Kowloon Tong (12 page)

Still rehearsing excuses, Bunt was imagining being brisk and businesslike with Hung:
Talk to my lawyer. Monty will see you right ... It's out of the question ... I am afraid you are very much mistaken, Mr. Hung ... Well, you would say that, wouldn't you?

Mr. Hung said, "You're not paying attention, Neville."

"Sorry," Bunt said, and loathed himself for uttering the hated word.

The waiter stood smartly taking down Hung's order on a pad, writing efficiently and, as he did so, repeating what Mr. Hung was saying. After a moment, Bunt realized why Mei-ping and Ah Fu were uneasy. Mr. Hung was addressing the waiter in Mandarin, not Cantonese. Although he could not speak either one, Bunt could distinguish between the two languages: the snarling twang of one, the goose honk of the other, as different as a xylophone is from a lawnmower, and Cantonese was the lawnmower.

Hung dismissed the waiter abrupdy, then looked at the young women. "Did you understand what I said?"

Ah Fu giggled. Mei-ping said, "Little bit."

"Good for you."

Wanker.

"And what did I order?"

Plonker.

"
Feng tsai,
" Mei-ping said. And to Bunt, "Chicken feet."

"But
feng
isn't chicken," Hung said. "
Feng
is phoenix."

"I knew that," Bunt said. "
Yet lau, yet feng
—one room, one phoenix. It's an old tradition here."

The local expression for a prostitute working on her own in Hong Kong, spoken by Bunt, caused Mei-ping to blush and giggle miserably at Ah Fu.

"These are chickens," Hung said when the food was brought. Six dishes were placed in the center of the table.

"Those are chickens too," Bunt said, nodding towards the women. "
Gai dao
is a chicken house. Knocking shop, we would say."

Mei-ping covered her face in embarrassment while Ah Fu looked up to see whether anyone else in the restaurant heard what Bunt had said. Hung's merciless eyes were querying Bunt again.

"I was born here," Bunt said. "I know my way round."

He knew perhaps a dozen words of Cantonese, which seemed to Bunt more than adequate. He had lived in the colony his entire life. Now he looked back and wondered. Of the many offenses Mr. Hung had committed against him, one of the worst was that he had made Bunt reflect with bitterness on his life.

"I hope you are hungry," Mr. Hung said.

He had ordered all the dishes without consulting anyone else at the table, and even Bunt, who denounced'Chinese food and never ate in such restaurants, knew that was bad form. But why should Hung care? For all their beauty, the two women were lowly factory workers, and Bunt was a prisoner.

"Chicken feet," Mr. Hung said. "Phoenix feet."

Hearing that, Bunt resolved that he would not eat, nor would he even pretend to. Not eating would be his protest and his rejection of the hospitality. He would defiantly remain sober, too, a condition that Mr. Hung had abandoned. The man was grinning stupidly and almost drooling.

"What's funny?" Mr. Hung said to the women.

They giggled on, chattering hard, their eyes fixed in manic fear.

"Sit near me," Mr. Hung said to Ah Fu. "There, I am sure Mei-ping would be happier sitting with Neville."

Though he hated the man for suggesting this, Bunt knew that to object would only expose him to greater ridicule.

"She can have my share," Bunt said, for he saw Mei-ping picking at the cold dishes. What Bunt wanted to say was,
I don't think of this as food, and I would not even dream of putting it into my mouth.
When Mei-ping offered some to him he drew back, hoping that Mr. Hung would see his expression of shock, and said, "Of course not."

Brandy was gleaming on Mr. Hung's lips. He looked drunk, his face pinkish and raw, his eyes boiled, and he was smiling in a vicious way as he chewed with his mouth open. Bunt remembered the look of greed, of heedless hunger, he had seen on Hung's face in the lounge of the Regent. It was the face of the desperate peasant who had been wrenched from his village and plunked down in luxury. Hung had not known that Bunt was staring at him: that was Hung's real face.

Hung said, "These chicken feet are first quality. You appreciate them?"

He was speaking to Ah Fu as he examined a chicken foot, using his chopsticks like tongs and dangling the yellow foot in front of his watery eyes. Then he dropped the chicken foot on his plate and began to claw at it.

