Three Seasons

I. Early Spring

That early spring, Shanshan moved in.

Before then, I never paid for the heating bill. 30 Yuan for each square meter. That made almost 2000 Yuan for the whole apartment every month. As the only living thing in the room, I decided it was not worth it. 

At first, Shanshan was just one of those girls I took photos for. She would sit quietly, letting me snap shots of her eating a box of instant noodles on the heating plate against the wall. At the end of the session, the noodles turned cold. Her face was no longer enveloped in the vapor, and it suddenly seemed clearer than ever.

In focus.

She put down the box and looked up.

There was no window in the basement she lived.

She was probably the 21st or the 22nd girl I featured for the “Girls of 20 in Beijing,” a series I freelanced at a local magazine. “Young girls living their best time in Beijing is always a sensation,” said the editor. I was quite broke at that time, so I said sure.

Out of the 108 different girls I ended up taking photos for, Shanshan was the most natural in front of the camera. She was born for it. I knew that the first time I saw her. She was standing by a dim lamp-post, wearing a little black dress, which suited her very well. As she turned and led my way, under the moonlight, I saw the dress was so tight that the skin on her shoulders turned red.  

I once asked Shanshan if she was going to keep doing what she was doing.

She shrugged and lit up a cigarette. I couldn’t see her face in the smoke but I did hear her cough violently after getting choked by the smell.

It was an opened pack left by one of her costumers.

That scene never left me, and I couldn’t stop thinking of her eating those instant noodles that got all tangled up in that damp drippy dark apartment down in the basement. Perhaps all of the moisture in the air got squeezed up in that little apartment with no windows, making that early spring the driest season in Beijing. Maybe, at some point, I too felt the dryness and started to go back to the basement.   

It was the same instant noodles over and over again. The same brand, “Master Kang,” and the same flavor: hot spicy beef. The bright bold orange cover was the only thing that stood out in the whole apartment.

In that very little space, I watched her walk bare foot on cement, polish her nails in bed, comb her hair under the only lamp, and even change her clothes, to which I always avoided facing directly as a professional male photographer. There was never much talking between us. Only when it rained occasionally, there was the sound of water dripping down along the wall, leaving a big water stain. Sometimes right next to her shoes on the ground, sometimes by her pillow. But she was indifferent to me, and I couldn’t tell if she hoped I would leave or stay.

She was just one of those 20-year-old girls, among many others that I photographed, and I should have moved on a long time ago, I kept telling myself. But there was something that held me back, and I was waiting for something to happen, a sign for me to let go.

Gradually, I started to have instant noodles in that room, sitting on the heating plate by her side, watching the steam disappear in front of my eyes, and beginning to see the swollen noodles get tangled in the cold air. I got a spare key for the room even though she often forgot to lock it as there was nothing really valuable down there anyway. 

Once in a while, she would be away for a few days and then come back with some new clothes or expensive bracelets on her wrists. She didn’t look particularly happy or unhappy, and would quickly go back to her old routine.

One time, she was away longer than normal. After she left, I went down there every day, and I thought maybe she would not come back this time. But eventually, after three weeks, she did. All tired and weary, she looked sad. There was nothing new this time, except a full bag of unripe plums.

As she was changing, I saw there was something different on her back. Right below her left shoulder, there was a scar, still fresh and pink, squiggling like a worm. Before realizing, I covered the scar with my hand. I had forgotten to bring my camera with me.

She didn’t move and my hand stayed. For a long time, my palm was dry and warm until it became infected by the moist air in the room and began filled with steam and sweat. I couldn’t see her face, but her eyelashes were shaking like the wings of a butterfly.

Shortly after that night, Shanshan moved in. I never asked or felt the need to ask. First it was a pair of slippers and her pajamas, then a few clothes she needed to change, and at last it seemed only natural for her to stay rather than to leave.

It seemed something had changed between us after that night, though sometimes she would still disappear. I often woke up in the middle of the night just to check if she was there, right by my side, breathing quietly with her mouth a little pouty in her sleep.

Later that spring, Shanshan disappeared again and never came back. Two full bags of unripe plums were all she left behind.

The apartment felt lonely and was cold again. The following summer, I rented half of the apartment to Nana, a girl who was new to Beijing.

II. Summer

I didn’t like Nana at first because she was too cheerful. Back in high school, Nana would be the one of those kids who would sit in the front row and always raise their hands as quickly as possible once the questions were thrown out. She would hand in her homework on time, get good grades in exams, and maybe even good enough to be selected by the teachers to collect assignments, though I doubted if she would be the best person. There was too much compassion in her that I could tell from the start, and she would probably let the kids, the ones sitting in the back and staring cynically at the blackboard, get away with not doing their homework.

She was the ex of a rap singer I used to photograph for the series of “Underground singers of 20 in Beijing.” Again the same editor’s idea. The rapper sang at those night bars two blocks away. It didn’t matter which one because they all looked the same and smelled the same. The pay was similar too. Before Nana graduated from an arts college in their hometown, she would take the night train to come down to see him. Usually it was morning when she got here and she would stay until he finished singing the first song at the bar before heading back to the station for another night train back to where she came. Night trains cost a lot less than normal trains, but there were still lots of people who needed to take them and oftentimes Nana would have to stand all the way back in the train for there were only standing tickets left at the box office.

