The Year of the Woman (23 page)

She tried reading the financial news from Japan and the United States, but politics got everywhere. Instead, she spent her break at the Peak Tram Terminus, Western tourists and sightseers from mainland China thronging the sloping queue. She looked enviously on. One day, she would ride it to the Peak, and there have a wondrous supper among flowers and music in the cool. She had seen an advert for the restaurant there, while waiting for yet another re-run of
The Great Waltz
in the original 1938 scratchy-voice version Hong Kong could never get enough of.

The heat enveloped her. She listened to a chanting crocodile of Glenealy School children coming from some celebration at St John’s Cathedral opposite. It melted her heart to hear the little ones singing. How she’d wanted to be one of them! She felt like weeping for no reason. She leant back against the pedestrian rails. She was sitting on the top step of the concrete flight leading down to the gardens. Here, brides and their grooms came to be photographed in their finery. Their favourite places were the Tea Museum and the doorway of St John’s Cathedral. Sometimes a cascade of several brides, all in bridal gowns and folderols, were visible above the carp pools in the steep vegetation, a lovely sight. She dozed, and in spite of only having half-
an-hour
that nagging voice screeched in her ear.

“What choosing?” Grandmother sounded fretful, but when wasn’t she? KwayFay was in no mood to listen. She wished, not for the first time, that she could dream like English folk, and wake up knowing it was nothing
to be concerned about. Instead, Chinese knew that dreams were fact, ignore them at your peril. No wonder English people were so calm. Americans were calm because they were all millionaires, the English because they ignored dreams.

“Calm?” Ghost screamed with laughter. “They are so busy being Hero-Country folk –
Ying-wok
people – they have no time left for real dreaming. It isn’t sensible, silly granddaughter!”

“No, Grandmother,” KwayFay whimpered.

“Tell now: what choosing?”

“I don’t know yet, Grandmother. I thought I had already done it at Lamma Island. Remember? I told you.”

“Easy!” Grandmother said with derision. Then, full of tricks, said casually, “Did you learn the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts, in full?”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

“Oh.” Ghost was disappointed! “And Hakka funeral ceremony?”

“Yes, Grandmother.” KwayFay said it with pride, wishing she could have spoken the English command for dismissal; she had heard it once. A visiting London dealer had said, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Jim!” A brilliant remark, full of power. She had wanted to say it to somebody ever since.

“In full?” More dejection! KwayFay was even more pleased.

“In full, Grandmother.” The time she had spent in the Hong Kong Library at City Hall excavating the myriad details! She had been exhausted for two days afterwards. That was ghosts for you.

“This choosing. Tell.”

“I think it is choosing girls for something.”

Grandmother shrieked a laugh.

“Then you must pretend it is Moon Festival. Go to Amah Rock tonight.”

KwayFay wailed, “I shall be frightened, up there alone, Grandmother!”

Two passersby saw the dozing girl twitching and
tutted
, guessing she was yet another young person drugged in broad daylight.

A car honked and KwayFay woke, startled to find herself near Cotton Tree Drive, looking across at the Peak Tram Terminus. She saw the time, and got up and ran to work.

Soon after five – the day hell, with Business Head
ranting
and, Alice said, “going into one” – KwayFay caught a taxi. It was only a phrase she had picked up from her disastrous brother, meaning a fit of weeping or berserk distress. KwayFay never believed Alice’s tales; her friend was death on Futures and With-holds. Alice’s help was always trouble.

On the way, she glimpsed a horrendous accident. A heavy Mercedes Benz motor crushed a small child against the wall of a narrow street. The contour roads above Central District were notoriously meandering, the edges being simply stone walls in some places. The child had been standing on a skate-board, and was rubbed, simply rubbed slowly against the stones by the huge car. His arm hung in a mess of blood from his shoulder. The driver of the splendid motor got out and harangued the mother, then angrily drove away. He
made no attempt to give money, or telephone for help.

“Did you see that?” KwayFay exclaimed to the taxi driver. “We should stop and help!”

“He is a Business Head, and a diplomat.”

“The man is Chinese!”

“So?” The taxi driver shrugged, and would not stop, simply drove on along Bowen Road. “He can’t be touched. Diplomats can do anything.” He lit a cigarette one-handed. “You think they pay parking fines? Or debts? Or get themselves arrested when they batter prostitutes in Causeway Bay and Nathan Road?”