"I think so," Ah Fu said softly, her voice trailing off.

"Are you completely bewitched by them?" Hung's lower teeth showed as he set his jaw to tear off a piece of the chicken foot.

Ah Fu murmured to Mei-ping, who said, "She says you speak English so well."

Hung was hunched over the drooping foot, scraping at its yellow scales, dragging white tendon strings from its slender shank.

"In the future, we will teach you," he said, gripping the chicken foot in his teeth.

Hung meant after the Hand-over, the Chinese take-away, now no more than a year off. Bunt loathed the subject, and when it came up always said, "I don't even want to think about it," and here he was, hating himself and listening to a Chinese man chewing and gloating over it.

"So many people will come to Hong Kong," Mei-ping said. "Chinese people."

Hung was still chewing, bits of leg scales on his lips, the chicken foot near his mouth as he gnawed, and still he replied, saying, "Not necessarily."

"They will take our jobs, we think," Mei-ping said.

Hung looked at her sternly, like a teacher distracted by a commotion at the back of the class. He held the chicken foot upright in the grip of his chopsticks.

"That's what people say," Mei-ping said. "Because the Chinese are clever and well trained. They are also tough."

"But we are rubbish," Ah Fu said, chewing with a downturned mouth.

Hung did not reply but instead went on cramming the chicken foot into his mouth, finishing it off with his teeth. He spat a knuckle of gristle onto his plate and reached for another chicken foot.

"Not to worry," he said, and gnawed. His face was so contorted by his chewing that he seemed to have no eyes. "We will teach you."

Ah Fu had been picking and peeling the mottled skin from her chicken foot. Mr. Hung's gruntings showed her how to work the skin free and she timidly thanked him.

Seeing her draw away from him, Hung thrust his face at her and said, "I want to eat your foot."

Bunt was disgustedly drinking a pint of beer, eyeing the table with its dishes of sticky pork and soggy and wilted lettuce, the black vegetables, the gray broth, the purple meat. On one dish of yellow meat was a severed chicken's head, its eyes blinded, its scalloped comb torn like a red rag.

Hung's elbows were thrust out, his blue tongue showed as he stuck his chopsticks into the dish of yellow meat and used them like pliers to grasp a fragment of chicken breast. Its white flesh was exposed when he left a bite mark on it, then he chewed and gagged and pursed his lips. Again, with a retching noise, he spat garbage onto the table.

"This is delicious because it has been strung up," he said. "You know how? Some string—tie it." He made deft throttling and knotting gestures with his fingers. "Truss it well and hang it for days. Let it air dry. Just dangle there."

Bunt watched the man salivate as he spoke.

"It becomes tender and fragrant."

Still salivating, Hung looked into the middle distance and apparently beheld the thing with his watery eyes, a suspended creature with a rope around its neck and its head flopped over. The apparition seemed to fill him with lust.

Bunt was frowning. Yes, the Chinese man had said,
I want to eat your foot.

Bunt drummed his fingers on the table impatiently. He had stopped being bored, he was now furious and wary, listening to the drunken man describe how a chicken should be trussed.

"Say something."

It took a moment before Bunt understood that the man was speaking to him.

"I have nothing to say."

Plonker,
he thought. And,
What am I doing here?

"My partner," Hung said to Ah Fu, and when he touched her she stiffened inside her dress and got smaller. "Here, I have something for you."

Mr. Hung searched his pockets and found a silk pouch, which he opened. He removed a piece of jade—small, dark green, a pendant of some sort. He held it before Ah Fu's face.

"Open your mouth."

The young woman obeyed, her tongue twitching, and Mr. Hung put it into her mouth. She pressed her lips together and worked it for a moment like a cough drop, then spat it into her hand and thanked him in a fearful voice.

Hung laughed and said, "Where is the bitter melon?"

Hearing the insistent question, the waiter hurried over, walking in the jerky way he had all evening—nervousness, perhaps.

"I gave you instructions," Hung said.

"Yes, sir."

"Bitter melon," he cried out. "Are you stupid?"

Bunt was always puzzled when he heard two Chinese people speaking to each other in English, but this was almost too much for him.

"Do you see any melon on this table?" Saying that, Mr. Hung snatched a knife and added, "Here, or here, or here?" He slashed repeatedly on the table for emphasis, leaving a narrow cut each time in the stained tablecloth.

