Chapter 31 Brave New World
brAVE NEW WORLD
One year ago …
What confronts you now is an alien landscape.
Concrete towers knife upward along the skyline.
Cars stream in a murmuring flood through asphalt arteries.
The government is, you hear, beginning to dig tunnels beneath, to create a rapid high-speed rail of some sort.
Even the harbor shape has changed; developers keep filling in bits of the coastline to expand the landmass.
Everywhere you look, new buildings and roads and shops are going up.
Such a complex structure will require a lot of work and planning to exact revenge against. This place is an enormous mountain to topple.
First, you have some personal business to wrap up.
You take two weeks of holiday from Kit Ling’s job, to adjust to her body and her life. It takes a day to even find her flat, much less get into it.
The sense you get, walking around those polluted and surging streets, is akin to walking around a large, endless shopping arcade.
It is both overwhelmingly vast and terribly claustrophobic at the same time.
It never ends and yet everything is repetitive and the same.
When you first go out, it is only for a few minutes, and then a few hours at a time.
Getting used to space again is not a quick transition.
At night, you huddle in small, confined spaces that remind you of the bottle gourd. Barrels are a particular favorite.
Another few days to learn the ins and outs of Kit Ling’s life, studying her diary and journals and trying to figure out how to pass in a job you aren’t trained for. This will be an ongoing process, but at least you have some basics, now.
You also establish a routine, for your own safety: every two days, you fill a bathtub or barrel and slip out of her skin.
Then you spend at least ten to twelve hours soaking, reclaiming and reasserting yourself so that Kit Ling’s body doesn’t submerge your consciousness.
This is important, if you are going to live as her without being swallowed by her.
On the seventh day of escaping confinement, once you’ve figured your way around the city and gotten accustomed to Kit Ling’s strange life, you manage to find Wing Yun’s contact details and reach out to him.
It’s not difficult, because he’s been petitioning the Council for years, as Kit Ling already told you.
The hard part is simply working up the nerve, and that does take you a few hours.
The message you send him is simple:
Let’s meet, old friend. It’s been too long.
Twenty-nine years was a solid amount of time to reflect.
Initially, you endlessly replayed the memories of your life, the moments of city and island and sea and wind. Of your parents, your childhood, your school, the war. Every grain of existence was examined, over and over. There was nothing else to do, after all.
By the time you emerged, there were three truths engraved on the tattered remnants of your soul, and they became the mantras that you would exist by.
The first truth: humans did not have true sympathy for another person’s pain, unless they experienced it themselves.
The wealthy dismissed the poor, the healthy dismissed the sick, citizens dismissed refugees, men dismissed women, and so on.
It was not until the wealthy became poor, the healthy became sick, citizens became refugees, or men suffered as women suffer, that people could truly understand another’s experiences.
Even you hadn’t really grasped Mei Chi’s pain, until you became a ghost, too.
From this, you concluded that suffering was not a thing to be transcended, as Buddha had taught, but a thing to be universally shared as widely as possible. Only through suffering could compassion flourish. Pain was the greatest of all teachers, and humanity was chronically ignorant.
The second truth: those who lacked sympathy were also those who caused the most suffering.
This was ironclad and immutably true. If the wealthy knew poverty, they would be kinder to the poor.
If men understood women’s lives, they would behave with more gentleness.
If politicians suffered in trenches, they would think twice about sending young men to war.
And so on. Therefore, it was imperative to inflict on them what they had done to others, or society could not improve.
Third: the most unbearable thing about pain was knowing that those who hurt you did not even comprehend your hurt.
Often they neither saw nor cared about it, and carried on with their lives, wrapped up in their own concerns.
This forgetting, this ignorance, torments victims more than the actual crime in many cases.
Therefore, when you thought about revenge during those long dark years, it was not the redressing of karma that you sought or imagined. The betrayal of your mother, of Mei Chi, of the city you’d fought for, could not be undone or rebalanced.
No. Vengeance, as such, was about understanding. You needed those who had hurt you to understand what they had done, in a visceral and deep way. And the only way to do that was to disseminate as much pain to as many of your enemies as possible.
