A Time of Ghosts. Hok-Pang Tang
heard the constant clack of mahjong tiles, and voices telling dirty jokes punctuated by loud laughter.
We went right to the room where the game was in progress. Four women played amid about seven or eight kids sleeping on the floor. As we entered, an old lady of about fifty rose from the table with a big smile on her face and greeted us.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Have you had dinner?” She barely waited for an answer before immediately producing cookies and candy, looking at me curiously all the while to figure out who I was.
My cousin explained. “We went to a movie too late, so my cousin here needs a place to stay for the night so he doesn’t wake up the people he’s staying with.”
It turned out the room we were in was the neighbor’s. His auntie led us next door to another small room that served as her apartment. It was packed with her belongings – clothing, snack foods, and cartons of cigarettes. There was one bed.
She apologized to him. “I don’t have an extra bed, and you are a big boy now. You can’t sleep with your auntie any more.”
“I’m going to sleep at home,” he replied. “He’s the only one who needs a place tonight.”
She pulled some sheets from a drawer and put them on the linoleum floor. Then she took one of the pillows from her own bed and placed it at one end of the sheets. That was my bed. Then she said she had to get back to the game, and told my cousin to show me where the bathroom was.
He led me down a long hallway with five rooms on the sides. I peeked into each as we passed. The doors were perpetually open, with just a curtain pulled to one side or open bamboo blinds to allow any possible breath of air to enter. All the windows were very small. Hong Kong was very humid, and at that time there was no air conditioning.
Privacy seemed unimportant, and the residents had nothing valuable to steal, and besides, a thief could seldom make his way across a room without tripping over the sleeping bodies of several people. There were even folding beds placed out in the hallway.
In the second room people were also playing mahjong, and again about five filthy kids of various ages slept on the floor. The humidity made them sweat, and the sweat made them smell.
In the third room a light was on, and what I saw made my heart jump. A big, tall foreigner was lying on a bed holding a tiny, half-nude Chinese woman. Both were smoking. I tried to pause for a better look, but my cousin hurried me onward.
In the fourth room a husband and wife snored soundly on their bed, illumined only by the dim light from the hall. Four children slept close by in a homemade bunk bed.
The door to the last room was closed. “A ‘Dao-friend’ lives there,” my cousin whispered. By that he meant a drug addict. Certain Daoists ate no meat, only raw vegetables, and were pale and skinny and weak-looking, with heads slumped so that their ears were nearly on their shoulders. That happened to be a good description of the way drug addicts looked too, thus the slang term.
We came to the end of the hall, where there was a public kitchen on one side and the public bathroom on the other, and there my cousin left me. In the kitchen each family had its own tiny clay stove, just big enough to hold one wok. There were no cooking facilities in their rooms.
The bathroom had large wooden buckets with lids, one for each family. Those were the toilets. They were emptied only once a week, so the bathroom reeked and was crawling with cockroaches. The walls were dark with soot, like the inside of a chimney, caused by daily smoke from the kitchen across the hall. Dirty water was all over the floor. The “sink” was a huge clay pot of water that one dipped out with a ladle.
I was appalled. I hurriedly urinated and got out of that terrible stink as fast as I could, and went back to my room. On the way I tried again to peek in at the tall foreign man and small woman on the bed, but the light was out and I could not really see anything.
I said good night to my cousin, then lay down by myself. I wondered about the lives of the people in the building, and thought of the line from Anna Karenina: “All happy families are similar, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I wondered whether the families living here were happy or unhappy.
The room was very close. The hot, smelly, humid air made breathing unpleasant, and with the constant clack and whir of mahjong pieces, the talk and the laughter, sleep was difficult – but finally it came.
I awoke some time during the night to the loud sound of a woman sighing and gasping and moaning in a regular rhythm in some other room. I could see that my host was in bed asleep near me, so I got up and shook her gently. She opened her eyes and looked at me.
“Hey, do you think somebody is sick?” I asked, as the moaning continued its odd rhythm. “Do they need help, do you think?”
She gave me an odd look, then replied, “Oh, I don’t think so. Maybe they just ate some bad food and got diarrhea. They will feel better in a while. Just ignore it and go back to sleep.”
She was right. The moaning increased in intensity, the rhythm quickened, and then suddenly it stopped. I fell asleep again.
I woke very early in the morning to a breath of cool air coming through the tiny window. I got up, peeked out at the street, and inhaled the outside air. Several delivery trucks were making morning rounds, and people were rising from sleep on the street as others walked off to jobs. A food stand on the corner already had a long line waiting for breakfast.
My hostess was still asleep in bed, snoring loudly. Suddenly, to my discomfort, I found I had to urinate.
On my way down the hall to the bathroom, the first thing I saw was a very nicely ironed British sailor’s uniform hanging on the wall. Next to it, in a narrow space under the attic stairs, was a small, folding iron camp bed. In the bed was a big, tall young foreign man asleep. His whole body was light brown and covered with fine, brown hair, like all not-quite-human foreigners. A tiny Chinese woman was asleep at his side. As I stared at him, he yawned and opened his eyes. My presence did not seem to surprise him in the least. “Hello!” he said.
I was afraid, and so disturbed by what I had seen that I did not continue on to the bathroom, but hurried back to my room. I waited a long time for my cousin to show up. After a while the woman I had seen in bed with the foreigner appeared at the door with some toast and milk she tried to give me.
I did not feel comfortable eating food from the hands of a woman I considered dirty and immoral. I felt it would pollute my hands. She was trying to be nice to me, but I was rude, so she left.
Finally my cousin appeared. I did not even say goodbye to his auntie, but hurried down the stairs as fast as I could. I gulped in the fresh air outside, then turned on him.
“How could a British sailor abuse our Chinese women?”
He seemed not to understand what I was talking about.
“Did you know that a Chinese woman was asleep up there with a British sailor holding onto her?”
My cousin gave me a strange look, then said, “So what? She’s a dancing girl, and the sailor is her customer. She takes them home to sleep. That’s her job.”
“No!” I nearly shouted, “That’s not an occupation! That’s prostitution!”
He gave me a weary look. “Oh, it’s just books that say that. We call that kind of woman a ‘chick.’”
He acted as though it were all perfectly normal. He seemed not to understand me at all. I recalled how my political education teacher actually burst into tears when describing how foreign armies raided China during the Opium War and slept with Chinese women, and how the Japanese imperialists had done the same. We were told that many women committed suicide rather than be raped by foreigners, and that any woman so raped was forced to kill herself.
My cousin obviously did not get it. I felt it my duty to increase his political sensitivity, so I launched into a lecture on the evils of Chinese women sleeping with foreigners. Just as I was really warming to the topic, he spluttered suddenly and