A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
I heard him say I could not afford them, it hurt my pride and made me angry. “Go back to your room and find your slippers!” I shouted at him, “And don’t bother me again!”
He stormed off, but in a few minutes came back laughing, holding his sandals in his hand – same size, same color. “They really are yours!” he said. “I had no idea you could afford to buy such things.”
Still angry and offended, I pulled a $500 bank note from my pocket and held it up in front of him. He was amazed. It was three month’s salary for him at the post office.
My cousin and her husband, now impressed with my sartorially-induced status, took me that day to have dinner with the family of her mother-in-law. She seemed to be showing me off very proudly.
Her mother in law, a lady in her late sixties, scrutinized me silently for five or ten minutes as my chubby cousin chattered on. Then she asked me my name, my school, my hobbies, what kinds of books I had read, and many other such questions. I answered politely, and she seemed surprised. She looked me full in the face and said bluntly, “Everybody says children under Communism have dirty hair, don’t wash their faces, have skin problems, talk slang with lots of dirty words, and have no education or manners. But your skin is delicate and pale and you are very polite. Even the children of the wealthy here cannot compare to you. I would not know that you were from the Mainland.”
After that, dinner invitations poured in from many different people with lots of questions about education under Communism. It seemed that everyone who had heard of me wanted to see the unusual Mainland boy. But I soon tired of being the circus animal on show. Then I went from being tired to being disgusted. I wanted a change, and asked a close relative to take me swimming.
A private car picked me up the next day and took me to a nice little resort house set halfway up a hill from the ocean. When all the polite rituals had been completed, I changed and walked down to where clean water lapped the shore. I swam until weary, then walked back up the hill to find that a servant had a very nice lunch waiting for me.
As I ate, I looked down the hillside and noticed a very old man carrying two buckets of well water slowly up the tiny, winding road to the house. When he arrived, my relative gave him some money and told me, “You should rinse off in this to remove the sticky salt water.” The house did not have its own water supply. All had to be carried in.
After a fresh, cooling rinse, I put on a soft cotton beach garment and lay down on a lounge chair, nibbling food and enjoying the ocean view. I was living in the lap of luxury, feeling very contented. Then I saw the old man again.
He was bent under the weight of buckets of water he was carrying to a house even higher on the hill. How sad that such an old man should work so hard to bring water that I just poured over me for a few moments and then it was gone. I felt guilty. My Communist education kept popping up like that. I felt once more the bourgeois boy exploiting the working classes – an old man laboring to bring me water for a wasteful rinse – a servant working to bring me food.
I needed to talk about it. I found it difficult to express my feelings to my relative, but did nonetheless.
He burst into laughter. “You think the old man comes here for nothing? I give him money! Actually he would like you to take even more showers so he can make more money!”
Oh, why was life never simple? Capitalism sucks the blood from workers to support luxurious living, my Communist education told me. If you don’t hire the workers, they will have no money and will starve, my relatives told me. I ran the problem over and over in my head but could not solve it. It spoiled the rest of my afternoon.
I accepted the invitation of an old friend of my father to go fishing and swimming off his yacht. As we skimmed through the harbor we passed other small boats – sampans – no more than fifteen or twenty feet long, but sometimes there were as many as three generations living on a single one. I saw little kids with soft wood tied to their chests and backs to keep them afloat if they fell overboard. There were cages of chickens and ducks, and there were dogs. Day and night, for weeks, months and years, they all lived aboard in the same tiny space. When our much bigger yacht passed by, it made waves that rocked them to and fro.
I could not help thinking of the great gulf between poor and rich. Here I was on a big, spacious, luxurious yacht, and there they were living crowded aboard a tiny boat. That, I thought, was Capitalism.
But when the yacht pulled out of the harbor and into the open sea, I was overcome with emotion. How vast it was! Another young man and I both dived into the water. I had never before swum in the open sea, and what a pleasure!
Then I heard screaming. I swam quickly back to my companion and helped him to the yacht. He had brushed against the stinging tentacles of a jellyfish, and was in severe pain. His face was swelling where the poison strands had touched him. We hurried back to shore and took him to a hospital.
On the following day another “Auntie” introduced me to her nephews. One named Chak Ch’un was near me in age. We hit it off immediately, but I soon noticed that he never mentioned his mother and father, nor took me to visit them. When we got together, we always met at a theater door or at a bus station or street corner.
He was a great guy. He took me all over sightseeing. We visited cheap restaurants, places selling ice cream and soft drinks, and wonder of wonders, he took me to the places I had dreamed about – the places where I could use all the sugar I wanted! At first I dumped it in my soft drinks because it was such a rarity to me, but after a while I grew jaded and did not use so much. My friend seldom used any.
He taught me a number of interesting things, such as how to shake up a soft drink bottle and squirt it out under pressure with the thumb. It was a great waste, but it was fun.
We went to lots of movies, but only the afternoon shows one-third to one-half the usual price. Once we both picked a film titled “The Last Kiss,” because it sounded erotic. But it proved a great disappointment, just a dull story about a poor university student chasing a rich girl, with a murder thrown in. To have a more lucrative relationship, he threw his pregnant old girlfriend from a tall building after giving her a last kiss, thus the title.
Hmmph! That corny story seemed an illustration of Capitalism, which does everything for money. I pointed that out to my friend, but he said, “Oh, it’s just a made-up story – who cares?” I tried to explain to him how it was a revelation about Capitalism, but could tell from his face that I was boring him. So I decided to dismiss him as an apolitical, ignorant child.
But actually he was pretty smart. The next time we went to a movie we mistakenly arrived too late to get the cheap tickets. He asked an adult to pretend we were his children and get us in for half price. Then he turned to me and whispered, “When you pass the ticket guy, just try to look short.”
We left the theater long after dark, and I asked my cousin if I might spend the night at his house rather than showing up late and disturbing the people with whom I was staying.
It was not a good idea, he told me, because he did not get along well with his stepfather – but added that I could stay at his auntie’s.
I called and told my hosts someone had asked me to stay over. They were surprised, because that was rare in Hong Kong. It was so crowded that eight or nine people living in a single room – often three generations of a family – was very common. People seldom had space for overnight guests, so they assumed I was staying with a rich friend.
We took a bus to his aunt’s house, but as the road grew bad and in poor repair and the street lights vanished, I began to regret my decision. I looked out the windows and saw people sleeping out all along the sidewalks because it was a humid night and uncomfortable to sleep inside.
Eventually we stopped at a very run-down three-story apartment building. It looked as though the entrance had not been cleaned in years.
My cousin saw I was not happy. “Don’t worry, it’s just one night – only a few hours – then I’ll be back to get you,” he assured me. There was not enough room for both of us, he added, so he was going home to sleep.
Though