Now that you are free, teaching that pain is your new goal. Not just to the city which betrayed you, but to the one person who truly failed to grasp the hurt they had caused—none other than Chen Mei Chi herself.
You would make her understand, no matter the cost.
Thoughts whirling in your skull, you stride into the Peninsula Hotel on a sticky June afternoon and head straight for their far-too-expensive cafe.
The decor is an arrogant array of white and gold, every chandelier and marble tile immaculate. The outside fountain is a pleasing rush of water, and a part of you longs to take off your shoes and put your feet into that cool spray. That would get you thrown out, though, so you don’t.
As a girl, you walked past the iconic Peninsula Hotel on the way to and from work.
Those gilt staircases and glass-fronted exteriors meant it was far too upmarket for you to ever get work there, let alone visit as a customer.
The cost of an afternoon tea in their high-end cafe would have been months of your wages.
But you’re a councilwoman now, from a well-off family. Though it’s still an expense to drop in, it is an affordable one. Especially for such a special occasion.
Take a breath, compose yourself, walk in grandly.
Wing Yun is already there, seated calmly by the window, an untouched cup of coffee gone cold in front of him.
Twenty-nine years have changed his face greatly.
A map of lines runs deep across his skin.
The brawny young soldier, so cockily defiant to his Japanese captors, is now a tired and skinny man in his late fifties.
But he is still the smart, thoughtful person you knew during the war. The same shrewd intelligence behind those kind eyes. There was no room for love or even affection in the relationship you had with him; even if you weren’t dead, the war took up all the oxygen.
Still, looking at him now, you can admit quietly that he will always occupy a space in your heart. Even after all these years, and all the bodies you’ve lived in, and all the things you’ve each endured, his face is comforting to look on.
He glances over as you enter, clearly recognizing the figure of Kit Ling and looking puzzled.
You throw him a military salute.
His solemnity breaks into a familiar grin. “It’s been a long time, Siu Yin.” He rises to standing, clasping your hands in his.
“Thank you.” You surprise yourself—and him—by squeezing back tightly. “Thank you so much!”
“I haven’t done anything,” he protests.
“Yes, you have. You remembered me, when everyone else forgot. You tried to help me, these past three decades, and kept a promise few others would have cared about.” An unexpected lump forms in your throat. “In a world of betrayers, I am truly honored by your friendship.”
“It was the least I could do.” Wing Yun extracts his hands and claps you awkwardly on the shoulder. “After all you and those other spirits did for us, in the war … shameful, the way those exorcists locked you up. Especially when it was my fault they found you.”
You nod your head, saying nothing. Internally, though, Chinese politeness is warring with a spike of ghostly fury.
He’s the closest thing you have to a friend, the only person who has always shown up for you, but it was his fault, intentional or not.
Across the past twenty-nine years of captivity, you’ve had plenty of time to curse his name, even if you’ve mostly made peace with it now.
That realization briefly surprises you. Making peace with things isn’t something ghosts usually do, but searching your heart, you find only lingering resignation for the unwitting role he played in your capture, rather than burning anger.
How curious. Maybe forgiveness is occasionally possible, for ghosts.
“Well,” he says, into the dragging silence, “the point is, I’m glad you survived.” He takes his seat again, leaning back slowly. “I must admit, when I first began petitioning the government for your release, this result”—he gestures vaguely at your stolen body—“was not quite what I had in mind.”
“Does it upset you, what I’ve done?” There is no malice in your question, only curiosity.
Always, you have been frank with each other, and even after nearly thirty years, speaking to him is like slipping on a familiar jacket.
“One could argue she was innocent. I would understand if you disapproved.”
“That depends. Why did you do it?” He sips from his cold coffee, and makes a face. “Can’t believe the Americans drink this stuff.”
“It’s better with milk and sugar, I’m told.” You perch in the chair across from him, and signal politely to a waiter. “As for Kit Ling, she heard about me because of your petition, but she didn’t agree to free me, as you asked. She wanted to use me.”