Year of the Dragon (34 page)

TO ORCHID KOY the ride home seemed as endless as a day in school. She was like a schoolgirl being moved about at the behest of others. First stop was the Peninsula Hotel in downtown Kowloon where one of the ex-sergeants was registered. All of them trooped inside for the rite of afternoon tea. The Peninsula lobby at tea time was the place to be seen in Hong Kong, and had been since before World War II. After ordering tea and Western pastries, they stared around, stared into the babble of languages. The place was crowded, all tables taken, people waiting: European and Asian tourists, some British officials, mostly prosperous local Chinese.

At the sight of some acquaintances across the lobby, Orchid waved, attracting their attention. She wanted them to know she had her husband back. She wanted Koy to know she had not spent five years in a cloister. He quickly glanced that way, but saw no one he knew, and appeared disappointed. So she had new friends - after five years, what did he expect? He seemed almost jealous, and this pleased Orchid. It gave her hope, though perhaps it didn’t mean much. After tea the remaining two ex-sergeants had to be returned to their hotels through what was now rush hour traffic - the interminable afternoon continued. Only when this was accomplished could Orchid, if she wished, at last move off the jump seat to a place beside her husband. But she hesitated. The distance was greater than it looked, as was the danger. It was like crossing a busy intersection. One had to think it out first, then dash across. It was not something that could be done gracefully. One called attention to oneself. One looked clumsy doing it.

“Sit here,” said Koy.

She did so - there, it was done. Only now she didn’t know quite what to say to him, and so reverted to the deportment of her girlhood. She chose silence. She faced her destiny with naked eyes and frightened heart. She became like an old-style Chinese woman: she submitted with shyness, with downcast gaze, to the benign glance of her lord. She thought of their house that she had kept unchanged for him for five years. How would he find it? She herself was unchanged also, though she had aged more than it had. How would he find her? What were his feelings for her? What altered circumstance in his life had brought him back to her?

Now there was only the armrest between them, but it seemed to rise to the ceiling like a wall. Her emotions, un-perceived by him, seemed to bounce back on her side. The armrest was like a river. She could see him without being able to reach him. One needed a special implement to get across, a bridge, a boat. But she could find no bridge, though she looked, and all the boats were on his side.

Hong Kong traffic got more intense every year. From time to time as they moved slowly along the streets, Koy murmured that this or that had changed. He spoke in Hakka, the language of their courtship, and she answered in Hakka. Although she also spoke Cantonese and Mandarin, she had never learned much English. She answered in monosyllables because it was best to avoid all risk. Perhaps he did not wish her to speak. She had no confidence in herself. In his presence at last she realized this. There was none left. Confidence was like a candle that had gone out. Only he could relight it. She could not give confidence to herself. No one could. It had to come from another. Sometimes she could feel him staring at her, and she kept her gaze averted because she was afraid she might see, mirrored in his eyes, the woman she was: one who still did not speak English, and who as a result could not move easily in the same circles he did; a woman now closer to fifty than forty. A certain Chinese proverb had been much in her mind lately: the husband will pick a plum blossom as his wife becomes a prune. Nothing could be more normal than that.

Beside her Koy did not trust himself to speak either, for to speak would be to betray how hard his heart was beating. He wanted to take her in his arms but couldn’t because of the presence of the chauffeur. Public displays of affection, to a Chinese, were the worst form of bad manners and he had no intention of losing face in front of a chauffeur he had never seen before this day.

Even after they had entered their house, a mansion on a hill overlooking Repulse Bay and the South China Sea, he was constrained to act correctly, distantly, for some time longer. It was nearly dusk by then. The house had once been owned by a Pan American vice president in the days when Pan Am owned the only long-range flying boats able to cross the Pacific, and the internal airline of China as well. The chauffeur had carried Koy’s bags upstairs to the room Orchid had ordered prepared for him. When they heard his footsteps pattering down the back stairs, Koy turned toward his wife and in the dim light of the hallway, a yard of air between them, took both her hands. But they gazed at each other like the strangers they had perhaps become.

They had been married when she was fifteen years old, and he two years older. Already speaking English, he had come back from Hong Kong to her village to claim her. He was the first boy in Orchid’s life and she the first girl in his, but from the traditional point of view it had been a bad marriage for both, for she was only a village shopkeeper’s daughter. The streets of her village were not even paved, and she brought him no dowry. His father totally disapproved, and as a result he had been obliged to leave Canton, to take his bride to Hong Kong to try to make his fortune there - the young couple would have been ostracized by both families and by most friends had they stayed. To the Chinese at that time, and still today, there were a number of good reasons to marry, but love was not among them. To be sincere in love, it was written, was to be grotesque.

But suppose he had married some other girl in the traditional way, one chosen by the two families, Koy sometimes asked himself. What might his career have been? Probably he would have become a banker in Canton like his father. Instead he had landed in Hong Kong with a frightened fifteen-year-old girl to take care of, still a boy himself, with no money and no prospects, and he had fought his way up the only path he had seen open before him. As a businessman he had achieved undreamed-of prosperity. He had wanted to be respectable too, but had never had time. Prosperity had been due principally, he believed, to the rules of conduct he had set himself, and to which he had adhered rigidly. He believed in
li
- which might be defined as the Tightness of things. What was not
li
was not done. He learned to extract small amounts of money from the many, rather than large amounts from the few, and thus avoided the making of devoted enemies. These amounts were always stipulated in advance, and never exceeded, and in exchange he gave his clients what they paid for. He provided the protection he promised - protection from street marauders, from rival entrepreneurs, and from the police. Whenever possible he shied away from violence, which he had identified from the first as a bad business technique. Only occasionally was it essential, and even then he ordered it reluctantly, being careful each time to keep it at two or three removes from himself. He left such assignments to those with a talent for it: Sergeant Hung here in Hong Kong, and in later years Nikki Han in New York.