Nana came to Beijing the year after she graduated and lived together with that singer before discovering he had been cheating on her. It was kind of a cliché—a widow who came to the bar very often and was quite generous with him. The widow even promised to help him produce his first music video, and he stopped singing at the bars.

Perhaps out of guilt, the rap singer gave Nana my contact info and pleaded to let her stay with me for a while. He promised that as soon as he made a name for himself, he would come back for her. In the meantime, he wanted someone who was trustworthy to keep an eye on Nana. I doubted if freelance photographers were necessarily more decent than his singer friends, but I said nothing. Instead, I reached out to Nana and asked her to come over and take a look at the apartment. Maybe, having enjoyed the warmth of the heating system, I was looking for a better excuse to pay the heating bill before winter came again.

Nana worked at an extracurricular cram school as a calligraphy teacher. She had studied calligraphy when she was little and later majored in it at college. I watched her whenever she was practicing at the dining table. The brush was held so straight in her hand that it seemed the ink on the tip would fall at any second. She looked down at the Shuen paper, so focused as if there was something behind the paper for her to look into.

She stood still with the brush standing straight in the air.

It was sacred.

From the most angular standard script to the most unrecognizable running script, Nana could easily change from one style to another within characters. As the old Chinese saying went, “the writing is the man.” I often wondered what would be the writing of Nana since all of the characters she wrote down looked like floating clouds and flowing water, so interchangeable and so intangible.

Even though the pay of the job was not good, Nana seemed happy with it. She sometimes came back with gifts from her students, a candy or a crystal marble—something that a six-year-old would deem important. She never threw them away and collected them all in a small little wooden box where there was still a photo sticker of her and the singer. They looked much younger in the picture. She still had bangs and a pony tail and his face was clean-shaven. Shoulder by shoulder, they stared into the camera with soft smiles and rosy blush. 

I saw her take it out and stare at it once, though she didn’t know I was watching.

As a decent gentleman, I let Nana stay in my bedroom, and I slept in the living room. She never complained about how small the apartment was. In fact, she even brought back small succulent plants in some colorful pots.

I told her I didn’t know how to grow them, but Nana tried to explain that they were the most popular kind of plants and weren’t easy to die. Spiny on the outside, the plants could store water inside and live a long life without much care. They were called “fleshiness.”

Of course, I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t tell her that. After all, she looked so optimistic. 

Nana was living such a simple life in a city like Beijing—leaving home at 6:30 so she could get to work at 8, coming back around 6 to make dinner, and then talking to the plants before sleep. Sometimes if I came back earlier, she would invite me to dinner, as a compensation for the rent. Of course, she didn’t know that the singer had prepaid me for the whole season.  

Nana was not a great cook, but the stir fry she made was above average. She cut the meat and the green peppers into such small and thin slices that it was hard to differentiate whether it was meat or pepper that I was eating.

The dish was oilier than it needed to be. But because of the extra oil, the sliced meat was soaked with chilliness of the green pepper and became extra hot. I would often end up eating way more rice and feeling heavier down in my stomach. But it was a good weight to have.

I asked her where she learned to make the dish.

She didn’t tell me at first. Only until later did I learn that it was the singer’s favorite.

It was a few months ago when she was still looking for jobs after settling down in Beijing. Everyday, she would rush between interviews when he stayed at home, dividing his day between trying to catch up some sleep and writing new songs. By 6 or 7 at night, she would hurry back to make a meal before he went out to sing at the bar. There was never enough money when she went for groceries, so, as time went by, she learned to go to the market after 6, right before it closed, when she would get good deals without much bargaining needed.

As the only child in her family, Nana had never even touched a pigskin or fish scales before. But now she could cut up a fish without blinking her eyes.

She knew that he rarely got full. But there were only this much of vegetables and this tiny tiny chuck of meat lying there. What she could do with that? Then she thought of adding more oil. Not only did it add to the hotness, but it left some sauce at the end for him to mix it up with the rice. She was always glad to see him clean up the plate without wasting even one drop of the oil left.

Days went by, and by the time I started to notice there was not much oil in the dishes, spring was long gone. Nana stopped checking her wooden box or taking care of the plants. She seemed all closed up in her own world.

That’s when I knew it was all over.

By the end of the summer, Nana left. She took most of her belongings but left behind something as if she did it on purpose. When I went to see the singer and gave him the little wooden box, I watched this guy, who had a tough look with all of those different colors of tattoos on his arms, start to cry like a baby in front of me. On his left arm was a little writing brush tattoo that had red blooming roses twined around. The red was fading.

I was not particularly interested in watching any man break down, so I left. The box was almost empty except for that photo sticker. Perhaps she couldn’t rip it off from the box, so she abandoned them altogether.

Shortly after, the rapper started to sing again at those bars. Mostly heart-broken songs. Afterwards, he would get all drunk. That’s what I heard. 

By the time of fall, when I was cleaning the apartment for Ping-ping, I saw the plants, the “fleshiness,” forgotten at the corner by the window. It looked okay, still spiny. So I guess Nana was right, but I watered it anyway.