“Yes!” she cried, because she did. Police arrested
people
. They’d arrested her when a child for stealing three plums from a hawker’s barrow.

“You’re wrong. He will already have forgotten it
happened
.”

Dismayed, she heard out the taxi driver’s litany of complaints against wanton diplomats, and alighted in a mood of dejection. She tried to put the incident out of her mind, but it kept recurring. She wondered if Old Man’s captors had the power to punish the man in the big motor, who had shown more concern for his car’s radiator than the unconscious child.

The hillside was steeper than she remembered. She was tempted to stay with the taxi and return to Central, but she had come too far. And what would she tell Grandmother?

The taxi meant more expense and less food. She started the climb towards Wang Nai Chung Gap, site of the Amah Rock. Once before, she had come with some other street children, for one of them had been ill with blood-spitting disease and they went to ask Amah Rock
to make her well, but their little accomplice had sunk into torpor and was taken away. Her name was Ah Geen. She too had been eight, the age KwayFay guessed for herself. One day, she might try to find out if the Rutonjee Sanatorium had given spindly little Ah Geen charity medicine and made her better. She might have got to America and married one of the Warner Brothers! It did happen, in movies.

The climb was two-and-a-half miles, but she was too frightened of the consequences to turn back. The taxi man had wanted paying off, and she’d not had enough money to tell him to wait, so she was on her own. She had the necessary provinder, to pretend Ghost’s silliness about the Moon Festival, so far away in the year it was ludicrous to be doing this. She took off her valuable shoes and walked in her bare feet.

The path ran from the back of what was once the Military Hospital but was now Island School, with bits let off to charities and other daftnesses, and ascended the central peak of Hong Kong. She struck over a small bridge across the deep ravine, unnerved at being so far from anyone. You were never farther than, say, three paces from a hundred folk. Now, here she was climbing away from civilisation among the lantana bushes she loved – always there, always trying to flower with their yellows, oranges, pinks, reds, and their green leaves. So loyal, she felt they sometimes might deserve a god of their own. She halted for breath, worrying that the
lantana
bushes might actually have such a thing, and
mentally
apologised in case some god was already frowning at her impertinence.

The water below formed a lovely waterfall. She gazed,
not going on until she felt it had been shown the right degree of respect, for she had heard its sound was full of music. She tried listening, but no music came, only the delicious sound of splashing clean water. Maybe that was the music? She smiled at the fantastic idea and walked on.

Eventually the track narrowed, becoming nothing more than a slender path, ever steeper, until she could only progress by clutching the overhanging foliage. Disturbed clouds of butterflies rose, mostly little
yellowish
creatures. Why was none of them down in Pedder Street or Sai Ying Pun, where free colour was needed? The ground became slippery and craggy as if the powdered laterite was trying to revert to the hard stone outcrops from which it originated. She was breathing hard by the time she came to a huge stony crag, surmounted by a hunched stone figure. It looked quite like one of those English guardsmen the London poster showed in Kai Tak Airport, but as she approached it she could tell it was a woman, a baby on her back.

This was Amah Rock.

She climbed the steps and sank with relief onto the stone seat. It was worn by former visitors, traditionally young lovers swearing fidelity in betrothal. The rock, so like a young fisherwoman carrying her babe slung in a binding cloth, was famed throughout the Colony.

Its story was that the woman’s husband, a fisherman centuries before the English came with their Raj, had been lost at sea. As days passed, fearing for his safety, she climbed this sacred place to keep watch for his
vessel
. It did not come. Fiercely loyal, she remained there, kept by her devotion until she turned to stone. The
Immortals pitied her, for they knew he had been lost in a
Dai-Fung
on the ocean. They lifted her soul and that of her baby into the heavens, where she was reunited with her drowned husband, to live among the Immortals for ever. KwayFay’s eyes filled with tears as she gazed at the stone, imagining how the fisherwife’s soul had been encouraged from her dead form, and how the baby’s soul too had been teased carefully out of the granite by the Immortals to fly into the stars to eternal joy. No wonder Amah Rock was the place for the Wedding Walk, the stroll of Hong Kong’s betrothed.