Now in the dim hallway Koy had reached at last for both his wife’s hands. She seemed to give them up reluctantly, like small change she did not really want to part with, and there was no expression on her face that Koy could read. Her face was like a road with no traffic on it, which disconcerted him completely. There ought to have been something. He started to speak, but was interrupted by footsteps on the staircase and then by the appearance of a teenage boy who came down upon them, out of control, bounding like a loose soccer ball.

“My son,” said Koy.

The boy was seventeen, and he pulled up short to see his father. He was dressed in blue jeans and a leather jacket, the international teenage uniform.

But his manner was surly. He was not interested in Koy and he was in a hurry to get out. “Hi,” he said. “Will you be here long?”

His mother reached to straighten out the collar of his shirt. “He would not come to the airport to meet his father,” she chided. “He said he was too busy.”

Koy was trying to feel joy to see his son. This was the only son he had - the three children in New York were all girls. But the boy was so distant it was difficult to feel anything at all. “I expected to see you,” he said.

After a short silence the teenager said: “Perhaps I did not believe you were really coming. When you went away I was a child. Perhaps I did not believe you were still alive.”

“We’ll spend some time together now,” said Koy heartily, but he had been stung by his son’s words. “It was not my wish to leave you when I did, nor to stay away as long as I have.” He was trying to explain himself, he realized, not so much to the boy as to Orchid.

“I have to go,” his son said sullenly. When he was halfway through the door, he muttered “I’ll see you later.”

Koy, both perplexed and hurt, turned back to his wife, but she did not move to console him. “He’s running with a bad gang,” she said. “I told you that on the phone. I can’t reach him. You’re his father. You have to do something.”

There were a number of reasons why Koy had returned to Hong Kong at this time. This was one of them. “I’ll try,” he said. He frowned.

Koy was unusual among Chinese, and he knew this - he was a man who valued females. He thought females were, or could be important. This was contrary to the Chinese tradition. There were many adages and sayings which perhaps sounded comical to Westerners but which the Chinese took seriously. For instance “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters.” Or, “When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls.” But Koy respected both his wives and valued all three daughters, whom he intended to educate in the best schools.

Nonetheless, he was not immune to the four thousand years of civilization that had formed him, and the firstborn son was special to every Chinese. This was especially true of Koy because the boy was so late in coming. He had thought for many years that Orchid could not have children - that he might die childless. When she had at last conceived she had wanted to go immediately to an astrologer to ask if the child would be a son, and Koy, wanting to know also, had not dissuaded her. But the astrologer after studying the stars had found only confusion, so she went to another seer who sought the answer in the entrails of a freshly killed duck. The answer there was confusion too, and they had had to wait eight more months to find out. His son’s birth had brought him great joy. The problem now was to decide how best to straighten the kid out. Could it be done here? Should Koy bring him to New York, enroll him in some tough school there?

“When are you going back?” Orchid asked.

“I can’t stay long in Hong Kong. Business-”

“Take him with you,” Orchid urged. “The boy needs a father - badly.” After hesitating, she added, “Take me with you. I need a husband.” Her eyes dropped to the floor and she added almost inaudibly: “Badly.”

“Well,” said Koy, “it would not be suitable for you in New York. Still we’ll talk about it later, all right?”

Orchid, who was wearing a white linen suit cut in the Western style such as any woman might wear to meet her husband at the airport, excused herself. She wanted to change before dinner, she said. Left alone, Koy pushed through the scarlet satin curtains that hung in the doorway and entered the principal room, and to his surprise it was just as he remembered it. The cushions on the carved wooden chairs were covered with the same scarlet satin. The tables were blackwood, and the overhead beams were painted blue and red. Here and there stood statuettes of various household gods and goddesses, and these were the guardians of happiness, money, and long life. On the walls hung picture scrolls of landscapes brushed in black ink upon white silk. The air was sweet to his nose - sweet with perfumes of soaps and oils. The floor was of tile, and latticed windows opened onto a court and onto a round, lighted pool where goldfish swam, their sides flashing in the light like birds in the sun. He turned back into the room. There was a mantelpiece on which stood two high brass candlesticks. Between them hung a painting of the sacred mountain of Wu T’ai, and under it stood a pot of yellow orchids, the imperial color.

It was Orchid who had chosen this house, and its ownership was in her name. Secretly, knowing Koy would not approve, she had consulted a geomancer or
feng-shui
expert before deciding to buy it - she had told him this afterwards. The Chinese believed that the universe was based on the interaction of two opposing forces, Yin and Yang, negative and positive, and that good
feng-shui
- living in a place where the combination of natural forces was harmonious - brought good fortune to a family. And although Koy no longer believed in gods and goddesses, or Yin and Yang - or astrologers - still he was pleased that his wife, when choosing a home, had decided to take no risks that could be avoided.

Koy went through into the next room, which was a kind of chapel. There were a dais and altar at one end on which stood an incense burner with vases of flowers to either side. The wall above was nearly covered with red and gold tablets that commemorated the family dead. If the Chinese made poor colonizers, Koy thought, it was because the wandering souls of their ancestors kept calling them back to pray in front of ancestral tablets such as these.