at the scene. It wasn’t just about learning what happened but also about the emotions she could feel from it. She realized it wasn’t difficult to overload oneself with feelings: a young mother used her own body to shield her infant from the impact; rescue workers kept a trapped man conscious by chatting with him for hours before he was rescued. He died on the way to the hospital. Hung Yi sniffled and cried over these news stories. In the end, she was satisfied with the essay she submitted. Her teachers often said good writing was usually filled with emotions resonating with real-life experiences.
Back in elementary school, a teacher had once told Mom that Hung Yi seemed to “understand things a little differently from the others.” For instance, in a Chinese writing exercise, students were told to make a sentence with these components: “leads to / diligence / laziness / success / leads to / failure.”
The correct answer was: “Diligence leads to success; laziness leads to failure.”
But Hung Yi’s answer was: “Success leads to laziness; failure leads to diligence.”
When the sheet was returned to her, she saw a big red X slashed across her paper. Baffled, she ran up to the teacher’s desk and asked what was wrong with her answer. She earnestly laid out her reasoning: “If someone keeps succeeding, they naturally become complacent and start slacking off. Just like in ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’; the hare kept coming in first, so it underestimated its opponent and lost to the tortoise. On the other hand, failure makes people work harder. Like Edison—he ran more than eight thousand experiments before he finally invented the light bulb. How is this wrong?”
The teacher seemed mildly amused by her argument but wasn’t sure what to tell her except to not be so pessimistic. She wasn’t convinced. The teacher was losing patience. “Anyway, let’s stop talking nonsense. Your answer is different from the standard one, so it’s wrong. Understand? Besides, you already have the highest grade in the class. Why make a fuss over a fraction of a point?” Her classmates nearby quickly joined in, jeering at her for not knowing when to quit, for scoring so high and still nitpicking. Wasn’t she just rubbing salt in the wounds of those who scored lower? Did she think she was really all that just because she got good grades?
After school she told Mom about it, only to become more upset when Mom tried to comfort her by suggesting that she should be happy with being “good enough.” “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Mom said. Everyone was missing the point. This feeling of being misunderstood sent young Hung Yi into an unknown sadness. Revisiting the memory of that day, Hung Yi mused that the teacher’s warning against pessimism and Mom’s advice on flexibility had likely backfired. She grew to defend her points of view even more.
A couple of weeks before the Olympics opening ceremony, Hung Yi’s best friend, Ah Sze, mentioned receiving a phone call. The host of the writing competition informed her that her essay had made it to the final round and would be included in an upcoming anthology. She was also invited to a press conference where the winner would be announced. Ah Sze and Hung Yi read each other’s submissions. Hung Yi privately thought Ah Sze’s writing was filled with lofty declarations and flashy words. Her own piece was obviously superior. After all, she had cried real tears in the process. Also, her grades had always been far better than Ah Sze’s. If Ah Sze had become a finalist, it was only natural to expect that she’d receive a call too.
In the following days, Ah Sze kept asking if she got her call. At first, Hung Yi took this impatience to be an endearing wish that they could both receive prizes and be in the anthology together. But soon she found it annoying, and tinged with a hint of boastfulness. Among girls their age, they became aware of an undercurrent forming beneath their previously innocent friendships. For years they’d been all smiles and lovey-dovey. Suddenly, they started to hear an edge in their friends’ innocuous-sounding comments.
Even more anxiously, Hung Yi waited for the phone to ring. Mom teased that she was turning into Ah Mou. Jittery as a puppy, she hovered by the phone. She refused to drink water in case she needed to pee and missed the call. She kept her eyes locked on the base unit, waiting for the green light to flash so she could snatch up the receiver and answer.
“Hello?” Having recently lost a few baby teeth, her words came out slightly lisped. On the night of the Olympics opening ceremony, when the helper picked up the phone, Hung Yi had imagined a warm and official voice on the other end, saying, “Apologies for the late call, but we are glad to inform you….”
The writing competition business not only made things weird with Ah Sze, but also drew Hung Yi’s own emotions into question. These were more difficult questions outside the framework of the essay. Questions that Hung Yi didn’t have standard answers for. Sinking into someone else’s sorrow was so easy—should she guard her own heart? If she did all this as part of her schoolwork, were these feelings even real?
Was her sorrow contrived and manufactured for the sake of a prize?
She wanted to defend her intentions: The thought that many, many kids her age had been sitting in class one minute and were dead the next had undeniably made her sad. But what kind of grief was this? Was it like her fear of losing Ah Mou as the dog approached old age? Was it like when a beloved character got killed off in a TV show? Or, was it like what Dad said, the victims were compatriots and they were bound to her by blood?