III. Fall

Ping-ping called me right before September ended. She said her landlord needed her to pack up before October and she needed a place to stay. As an old good friend, I agreed to let her stay with me, though temporarily.

When I saw Ping-ping at the door, I almost couldn’t recognize her. She was still so lively when I saw her only a year and a half ago. But now she looked barely alive. She seemed to have all withered up, gone with all the summer greenness. The leaves had just started to turn yellow and red. Fall was always the most beautiful season of Beijing, though Ping-ping clearly didn’t belong to that picture.

Her business of building a homestay hotel from an old abandoned two-storey house in the city had all fallen apart. Besides a pile of building materials and those twelve print pictures that I had taken to document her transformation process, there was nothing to prove even the existence of her hotel. Ping-ping had the idea of having a whole wall at the entrance just for these print pictures, so everyone who came in would know and appreciate the house more during the stay. She said she would print my name on that wall too, so maybe some day when someone big walked in, they would see my work, and then we would both be famous and successful. Six months away before that wall could be completed, she was requested to leave for the new governmental house demolition plan.

The plan was kept as a secret for a long time, even though there were rumors about relocating people in that old district of the city to the suburbs. But there were always rumors in Beijing and no one knew which ones to believe. Even if the plan was the one to believe, no one thought it would come so fast, including Ping-ping. She had signed a twenty-year contract with the local government just a year ago, but still she couldn’t get any compensation because of the relocation since she was not the actual owner of the house.

For most of the time after Ping-ping’s arrival, she stayed in bed, spending day and night staring at the ceiling. I tried to encourage her to eat more, and once even made her some oily pork green pepper stir fry, but she was getting thinner and thinner, like a piece of paper. She didn’t respond to most of my questions as if she didn’t even hear me.  

If there was anything that would cause some reactions from Ping-ping, it would be Big Huang, the orange fat cat that she had picked up outside of the hotel she was building. It was a small kitten the first time I met him, and now he had already grown out of my imagination. I even suspected that Ping-ping had been feeding him her own food this whole time. He was growing like a balloon, bigger and bigger, while I could see Ping-ping getting smaller and smaller.

Perhaps Big Huang also felt his owner had been moody; he would stick around her all the time, eating, sleeping, and even pooping. Because I didn’t have any cat food at home, I was being creative with the recipes I got online and trying really hard not to make things worse.

One time, I mixed up some small chunks of fish with rice for Big Huang because that was what we were having that night. As usual, Ping-ping didn’t have much and returned to her meditative mode in bed right after. When I came to check in with her later that night, I found some uneaten fish lying on her palm. I was not even sure if she noticed it since she had already fallen asleep. As I was about to throw it away, I felt something scratching my leg.

It was Big Huang.

I showed him the fish in my hand, and he picked it up with his mouth, and went to sit back down at the corner of the room. His two front legs made a circle around the fish as if he was trying to protect anyone from touching it so he could wait for Ping-ping to wake up and give it to her.

He was just lying there, placing his face against the floor and wagging his tail. Maybe he was happy that he could do something for Ping-ping.

This went on for a while until, one day, Ping-ping got up from bed. Maybe she got tired of staring. After all, it was a small bedroom with a small ceiling. Or maybe all the leaves had turned red, as if there was something burning outside the window. Or maybe Big Huang had brought enough food of his own to push Ping-ping out of the bed and get her own food.

Whether it was because of none or all of the reasons above, she was getting better. By the end of the fall, when the leaves all reached the peak of their colors, flaming in the sky like they had burnt out the very last bit of themselves, Ping-ping also got some color on her face.

She said she was planning to go back home.

“It’s been ten years since we came here for college and I have had enough,” she said. 

It seemed as if yesterday when Ping-ping and I left for Beijing. The whole village came to send us off at the train station as we were the only two who got into a college in the capital city of China. Back then, neither of us would have even thought of the possibility of sticking in Beijing for another six years after graduation. But everything seemed possible and reachable when we were young, and we thought of nothing.

Ping-ping left before December came. She said she couldn’t stand Beijing’s winter anymore. Before she got on the train, she stopped and looked back. At first I thought she was looking at me, but then I realized it was Big Huang that she was looking at.

“You want to hold him one more time?”

“It’s fine. As soon as I find my own place, I will come back and get him.”

Big Huang wagged his tail as if he thought it wasn’t a bad idea.

After Ping-ping left, Big Huang stopped eating for a few days. I was worried at first, but then I thought he was too big as a cat anyway, so a little starving might actually do some good.

When he started to eat again, he barely chewed but swallowed everything in the plate as if he could eat the whole world. I got him canned cat food now, even though I sensed that he preferred to have some fish that I cooked for myself since he always jumped on the table and stared at me whenever I had that. It made me wonder if he learned that trick of staring from Ping-ping.

The winter came a little earlier that year and it started to snow in early December. One day when I got back home, I received two big jars on which wrote “Shanshan homemade plum wine.” All the plums had shrunken and turned brown. I picked one drunken plum from the bottom of the jar and enjoyed the bitterness of the wine spreading on my tongue with a slice of sourness that was unique to the fruit itself. 

