Chapter 19 And Then You Look Down
AND THEN YOU LOOK DOWN
Thirty-three years ago …
You wake in bed with the morning light streaming across your face, unaware of what has transpired in the night.
It is New Year’s Day, according to Hong Kong’s British calendar, though Lunar New Year is still a way off. Not that it means much. Time hardly seems to matter, on Shek Ham Chau. The world is far away in this place.
As you get up and walk through the house, you are shocked to discover ghosts milling around as if they belong, rifling through your things and leaving watery footprints on the floorboards. At least eight are thronging around the kitchen and poking through the garden.
“Hey!” you protest, and have to snatch a bowl away from a curious but clumsy ghost child.
It warbles at you plaintively, its face too bloated in death for you to work out whether it used to be a boy or girl.
An accident!
God’s will. God’s will.
The drowned priest is back, standing next to an old fisherwoman with seaweed in her hair. The pair of them drip in the kitchen as they repeat lines to each other endlessly. The fu talismans must have failed.
But when you go to check on them, they haven’t failed. They simply aren’t there. Someone has taken them all down.
It’s not exactly a mystery. There’s only one other person living in the house.
You stride outside furiously, in search of Mami. She’s hanging things on a washing line, basket of laundry on the ground.
Confronting a parent isn’t the natural order of things, not for a young woman of good Chinese upbringing. But neither is waking up to a house full of ghosts, apparently invited in on purpose.
And breathe. “Mami, there are ghosts in the house. Lots of them.”
“Yes.” That’s it. Her one-word reply.
“I thought we were going to talk about maybe leaving Shek Ham Chau?!”
“I changed my mind. I spoke to them last night, and we came to an understanding. It is best if you and I stay a little longer.”
“What does that have to do with taking down my fu talismans!”
“I didn’t want to offend them, or make them feel unwelcome.” Her tone suggests she thinks that is completely reasonable.
“Offend the…” It takes all your effort not to swear. “Mami, ghosts shouldn’t be under the same roof as us. That’s what you’ve always told me.”
“This is different. I am honoring our dead,” she says, stooping to pick up another item.
Spirit children chase one another in and out of the draped row of clothes while she works, and their whispers sound like water gurgling.
“The island belongs to them, and we hide here in safety because of their hospitality.”
“Ghosts do not own anything,” you say, exasperated. “The world of the living belongs only to the living. It is they who are guests, not us.”
“You understand nothing,” Mami said, fingers shaking a little as she pegs a shirt to the line. “I should not have survived, daughter.”
“… What?”
“I told you. Almost everyone died in the typhoon, yet I lived.” She fumbles the next peg, bends to pick it up. “Why should I have such good fortune to still be breathing?”
“Mami…” Your heart is heavy at her words.
Having been down to the village yesterday during its haunting, you can well imagine how terrible it must have been for a child to wake up to such destruction, death, and fear.
She shakes her head. “They said it was my sister who was bad luck, a curse to everyone.”
“Sister?” you say, ears perking up. The other little girl in the photo. “What about your sister? What happened—”
“But they’re wrong,” she interrupts, talking over you. “It is me. Me. I lived while others died and ever since that day, I carry my cursed luck wherever I go. I feel I owe it to my ghosts. How can I turn them away when I should be one of them?”
That rare moment of vulnerability moves you to pity and sadness. Your mother is beginning to look like the ghosts she loves; she has stopped tying up her hair, let it grow loose and tangled around her shoulders. Her clothes, once hospital-clean, are unkempt. The sleeves are streaked, dirty, torn.
Life has been hard on her. It has been hard on both of you. In this haunted place, trapped between time and tides, your shared grief exists in limbo. As if you are both caught between the real world and the underworld, just like the drowned villagers.
“Mami, nobody is at fault for a typhoon,” you say, gentle as possible. “You do not owe these ghosts any debt.”
She recoils as if slapped, lips trembling. “Ignorant ugly chicken!” she shouts. “What do you know about my life, about this island?” She flings down the shirt she is holding—it is one of yours, of course—and storms back to the house, arms wrapped around her chest.