To prove that her intentions were pure, one weekend, Hung Yi woke up early to join a fundraising drive. It was a raffle organized by the local community center. She was the youngest and shortest among the volunteers, but her fervor impressed all others. She carried raffle tickets in her hand and a clear box on her back. Running through the neighborhood, she called out, “Please help with the Sichuan earthquake relief! Save our compatriots.”
When she returned to the center, she handed the clear box back to a staffer. The nice-looking auntie turned it upside down and colorful banknotes rained onto the desk. The auntie praised her, “What a gutsy girl. Maybe you’ll one day make a living with a microphone in hand!”
The community center auntie wasn’t far off. Eleven summers later, Hung Yi was out in the bustling streets again, leafletting, postering, setting up encampments. She ran around day and night, lugging speakers and megaphones with her. “Withdraw the evil law! Stand up against the extradition bill!” Hung Yi shouted herself hoarse. Would the auntie praise her courage this time?
* * *
—
As the bus approached Sham Shui Po, Panda had a feeling of déjà vu. It was as if she were twelve again, arriving at this neighborhood late at night, fearing that her cousin Ah Mak might be in trouble. Walking toward the police station, she could now see the low-slung building in the distance. It looked just like what she remembered.
“Why don’t we pick up some food before meeting up with Ah Lei?” A man’s voice brought Panda back to the present moment. “Having some food in the stomach will help everyone feel better,” he said. It was Ah Ming, Panda’s new boyfriend. She had first seen him at a protest, tossing Molotov cocktails like it was the end-times. Was that what had attracted her? She was certainly charmed, later, when she saw the radical turning all soft and kind at a dinner gathering, thoughtfully ordering food for the table and refilling friends’ water glasses. They stopped to order at a street food cart and watched the preparation.
They were still new in this relationship, learning each other’s tolerance for spice and preference for drinks and swapping childhood memories. On their ride here, Panda told Ah Ming about her patriotic fundraising effort as a child. Ah Ming said he had a patriotic story too. “I was once a flag bearer in elementary school,” he shared. “From flag bearer to flame thrower?” Panda chuckled. Ah Ming smiled and went on. Every National Day, his school organized a flag-raising ceremony, and the Civic Education teacher picked three students to do the honor in front of the whole school. “We all wanted to be chosen and behaved so well in civics class. My friends were very jealous when I got picked,” he said.
“Did the experience live up to your expectations?” Panda asked teasingly.
“The air was muggy and stifling that day,” Ah Ming said. “I watched the flag moving to the top, but without any wind, it hung limp without even showing all five stars on it.” He feigned sadness.
“Poor you! Your opportunity of heroism turned into a public display of lousiness.” She laughed and patted him on the back.
When they carried the take-out food and turned onto Yen Chow Street, they saw the block was teeming with family, friends, and supporters of the arrestees. People were busy talking on the phone, texting updates, or explaining the situation to those who just got there. Panda spotted Ah Lei sitting under a streetlamp, curled up like a cat in cold weather. Without making a sound, she snuck up and pressed warm tea and a bowl of fish and lettuce soup against Ah Lei’s cheek.
Panda was used to seeing Ah Lei being gloomy, but she was still taken aback by how down she looked. “It seems like we’re always eating whenever we’re together,” Ah Lei said as she lifted the lid off the bowl. Steam rose. “Remember the time we had burgers with Ah Mak? That was my first meal with him. I knew you were trying to set us up.”
“I wasn’t! But you ended up dating anyway,” Panda said, trying to lighten the mood. She sat down by Ah Lei’s side. Ah Lei’s eyes were rimmed red. She looked up to the sky, as if trying to get her tears to flow back. “It’s the steam. The bowl’s so hot,” she said. “You know, he doesn’t have many friends. Even I don’t know him that well yet.” Panda set Ah Lei’s bowl aside and pulled her into a hug. “It’s okay, it’s okay. He has us. And we’re here now. We’ll get to see him soon,” Panda said, stroking Ah Lei’s hair.
The dense buildings cropped the dark sky into a square. Streetlights flared bright. It was a sleepless night for people all around them. Contradicting speculations of the arrestees’ fates circulated. One version said they weren’t going to be charged, another said they were all going to face riot charges. Trying to piece these together frayed their nerves. Panda changed the subject. “Did you know I actually picked up Ah Mak here a long time ago?”