She sat in the shelter of the rock slanting above her stone seat. Three cracked earthenware bowls held the stumps of many burned incense sticks and scraps of Spirit Flags – paper bearing pious characters wishing for fidelity and progeny in generations to come.

From the gathering dusk she guessed it was eight o’clock. She decided to make her preparations first, then rest until it was time to do her ritual, which would give her the answer to the Triad people. For a moment she wondered why she never had any doubt this would
happen
just as Grandmother said, but she quickly put the thought from her. There could be no doubt. Doubt was for people, certainty for ghosts.

Perhaps this was tonight’s lesson, the realisation that people had lost the art of sorrow, in their rush to
gratification
? Living was an art, as Grandmother seemed to understand. All the folk KwayFay knew craved instant satisfaction. Tired, she began to prepare for the Harvest Moon.

Properly, the moon was at its brightest on the
fifteenth
night of the Eighth month, the fabled dazzling
apogee. This was the time for celebration of harvest,
village
, the tribe, safety, existence, life, celebrated only in China as it should be, for all other peoples were
barbarians
and would not know such things.

She had bought several
heung
, incense sticks, and placed them upright ready to light. A polystyrene cup of jasmine tea, which Heng O, the Lady in the Moon, would naturally love, was beside her.

“How foolish the English are!” Grandmother squeaked loudly in her ear, making her jump in fright. “They see the face of a man in the moon! Can you
imagine
?”

“No, Grandmother.”

“It is clearly a toad, and always has been. At least, ever since that Heng O stole her husband’s potion for
prolonging
life, and got herself chased from Earth – though you can’t really blame her – so she had to dodge into the Moon and now hides there. I never knew her.” Grandmother sniffed in disapproval. “Did you bring the water caltrops? And make sure they are correctly
bat-shaped
?”

“Yes, Grandmother.” Did Grandmother think she was stupid, not to check water chestnuts? Each one had to retain its horns so that, bat-like, they would bring good fortune.

“I heard you think that, rude girl!”

“I try to remind Ah Poh how careful I was, doing as you told me at the last Moon Festival!” KwayFay almost started to cry, but put a stop to that. She would not be cowed, not in this. Her survival might depend on it.

“So I did!” Ghost cooed. “I taught you how to choose vegetables! Good, good. Did you bring something red
and something green, lazy girl?”

KwayFay swallowed her pride and said she had. Two scraps of expensive silk, one of each colour. She had had to steal them from the silk merchant shops in Wanchai, no big deal.

“And a lantern?”

“Only an oil lamp, Grandmother. I had no more money. It is open clay, with a little oil in a shoe-polish tin, and string for a wick.”

“It’s not much, is it? Not a decent lantern.”

“I sorry, Grandmother.”

“Did you bring a moon cake?”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

She had begged Alice for one, who had three left over in her fridge at home. They kept, at least that was in their favour. She had brought it wrapped in a tissue. It felt heavy, as all Moon Cakes did, and was probably stiff with almond nuts and mashed millet seed, pork and fat, and sugar to make it absurdly sweet.

“Did you learn a poem of Li Tai-Po?”

“No, Grandmother!” KwayFay wailed. “You didn’t tell me to.”

“He composed poems to the moon, always the moon. You know he loved Heng O so much that he drowned trying to embrace her reflection?”

“You told me, Grandmother.”

“If you didn’t learn his poem, then you can only wait. People pass here at midnight. They tell answer.”

“What if nobody comes?” Then she would be left here until morning, and have to go to work worn out.

“Distrustful granddaughter!” Grandmother shrieked, and gave her what for, abusing her laziness, shiftlessness,
ingratitude, when she should be grateful to a caring ancestor whose talents were renowned throughout…throughout…

KwayFay slept.

She woke, and saw from the harbour glow in the night sky and the positions of the stars it was almost
midnight
. She thought a thank-you to Ghost for rousing her, and lit her incense sticks. She made sure the cup of jasmine tea, now stone cold, was in position, and laid the unwrapped moon cake beside it. She had no paper crown to wear, as was proper, which was just bad luck. The two coloured silks she put beside her on the stone seat. She was stiff, wondering how much colder it would get. If it really had been the Fifteenth of the Eighth Moon, it would have been hot and sticky with Hong Kong’s enduring humidity. Now, she shivered in the cold and stayed quiet.