In that single moment, your brief burst of sympathy and pity evaporates like mist, burned off by the hurt and indignation of many years. How easily she kindles anger in you; how swiftly she stings and lashes out. Only family can hurt family in that way.
Slowly, you bend to pick up the discarded shirt. It is freshly muddy, and will need washing again.
Ignorant ugly chicken.
She might be your mother, but Mami can’t stop acting like a hurt child. Some part of her has never healed from the past. She may be your mother, and you her daughter, and you may live together on this island, but it is through necessity of survival. Nothing more.
No point running after her, not again. You’re flat-out tired of always reaching for her, something you have been doing your whole life, only to hit walls and barriers and slaps. Why should the burden of connection always be yours?
Baba asked you to look after her, and you’ve been trying. But everyone has a limit. This might well be yours. If Baba comes back, he can sort it out. If he doesn’t … Well. Mami is old enough to know what she is doing, and she has chosen this.
Fuck that old cow.
Fueled by anger and fear and confusion, you kick the bucket of laundry over and storm off. Let her wash the whole lot again.
It is so easy, when looking back on our lives, to judge relationships only on how they ended or how they broke down. In the wake of estrangement and arguments, it is so difficult to remember the joy we once felt in another’s presence.
There were good memories of Mami, and if pressed you could recall them. Those Friday evenings down by the dock, for example. The odd occasion she’d help with your schoolwork, or tell amusing stories from her day at the hospital.
In the present moment, however, those handful of bright spots feel very far away. They have been left behind with a war-torn city, lost along with a missing father.
Right now, you cannot remember Mami at her best: tired and trying, telling you stories, making you food.
In the heat of your anger, she is only stupid, stubborn, old, and pointlessly secretive.
Every unfair criticism, harsh word, scolding tongue, contemptuous click, unearned slap, stair-running punishment, bad day, or cranky argument comes tumbling into your brain and you can’t bear to be around her for another fucking minute.
Should have let her meet those ghosts on her own. Why do you keep saving her, anyway? Why do you keep running after her? You are a stupid chicken, actually, but not for the reason she thinks. You’re stupid for always coming back to her, for trying again.
Anger boils up and you run. Out of the house, down the overgrown trail toward the beach. Away from her, away from everything.
A grass-choked path unfurls at your feet. The forest sprawls on all sides, filled with birdsong and tree-rustling and wave-roaring. Empty of people, though. Behind you, the house is swift to vanish, its ghosts too slow and heavy to keep up with your flying steps.
The deep sense of isolation strikes you, sinking in all over again.
The sensation is freeing, giving your spirit wings and lifting the corners of your mouth into a smile.
You start singing out loud, because there are no ghosts or people around to observe an awkward young woman belting out the worst rendition of Bai Hong’s “Spring Wind” on this side of the Pacific.
Skip a little, run a little, walk when tired. Following the half-rotted signage, your feet tracking through the forest and out again, along the sultry curve of coast to a particular sprawl of beach where the water is a reflective sheen and the wind a quiet companion. Sunlight skitters across surf.
Heart swells. Breath catches.
It’s perfect.
Back in the city, you were never far from the shore. Beach trips were an occasional weekend thing, and Baba taught you how to swim years ago, though Mami always stayed stubbornly on shore.
Still, those trips had nothing on this place. Stanley Bay was full of litter, crowded, the sand strip narrow and speckled with crusty rocks. This is a pristine paradise, empty and clean, filling your ears with the raw smash of water.
Suddenly, the only thing you want to do is swim.
Mami’s warnings, like Mami’s moods, feel of little consequence.
What does she know about anything, anyway?
It’s nearly spring, now, with the days already heating up and the water looking inviting.
Certainly, it will be safer than going for a dip in August, when the rains come in heavy.
Time to dive. Peel off those sweaty, grimy shirt and trousers, and leap in wearing just camisole and drawers.
Why not, no one is around to see. Cool water silks over skin, washing heat and dirt away.
The waves are big, crashing over and around, tumbling limbs about.
Sand grits under eyelids and fingernails and you surface for air, licking salt from cracked lips.
Swarms of little moon jellyfish brush your skin, gentle and quivering as they move with the tides.