* * *
—
When the phone rang that evening, Hung Yi and her parents were enjoying the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
The show was spectacular. At one point, numerous performers stood side by side in staggered rows, creating a vast sweep of whiteness. They held bamboo slips and chanted scripts. Another group moved nimbly on the stage and became formations of Chinese characters. Soon, they turned into the Great Wall and then cascades of peach-pink blossoms. Each sequence was accompanied by perfectly coordinated music, lighting, and special effects. Mom and Dad were stunned and kept saying things like, “This is insane!” and “How do they do that?”
Hung Yi slapped her arm hard, trying to dispel the tiny bumps that had risen on her skin. She suspected it wasn’t just about being moved or being excited by the visuals. Usually, she only got goosebumps at unsettling sights, especially clusters on beehives, lotus-seed pods, and strawberries. Just thinking about it made her scalp tingle.
When the show cut to commercial break, they could finally sit back. “If I’m being honest, I have mixed feelings about this,” Mom said. “So many people died just a few months ago, and now the whole country puts on a big show of celebration. Sure, it’s amazing to look at, but I feel a little iffy about it.”
Dad came out of the kitchen, carrying freshly brewed mulberry-mistletoe tea. “Isn’t it precisely when people are heartbroken that they need something uplifting? We can’t live in grief forever,” he said. “Besides, this may not sound nice, but it’s not like our country is lacking in population. Am I right?” The broadcast resumed. Mom turned back to the show without engaging with Dad’s comment.
Hung Yi snuggled with Ah Mou and thought about what Dad had just said. His words were meant to be uplifting and positive, but they left a knot in her chest.
On TV, aerial shots showed magnificent scenes made up of groups of synchronized performers. Yet in that vast sea of color, Hung Yi couldn’t make out a single person.
* * *
—
Later that night, when Hung Yi followed Mom to the police station, she witnessed a spectacle of another kind.
Auntie Lan’s left eye was half shut and swollen like an egg, her face blotched with patches of purple and blue. Her hair was a mess. Her clothes were torn. She was screaming and pointing her finger at her husband. “He hit me! He hit a woman! Why aren’t you locking him up? Please help me!” An officer ordered her to stop shouting and sit down.
Ah Mak’s dad was calm. “I never laid a finger on her. This is all an act.”
Ah Mak sat next to his mom and didn’t say anything.
Mom was anxious and had brought in a lawyer. But it looked like the police weren’t going to press charges. After taking statements from both sides, they asked Auntie Lan whether she wanted to file a formal complaint. The same Auntie Lan who’d been so frantic fell quiet for a moment. She conferred briefly with Hung Yi’s mom and the lawyer. She said no.
On the ride home, Auntie Lan dozed off in the passenger seat. Hung Yi fiddled with the button on the door, making the window go up and down. “Stop.” Mom said just the one word. Hung Yi complied and left the window open at the top. Wind whistled through the crack, carrying the heat from the streets.
Next to her in the back seat was Ah Mak. Without looking at her, he said in a low voice, “Do you believe my dad hit my mom?”
* * *
—
Even before the visit to Sham Shui Po Police Station, Mom had always told Hung Yi to be nice to Auntie Lan. “She’s a gentle soul and has endured a lot. Fate hasn’t been kind to her. We owe her that much,” Mom said. For as long as Hung Yi remembered, every weekend, she followed Mom up the six flights of stairs to Auntie Lan’s. Each time, Mom lugged bags from the grocer’s and the butcher’s up the narrow, winding stairwell, and never tired of reminding her, “You must listen to Auntie Lan. You can give me attitude all you want, but you can never be disrespectful to her. We owe her that, okay?”
Hung Yi nodded. She wasn’t really sure who constituted “we”: the entire family? Or just Mom and her? And what exactly did they owe her? Why couldn’t they just pay her back? What she knew was what she saw. Around Auntie Lan, Mom always put away her usual flamboyant personality and played the part of a deferential little sister.
Auntie Lan’s family rented a unit in a postwar tenement building in Sham Shui Po. Like with most old tong lau buildings, the rent was cheap, but there was no elevator.
Enduring the stairs was apparently one of the things they owed Auntie Lan. The building looked skinny from the outside, but it was like a spiraling tower from the inside. Its steep stairs seemed to never end. Hung Yi navigated dead cockroaches, toppled liquor bottles, and suspicious, foul-smelling puddles. Occasionally, old men in rubber slippers and saggy undershirts emerged from a unit with a Massage sign on it. Hung Yi tried to get out of their way.