I started to pay the heating bill so Big Huang could get heat from somewhere else in the apartment besides my belly. From time to time, I would water the fleshiness whenever I remembered. I never really worried too much about it, since I knew it would continue to live and grow, in its own way.

Midsummer in 1994 Hong Kong

1

Yanyun (燕云) looked outside the window as Bus 121 went into the dark long Harbour Crossing tunnel. Yanyun thought about twenty years ago, before the tunnel was built. Like many people back then, she had to take a small ferry boat to go to Hung Hom. Yanyun would sit in the boat as it wobbled slowly against the water before buildings started to emerge in front of her eyes. She could hear nothing else except for the monotone of the engine splashing the water, over and over. Sometimes, she sat quietly in the corner of the boat next to some young male Vietnamese refugees. It seemed they always moved together in groups. Even though she didn’t understand any Vietnamese, she could sense the flirtations in their tones. Back then, she was easily embarrassed under their bold stares, and she only dared to take a quick glance at them when no one was looking.

That was before the end of 1972 when the first tunnel was open to use. Yanyun remembered it very clearly because that was when she met Muyun for the first time. And now the last and third tunnel was under construction and was said to be completed in a few years.

Against the dark backdrop, Yanyun saw her own reflection in the window. Though with heavy make-up, it was a face of vicissitudes and was marked with wrinkles that belonged to a woman in her late 40s. She saw the woman in the window rubbing her face gently as if trying to smoothen out those markers. What would he look like after all these years? Were there wrinkles on his face as well? Would he recognize her? Would they recognize each other?

Before all of those questions jungled up in her mind, 121 was out of the tunnel and the midsummer sunlight beamed into the bus from above. Yanyun was overcome by a dizziness that made her feel like she was spinning. She closed her eyes. For a second, Yanyun heard waves coming from all the directions.

2

As Yanyun’s bus reached the end of the tunnel, Zhou Muyun (周慕云) was standing by the small window in his hotel room in Wan Chai. All of the other ensemble members had gone sightseeing, and now he had the whole afternoon to himself. Muyun watched a big cruise ship slowly pulling away from the Victoria Harbour. The water down there didn’t look too much different from the water in the Hudson River which he passed by everyday. It might be a little greener, but nothing too special, and Muyun wondered what about it made his father so fascinated with this place.

“I only started to know Hong Kong after I left” once said Muyun’s father. Having lived in Hong Kong for more than twenty years before studying in the U.S., Muyun’s father used to tell stories that made Muyun want to come visit Hong Kong himself.

Now he was here, but not sure what to do.

3

It had been a while since Yanyun last stepped onto Hong Kong Island, and she felt like every time she came, there were ten more names to learn for those new skyscrapers being built. Before Yanyun realized, she had followed someone who got off the bus and was walking on the Yee Wo Street. Her father once told her that the street was called “Kasuga Dori” during the Japanese occupation, meaning “the road of spring day,” but no one remembered that now.

Yanyun turned left at the next crossing onto a narrow road. There used to be a curry fish ball store at the end of the road, but now there was only a newsstand. The man behind the stand was talking to a few old men. They were clearly from the neighborhood and each of them was holding a bird cage. 

“I heard the family on the second floor upstairs was forced to leave two days ago,” one of them said.

Yanyun recognized the bird he was holding a red-billed leiothrix that had a white tummy. She bent down to take a closer look.

“Is that so? They’ve been here for years,” another one said. He had a thrush in the cage by his feet.

“At least six, seven years I bet. I’ve been eating their red bean buns for that long,” said the first man.

“Ah, I miss the smell of those freshly steamed buns,” the guy inside said. Yanyun couldn’t see the bird he was holding in the cage. It was hiding behind piles of newspaper.

“The policy has gotten tighter,” said the newsstand owner with a sigh. “But it might be a good thing. You know the robbery that happened in May right? In the bank at Central Plaza. That was just a few blocks away. Who knows, that might be done by one of those people from the mainland. You never know, they—”

The owner caught Yanyun’s eyes, and he stopped.

“Ah, Madam, are you looking for something? We’ve got all kinds of newspaper here, Ming Pao, Sing Tao Daily, the Daily News, …”

Walking down the street, Yanyun flipped over the front page, the News section, then the Local page and the Sports, before reaching the Arts. She quickly skimmed over and found what she was looking for: …leading musicians in the orchestra, …, Muyun Zhou. Even though she saw the name a few weeks ago on the newspaper, Yanyun could feel her heart miss a beat.

She folded and put the newspaper in her handbag, and checked the bottom layer to make sure her ticket was there.  

4

By the time Muyun crossed off the second to last one on the list of “places to visit” written by his father, it was close to sunset. Most of the places on the list, restaurants, bookstores, coffee shops, record shops, were gone. Even his father’s favorite museum was under renovation.

Muyun walked along the shoreline, wondering if there was anything in Hong Kong that was left unchanged since his father’s time. A group of high school girls approaching the Wan Chai Ferry Pier caught his eye. They kneeled at a corner of the pier, by a big black and white picture of a good-looking young man. Around the picture were bouquets of white and orange chrysanthemums, blooming, and standing candles that were shimmering in the summer breeze. One of the girls took out a cassette player. Some girls started sobbing when the music started.