Laugh, dip down again. The shore sinks deep quickly out here but it’s clear water, with good visibility.
Not too much kelp, either. You swim down a dozen feet, feeling like a deep-sea explorer, and touch the bottom in joyful triumph while avoiding spiny urchins and irritable crabs.
Rise again to surface, pushed by natural buoyancy.
It is unholy to be this happy.
Hard to believe that a couple of months ago, your life was so completely, unutterably different: the long drudge of working in a street restaurant, the sluggish surge of city life, the war that threatened like a snarling dog in the corner.
The days leading up to Hong Kong’s invasion had narrowed your existence until the hours seemed to fold indistinguishably into one another.
After an hour of swimming and splashing, your limbs grow tired. Time to turn for home and swim back. The beach is a good fifty meters away, and the front crawl back to shore is filled with reluctant weariness.
But as you strike out for shallower water, the current tugs in the opposite direction, its pull noticeably stronger than an hour ago. It doesn’t seem like a problem at first. You’ve swum on the southern side of Hong Kong Island. This is not any different.
Except … it is.
The current here is more of a yank than a tug. The riptide picks up force and urgency. Suddenly the water isn’t a friend but an enemy—dragging you, bewildered and terrified, through churning surf.
The next time you surface, the shore is farther than it was when you started. Tired and alarmed, you strike out for home once again. There are rocks ahead, an outcropping that stretches far into the water. If you can reach it, that will be a reprieve.
Almost, you make it. At the last moment the waves push too hard, dashing your leg against the very barnacle-encrusted refuge you sought.
Sharp edges cut unexpectedly into skin. Blood clouds the water and you’re stunned; you didn’t know such harmless shells could do so much hurt.
At least from here you’ll be able to climb up, reach the shore—
The next set of waves comes in, sweeping you off the outcropping and farther out to sea. Again.
The funny thing about riptides: they are most dangerous when you swim against them. Let them pull you where they will, and you’re less likely to drown. Resist, and they’ll pummel you into submission.
No one’s ever taught you how to swim in this kind of a current, though. So you strike out for land with increasing panic and get rolled up like a cigarette by those tremendous crashers. Into shore, back out to sea. Into shore, back out to sea. No closer than where you started, fifteen minutes ago.
The next time, that current drags you under and doesn’t let you go.
Sand on your tongue, in your throat, up your nose.
Salt searing the eyes. Forever and a day underwater and the strangest thing is that you can’t seem to reach the surface, no matter how you try.
The current is carrying you even farther and still you’ve not been up for air, the burning in your nose, throat, eyes matched only by the intense fire in your lungs.
It occurs to you with sudden, piercing clarity that you are going to die out here. In love with this place more than anything or anywhere else in your life, and it will be the death of you.
The edges of your vision are going dark and you’re not sure what’s up or down, where the shore is or how to reach the sky, can’t imagine ever breathing again. Everything hurts and you reach both hands out, blindly, without hope or expectation.
Something grasps your wrist.
Fingers, hard and slim. Long nails that press clean edges into your flesh. The shadow of a face you can’t make out with salt-stung, half-closed eyes. A flash of long, dark hair, the streaming tendrils curling like tentacles.
A figure, swimming at your side.
For the moment, there is nothing else to do except hold on tight and hope this is a savior, not a predator.
Clutch at the blurred body; it is ice-cold, reed-thin.
Water swirls and suddenly, you are rushing up and up and up, ears popping and a sick feeling in your belly as the pressure changes too fast.
Light. Air. Break the surface with a gasping wail, spluttering and sobbing. The shore is devastatingly far, and getting gradually more distant; the currents are still fast-moving. You tread and float, exhausted but too terrified to stop, too terrified to sink again.
Pain in your eyes, head, and throat, and pain in your left thigh where it was dashed against the barnacle-clad rocks. Bleeding into open water. That can’t be good. Sharks come out here sometimes, and they can smell blood from a mile away.
A fresh wash of anxiety fills you. Help, you need help—
The one who rescued you. The thin form, the long nails and the dark streaming hair. Where have they gone?
And
then
you
look
down.