"It was not served, sir," the waiter said, examining the order pad with his finger. "Very sorry."

"If you didn't write it down, that's your problem," Mr. Hung said. "Now stop arguing with me and bring it. I want it now!"

His mouth gaped open, full of yellow teeth and metal crowns and fragments of food. His tongue was discolored. His eyes were glazed, exhausted, red-veined, almost squeezed shut by the puffy flesh around them. His head was damp, his hair spiky.

He had perhaps not realized that several full minutes had passed since he had howled at the waiter. He turned his drunken face to Ah Fu and Mei-ping.

"Chickens," he said, and slavered.

They were terrified, Bunt could tell. They deserved to be, for being there at all.

"Where do you think you are going?" Mr. Hung yelled, just as he had spoken to the waiter. But before he could repeat it, Bunt had gone through the gold-painted moongate entrance and was out the door.

O
N THE
Star Ferry (the Rover wouldn't start, he had taken the Peak tram, and now he was crossing the harbor) the obscure suspicion that something was wrong nagged badly at Bunt. It was like the leftover derangement of a dream, as when he woke up flustered, in damp pajamas, with a taste of glue in his mouth, troubled by nameless blame. He had stolen something, he had broken something, he had given offense, he was hideously late. Blunders filled all his dreams. From the ferry rail he saw a flimsy plastic bag ballooned and floating just beneath the water's surface with a sodden length of rope attached to it. He wondered if it would snag on the ferry screws. Nearby a shoe bobbed upside down, as though marking a drowning.

At breakfast his mother had said, "What's wrong?" and that had only made it worse, because he suspected that something was seriously wrong, but he could not say what.

"See you letter," he heard. It was a child's voice.

A man and woman sat in chairs by the rail with their small child between them.

"See you
later,
" the man said.

"See you letter," the child repeated.

"And how are you?" the woman pronounced.

"And how are you?" The child was excited, his voice was shrill.

"One, two, three, four, five, six," the man said.

"One, two, fee, fo, fi, sick." The child sang the numbers.

"See you later."

"See you letter!"

Bunt would have been happier hearing them speaking Chinese. This English lesson was a reproach, and under the circumstances it was futile. He walked to the stern, hating the chatter. He could not account for his uneasiness, yet he was sure that today something was distinctly different. He sensed an emptiness, as of something missing. There was this morning a small hole in the world and he had the uncomfortable notion that he had made the hole. It was worse than a hole, it was a leak.

Hong Kong was not really home because Hong Kong was always strange to him, and so Bunt never spent a day in the colony without feeling that he was partly inhabiting a dream. His dreams were familiar only as foreground and the rest was foreign; his dreams were cloudy, and fuzzy at the edges. He flew in his dreams with his arms out, but he seldom knew what country he was flying over, and he never landed. Often, leaving Kowloon Tong and work, and entering the bungalow at night, seeing his mother, he had the impression that he was just waking to reality after a day of abstraction. The city's bad air and confusion and accusatory noises kept him indoors.
I live here. I will not die here,
he told himself. It was the only place he had ever lived in, and yet Hong Kong was not home. Home was a larger, warmer word. Perhaps Albion Cottage was his home, but his mother crowded it.

Just the fact today that his car would not start added to his anxiety. He had an inkling that the truth would be revealed and someone would tell him what was wrong. He hoped his dream, whatever it had been, was misleading and that he was not responsible.

Approaching the Imperial Stitching Building, he noticed that the Union Jack was not flying on the factory pole. The absence of the flag gave the building a colorless look, even a meekness, as of surrender.

"Mr. Woo did not come to work today," Miss Liu explained.

Bunt could not remember a time when Mr. Woo had been absent from work. In fact, since 1984 Mr. Woo had made a point of being punctual in raising the flag, as though making a statement against the Hand-over. Mr. Woo it was who refused to speak the name of the dictator of China—Bunt did not know the man's name, so it made little difference. Mr. Woo had a nickname for the man, and anyone within earshot giggled when Mr. Woo referred to him as "the Turtle's Egg."

"Is Mr. Woo the only person who knows how to run up the flag?" Bunt said.