Muyun couldn’t speak Cantonese, but he could catch some lines and vaguely understand their meaning, “You’ve lost what you owned in those years, but there’re still hopes in your weary eyes, now we’ve only got the empty life, to see the glorious life….” Maybe he had heard it before in his father’s gramophone.

The girls gradually calmed down, and were sitting together on the ground in silence. Muyun stood and watched the sun falling. Before the sun was swallowed by the sea, Muyun decided to leave for the last place on the list. He had to move fast since that was his last night in Hong Kong.

5

Yanyun went upstairs. The crimson door stood there, waiting. She put her hand on the darkened knob, tracing the peeled off golden paint that was once inseparable from the metal beneath. She heard something, bright and clear like a pale blue sky reflected on rippling water, with some mellow notes occasionally disturbing the surface like slender threads of bluish green streams. For a second, she thought he was back.

But all of the melody was gone when she opened the door.

The room had hardly changed. The sofa, the table, the fish tank, even those paint brushes she left behind… and the piano. She sat down and opened the keyboard cover.

Yanyun let her fingers stroke through the keys. To her surprise, she saw her fingers start to move and press the keys, first her right hand only and then both hands, playing as if they had been rehearsing without her.

Waltze Op. 69 No.2 in B minor by Chopin. Valse.

How did it start?

Fa sharp, her ring finger pressed the black key.

Right, The harmonic minor, the special one, the favorite child. It pushed the door open.

Duet moved to trio, dancing, spinning, swirling, endless turns as if they could keep going on with those steps over and over again.

Then she heard the change of tones, delightful bright colors fading into dull gloomy sorrows. Hues of joy replaced by a mysterious questioning that kept coming back with pedaled echoes before her hands finally let it go.

Yanyun found herself sweating as if the last ray of sunset had fully soaked into her body. She carefully laid the cloth cover evenly on the keyboards and closed the lid.

The keys were out of tune, probably had been for a long time.    

6

To his surprise, it was a small restaurant at the corner. Though with little space, the place was very popular, filled with customers. The only empty seat was at a table that already sat three old folks who looked a little too fashionable for someone at their age. On the floor were three bird cages, which looked ridiculously big to Muyun. He had never seen anything like this before in New York. The idea of wandering around with a huge bird cage in hand at Times Square made him smile.

As Muyun approached the table, one of the old folks moved the cages out of the way.  

Based on the English translation added on the side of the original menu, Muyun ordered Wantan noodles and a tangerine-flavored red bean paste.

Hearing the order, the old guy sitting across shook his head. “Since Master Wu left, the red bean paste is not good as before.”

“You can’t really blame him. Everyday is different now. Who knows what is gonna happen in three years when the handover actually comes?” The folk next to Muyun spooned the soy sauce over the steamed Kai-lan.

“Those Hongkongers,” snorted the guy sitting diagonally opposite to Muyun, “are not the real Hongkongers. As soon as something happens, they all just flee as quickly as possibly.” 

“The real Hongkongers,” another one sighed.

The soup arrived, and the three old folks sat there quietly, enjoying the rest of their meal.

By the time Muyun finished his noodles and the last bit of the red paste, the three fashionable old folks had already left. So had the other customers.

Now Muyun could see why this restaurant was still popular after all these years. The food had a special flavor, especially the red bean paste was like nothing he had ever had before in the local Chinatown of New York. The paste tasted like one of those black and white films, a little grainy but that feeling from the past only made it rich and savory.

The TV was playing a music video in which the song sounded familiar, but it was in Cantonese.

On the screen, a woman was standing on a rising elevator. She had short black hair, wearing an oversized yellow floral shirt and a pair of sunglasses rimmed in that same color of yellow that was a little washed out. She looked like she cared for nothing. Her brows were a little edgy but not too much.    

Later in the video, she took off the glasses. She had the exact eyes that Muyun had imagined. He waited until the music video was over. As he was leaving, Muyun suddenly remembered the original song, “Dreams” by The Cranberries, but all he could hear now were the Cantonese lyrics sung by the woman in the video.

7

When Muyun was finishing up the tangerine-flavored red bean paste, Yanyun had locked the door for the last time.

She ran into Aunty Chen downstairs. At first Yanyun could hardly recognize her. This small old lady in front of her was in no way resembling the tall and fashionable woman from twenty years ago. She sat quietly in that wheeling chair, enjoying the precious little breeze in summer Hong Kong. She surely had shrunken so much that it seemed now more appropriate for Yanyun to call her “Granny Chen.”

It took Aunty Chen a while to recognize Yanyun.

“It’s been years since I last saw you. Let me see, it was at least two, three years ago…How have you been? Is Jiaying doing fine in Canada?”

“Right, that was the time I came back for the broken water pipe. It’s been a long time indeed… Jiaying’s doing well. She got engaged last month with someone over there and had been asking me to go live with them, so I am leaving next weekend.”

Aunty Chen nodded. “Jiaying is a good kid. You must be so happy now that she has settled down. Canada’s nice. There were quite a few in the neighborhood moved there in the last couple of months.”

“It’s not so easy to leave behind so many things in Hong Kong. If it were not as a last resort, no one will make the decision to leave.”

“It’s better to leave now than to regret later. I’m too old to go anywhere anyways, but you still have a chance,” said Aunty Chen.

“I guess.”

“You plan to sell the apartment upstairs?”

Yanyun nodded.

“It must be hard after all these years. You know, from time to time, whenever I pass by your apartment, I could still hear him playing the piano. Isn’t that weird? I mean, I know it’s empty, but the music sounds so real.”

“To be honest, Aunty, sometimes I feel like I have forgotten what he looks like, but the music still sticks with me,” said Yanyun.

“I’m 79 now, and will turn 80 next month. I have seen too many people and too many things, and let me tell you something, he isn’t the only guy who knows how to play the piano under the sun. When you are young, you may think that’s the case. But that’s not true,” Aunty Chen patted Yanyun with her hand.

Yanyun reminisced Aunty Chen’s words as she was waiting in the building manager’s office. She took a ball of yarn from her handbag.

It was her favorite color, sky blue. Tough a little rotten over the years, the wool was still so incredibly soft.

He said he would make a scarf for her when he finished his studies and came back from the U.S. But she stopped hearing from him after three months, and all of her letters were returned, unopened.

Yanyun put back the ball of yarn as the manager came in. That was the last thing she picked up from the apartment.

8

As Muyun was on his way back, he passed by a six-floor building that looked exactly like the one that his father used to live and had once described to him. It was built in those red bricks.

Muyun stood there, feeling so close and so distant to the Hong Kong in the past. He didn’t know how long he had been standing there, gazing at this random old building in front of him, until a guy bumped into him. He was very tall and was wearing one of those shiny black leather coats that were obviously on trend now. Two fellows in his ensemble even talked about getting one of those to impress people back home. Without apologizing, the guy kept moving forward.  

He reminded Muyun of New York, where people didn’t even bother to stop when bumping into someone. Muyun thought it was funny for him to find something similar between these two cities that were so far apart. 

9

Yanyun passed the Blue House. The four-storey tenement block of tong lau had stood there quietly since the last century. The over-saturated blue was still vivid. Yanyun heard that the osteopathy clinic on the first floor would soon be renovated, though she would no longer be here by then.

Yanyun turned left at Wai Chai Road Crossing, and stopped at Wai Chai Market on Queen’s Road East. The place hadn’t changed much. Quan’s Fresh Fruits (铨记鲜果), Liang’s Fresh Fish (梁记鲜鱼), Huangguo’s Seafood (黄国记海鲜), those old stores had existed even before Yanyun. Ever since she could remember, her mother had been buying groceries here. There was a time back in middle school when she was so obsessed with Yangming Barbecue/Roast Restaurant (杨明烧腊饭店) that her mother had to reserve half of a grilled goose or duck every Friday.

Yanyun went inside and got herself a box of roast pork with rice. The familiar texture of the crispy skin and the overly oiled meat brought her back to thirty years ago. But the rice was harder than she remembered, and she felt full after only two chunks of meat. Swallowing the meat with fat in between, Yanyun could even feel it smooth out her esophagus with that sleek shiny soft touch. She wondered why she had never felt it was too oily before.

The side soup was a little stale. Yanyun wasn’t sure if it was because of the huge swollen piece of fruit peel, or because of the watercress.

Next to her table sat four girls who were still in their white uniforms from the high school nearby. One of them had her skirt rolled up a little bit just so it was above her knees. They were chattering about the “Four Heavenly Kings,” the four male superstars that everyone knew in Hong Kong. Who was the best actor, the best singer, had the most charming face or the sweetest voice…the debate went on and on.

Leaning against one of the girls’ chairs was a big black and white portrait. In a black frame, Wong Ka Kui (黄家驹) was looking at her with a crooked smile. Yanyun still remembered seeing him two years ago at a concert of “Beyond,” his rock band. She even waved her arms and sang along during “Glorious Years.” That was the only song she could recite the lyrics to just by hearing it in the radio.

Yanyun remembered she was so shock when learning from the radio that he died after falling from a three-meter platform during a game show rehearsal in Japan. It was only a year ago, though she felt like it was half a decade ago. 

The girl swung her legs back and forth on the chair. Her left foot brushed against the frame and the portrait slipped onto the floor. Next to a small wrinkled fruit peel dropped by some customer, Wong Ka Kui lied quietly on the tiles, with the smile on his face.

10

When Muyun hurried to the Arts Centre, it was a little past seven. The changing room was already empty. As Muyun put on his white shirt and ivory bowtie, something slipped out of his pocket. He picked it up. It was his father’s list on which all of the places were crossed off except for the last one. Muyun found a pencil and, in earnest, crossed it off.

He looked at the list, feeling both accomplished and empty at the same time. Muyun saw himself in the mirror and had the weird feeling of not knowing himself only after three days in Hong Kong. The place had changed him, permanently, in an irreversible way. He took a deep breath and adjusted his bow tie before leaving the room.

11

Yanyun stayed in her seat. It was intermission and people around her started to move to the exit to take a short bathroom break.

She didn’t see him for the first half.  She had no doubts that she would recognize him once she saw him. Maybe he couldn’t make it the last minute. Maybe he was ill.

Her heart sunk a little bit.

Most of the orchestra members were backstage, preparing for the second half of the concert. Only a few of them stayed on stage, focused on adjusting the position of their instruments. A young man in the back caught Yanyun’s eye. He seemed to be fiddling with something on his lap. She squinted her eyes to better see him, but could only see the French horn in front of him. He was looking down…knitting. 

Like waves from the Victoria Harbour, memories flooded back, overwhelming her all at once.

It keeps my hands moving even when I’m not playing the piano. He used to say.

Through the tunnel of time, she saw him smiling. Suddenly, his face was clear. His bushy eyebrows, eyes behind the glasses, and the soft curve on his mouth.  

Yanyun felt she was trembling before seeing her hand was indeed shaking.

12

Muyun looked up. Across the first couple of rows, he found her. It was a woman who was wearing a ruby shirt, which caused her to merge with the back of the seat. Because of the strong spotlight above him, Muyun couldn’t see her very clearly, though he felt she looked familiar.

Even across the audience seats, he found her stare bold and intense as if she was Xraying him with her eyes. Muyun gazed at her direction. Though the light was strong above him, he was sure that their eyes met in the air. Suddenly, Muyun had the urge to go jump off stage to meet her. But other members started to come back, and he had to put away the needles and yarn on his hands. When he lifted the French horn, he saw she had dropped her head.

13

Yanyun didn’t know how she sat through the second half of the concert. She was glad that the auditorium was dark enough so no one would have caught tears streaming down on her face.

When she finally remembered to check the concert program, it was clear that Zhou Muyun was indeed one of the leading artists, except not for piano and that this Zhou Muyun was born in 1974 rather than 1952. 

It felt too much like a joke.

She had prepared herself to come see him only to discover that it was all for nothing. 

When Bus N121 left the Harbour Crossing Tunnel and rejoined the bustling street in Hong Hum, Yanyun heard something explode from afar. A few minutes later, when the bus stopped at a crossing, a motorcycle ran past in the reverse direction. The guy on it was wearing a shiny black leather coat.

The small TV in the bus was playing a clip from Wong Kar-Wai’s new film released last weekend. On the screen, Leung Chiu Wai was standing in a local market with Faye Wang.

“You wanna study?” Leung Chiu Wai asked.

“Never thought of that. I just wanna have fun,” replied Faye Wang casually.

“Where are you gonna have fun?”

“Dunno, perhaps California.”

“California? Is it fun there?”

“Maybe. If not, I’ll go somewhere else.”

Faye Wang looked shy but freeing and rebellious. She had the same short hair that Yanyun used to have twenty years ago.  

Yanyun looked away. She suddenly thought of the young man who played the French horn at the concert. She wondered if he had the eyes of Leung Chiu Wai.

14

The next morning, Muyun left with the rest of the ensemble for the next stop of their tour.  As he leaned his head against the window, watching the city getting smaller and smaller and eventually become invisible under the clouds, Muyun thought of the woman from the concert last night. As soon as he put down the French horn, he ran out of the backstage to look for her, but she had already gone. Among the crowd, he found himself lonely, missing and even craving her stare. He wanted to go back, reverse Time, and seize the chance when he still had it, running off stage to stand in front of her, to see her, and to check if she indeed had big bright eyes just like the singer he saw on TV in that small restaurant. Muyun felt he was there again, in that very concert hall.

Just when he thought he was so close to reach her, the plane hit some turbulence and woke him up.

First Death

“Your aunt is sick,” Ting-ting’s mother said in her most peaceful voice.

 Ting-ting stopped goofing around. Her mind went blank for a second. “Yeah, pneumonia, you told me—”

“Advanced lung cancer,” her mother said calmly.

Even years later, Ting-ting could easily remember that night. It was one of the steamy summer nights in Shanghai. As if the air conditioner had finally worked, suddenly, all of the humidity was sapped out of the air.

Ting-ting looked at her mother. There was a second that she secretly wished it was just another horrible joke that her mother invented to scare her and trick her into studying for the upcoming high school entrance exam.

Ting-ting watched her mother, whose solemn eyes focused on the printer—lying on the desk and creaking breathlessly as if it is broken inside. Her stomach dropped.

“Is it … uh … is it …” Ting-ting found it frustrating to pick the right word out of hundreds of thousands of Chinese characters she had learnt, memorized, and even used in essays to please her Chinese teacher. After all, she was so good at this.  

 “…Is it…curable?”

 “No, it is not curable.”

The noise of the printer was getting more and more unbearable.

“Oh,” Ting-ting did not know what to say, “Then how long? How long does she have left?”

“Six months to two years … it varies … no one knows for sure.”

As if someone had thrown a basketball at her head, Ting-ting wasn’t sure if it was an accident or a terrible joke.

 “Can’t you think of something to help her? Give her a couple more years, at least … after all, you are a doctor and you have many doctor friends…”

“Right,” her mother sighed, “But there are cases even doctors can’t do anything about it.”

The printer suddenly began to vibrate. It became so loud that Ting-ting had to try hard to hear what her mother was saying.

“My friends have already found her the best possible doctor at the best hospital in Shenyang, and I am going back tomorrow to check on her.”

“Your grandpa and grandma don’t know about this yet, so you’d better behave yourself. Remember, don’t trouble them with anything you can handle yourself. There’s a lot to worry about already.”

Ting-ting nodded although she wasn’t sure she had heard all the words.

 “Don’t goof around like a fool. You are the one who is going to take the entrance exam, so, from now on, you’re on your own. I won’t pick up on you like this, come in every single time and catch you doing nothing. I won’t have the mood. You understand?”

 “I will be good,” Ting-ting mumbled, “But, are you planning to tell them? They are going to know, aren’t they?”

 “As soon as the time is right, I will.”

Ting-ting leaned forward to her desk and grabbed a pen, “I’m gonna study.”

Her mother took the newly printed documents and walked to the door. “Don’t you worry too much. She is my sister. I’ll do the best I can. And you do the best you can, which is study. You understand?” She left the room without looking back.

Ting-ting could not remember how many times she had later played these words in her mind. Every time just when she thought she had noticed something else in her mother’s voice, she heard nothing but the usual calmness.

Ting-ting dropped the pen because she couldn’t read any chemical elements on the practice exams at the moment. Unlike Chinese, English or even Math, chemistry always made her dizzy as if there was some kind of chemical reaction there, between her and the chemical markings on the page. She had to lie down.

Ting-ting dropped herself on her big soft bed. Her eyes wide open. She remembered one time, her best boy friend at school showed her a video in which a man was pressing on a woman, and together they were rocking in a strange way. It wasn’t until later that Ting-ting understood what was happening there. He must had thought he was sharing an intimate moment with her. But back then, she was disgusted. For a long time after that, she hated him for thinking she would understand something that she actually didn’t. She was forced to know something that she didn’t even want to. Ting-ting had her eyes closed. It was so quiet outside, even Grandpa was not watching the television news that night.

The following day, Ting-ting’s mother left. Ting-ting returned to her daily routine—school, home, dinner with her grandparents, and occasionally with her father when he came back from work early. As her mother had wanted, Ting-ting did not really think much about her aunt. In fact, she didn’t have the time. At school, all of her teachers tried to stuff one more thing in her mind before it got exploded. There was no time for her to rest. Every time she sneaked out of the classroom to fill up her water bottle, she imagined many more math problems were being solved by her deskmate, and even the thought of falling behind made her hurry up.

“Mom is right. Study comes first. There isn’t anything she could do to help anyway,” Ting-ting told herself every time she wondered if she had become someone like her mother, who was calm as always, sometimes too calm that it almost felt cold.

At home, Ting-ting stayed as quiet as possible and ate as fast as she could at the dinner table as if she was avoiding something. But avoiding what? Ting-ting didn’t know. The faster she tried to finish her meal, the harder she found it. No matter how much rice she managed to stuff in her mouth, there was something that prevented her from swallowing. Something subtle but hard and sharp, clinching to her throat like a fish bone. She remembered, one time, she actually had to go to the doctor to get it out because she couldn’t eat with something stuck in her throat. But this time, no one was going to take it out.

 A late afternoon a few days later, Ting-ting came back from school. She opened the door and immediately sensed that there was something wrong. There were no lights on and there was no dinner on the table.

In the living room, Ting-ting saw her mother and her grandparents sitting in the quiet dark. She couldn’t really see their faces. But vaguely, she saw her grandmother sitting on the chair with green beans to be trimmed in her hands. Hearing her come in, Ting-ting’s mother glanced at her and said nothing.

Ting-ting dropped her school bag on the floor and sat next to her mother. No one attempted to explain anything to her, or had the slightest intention to break the bleak air. She did not know how long before her grandfather finally got up, slowly and heavily. He seemed to look at something, far from him, or nothing in particular. Ting-ting couldn’t tell as his eyes remained hidden behind the glasses.

Ting-ting watched him trudge back to the bedroom. As if he had suddenly shrunk, Grandpa was no longer the same person Ting-ting had known before. Even just by watching him from the back, Ting-ting knew that for sure. Suddenly, Ting-ting realized, it had been a while since the last time she heard him watch the news. He had stopped for a reason. He might have had also been escaping.

Later that night, Ting-ting went back to her room. Before she went to bed, she remembered the last time she saw her aunt. She was still so lively and vibrant, telling everyone the joke of baby Ting-ting accidentally pooping on the patent leather shoes she had just bought for work. It was the first time that Ting-ting thought of her aunt after knowing her illness. Before realizing, Ting-ting found herself crying silently. It had all changed. From now on, she wouldn’t have another aunt telling the same joke. And that seemed like a bigger joke.

It was only years after that Ting-ting’s mother, for the first time, started to tell Ting-ting stories about her aunt. How she was born and survived during the three years of the Great Chinese Famine, how she was forced to go to a junior college, how she was introduced to her husband … and later how she died. Ting-ting couldn’t remember how their conversation ended up there, but it seemed her mother could go on telling those stories forever. It must have had been hard for her mother to have kept them all to herself for that long, Ting-ting thought. There were no tears on her mother’s face. She was calm as usual. But Ting-ting knew, just like her tears streaming down silently that night, there was much to be said underneath the calm surface.