The Hunger We Pass Down

Chapter 1

the house was so famous it had a name. Nam Koo Terrace. Say it five times fast and it dissolves into a chant, a nonsensical nursery rhyme. Or a call into the wild to bring forth something beastly, something even worse than a nightmare.

Since Gigi was a little girl, she had walked by the famous mansion every day, her hand held by her older brother, who dragged her all the way to school, muttering.

“We’ll be late,” he always hissed. “Pick up your feet.”

“But,” she said, “I want to look at the house.” And she craned her neck to look back at the white garden walls, the lush trees that grew fifteen feet tall, the smooth driveway, the columns flanking the sliver of porch she could see from the sidewalk.

If she looked long and hard enough, maybe she would one day see the headless woman she had heard about slip between the trees.

“Nobody cares about that stupid rich man’s house. They just make up ghost stories so people won’t try to break in and steal whatever is in there, you dummy,” and here her brother stopped and turned to face her. “It’s all bullshit.”

But Gigi only shook her head and silently wondered if there were English roses in the garden, a lavender walk, or a maze made of boxwood.

How would she look in a grand ballgown, walking down the mossy paths, fingers brushing the low-hanging branches of wisteria?

Would she look more like Vivien Leigh, small and elegant and flawless?

Or would she be like Joan Crawford, with an edge of danger barely concealed by her fearsomely angled face?

She might be discovered by a famous Hollywood director there, lit perfectly by the low afternoon sun, and be whisked away to make movies in which she could be beautiful and dance, in which men would fall in love with her and fight to the death for her affection.

In her daydreams, Gigi often chose danger, but she never told anyone this.

She was not a girl who cared about time or school or the rows of numbers her mother squinted at every night, trying to balance what they spent against what she earned as a secretary.

Their father had left them a long time ago, after all, and it was just the three of them, hidden away in a small apartment down a narrow street in Wan Chai.

To find their front entrance, one had to find the right winding street, follow it only halfway down to a faded green door, pull the chain for the bell, and hope someone in the building was home or cared enough to slide open the small hatch at eye level to see who was there.

Gigi often wondered how her father would ever find them. That is, if he ever wanted to.

Nam Koo Terrace was too beautiful for her to ignore for something so trivial as school or time.

The red brick mansion stood in the middle of a grove—trees upon trees upon trees.

If Gigi stopped at just the right spot in the road, she could tilt her head and see through the foliage.

The wrought-iron railings. The majestic round water fountain.

The wide porch that stretched from east to west. Gigi never saw anyone arriving or leaving, only a line of shiny Peugeots and Jaguars in the circular driveway, the sun reflecting off their impossibly smooth metallic surfaces.

No one in Hong Kong ever drove cars; they rode the trams with bags and bags slung over their shoulders or pedalled skinny bicycles while smoking the unfiltered cigarettes that always made Gigi gag.

The people who lived in that famous house, though, they drove, hidden in their cars away from the smog and noise and the smells coming from the fishing boats in the harbour.

Sister Lucia at school told her that a rich silk merchant had built Nam Koo Terrace for his bride years ago.

“They were happy for a while,” Sister Lucia had said, whispering so only Gigi could hear, “blessed with three sons and one daughter, a beautiful girl, the youngest of the family. They say she was skilled at the violin and could read in three languages and the entire family doted on her. But her father was struck with greed, as he had been his whole life.”

Gigi stared at Sister Lucia’s face, the swirl and noise of the classroom barely a ripple in her ears. “What do you mean? What did he do?”

Sister Lucia bent down and further lowered her voice.

“He realized what a treasure his only daughter was, accomplished and lovely and sweet. And so he arranged a marriage for her to the son of a wealthy shipping tycoon, so that his silks could be easily transported around the world. She was only sixteen, not even finished with her education.” She looked around and quickened her voice as the restlessness of the students grew.

“This is a lurid story, Gigi. Perhaps not one I should be telling to a girl of thirteen.”

“Tell me what happened to her. Please?”

“Well, in the end, she realized she could not marry this boy she barely knew. And so she tried to run away the evening before the wedding, but was caught leaving by her father, who then locked her away in her room. When her mother unlocked the door in the morning, carrying the wedding qipao, she found her daughter hanging from the chandelier.” Gigi gasped, and Sister Lucia frowned.

“It was a harsh punishment, but the girl committed the worst sin. Suicide is unforgivable in God’s eyes. ”

Gigi nodded, unsure if she agreed or not. “Did she become a ghost, Sister?”

“There is only the Holy Ghost, child, as I’m sure you would remember from your Bible class.

But they do say that ever since then, people have heard a woman crying within the walls of Nam Koo.

Some have even seen her, walking the hallways in a nightgown.

Sometimes her head is loose, held to her broken neck with just muscle and skin.

Sometimes she is headless, as if the noose had snapped her head clean off. ”

That night, as Gigi tried to fall asleep in her narrow bed, she could picture the girl’s slender body hanging from a chandelier made of crystal and gold, her neck bent at an unnatural angle that made Gigi’s stomach flip, the girl’s long black hair over her face—a face that must have been blue, if anyone had cared to sweep her hair away to see.

I would have brushed it away , Gigi thought, so her face could be seen one last time. Her face deserved to be remembered.

a year later, gigi’s brother joined the army to fight against the Japanese, who, the news on the radio warned, were surely coming to try to occupy Hong Kong.

Where he went, Gigi and their mother never knew, only that he was always behind enemy lines, that his ability to speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and English was what led him into jungles and villages he never named.

Her mother told the neighbours that he was a spy, that his good grades in science and math meant that he could disarm bombs and build invisible traps in the damp, dense bush, but Gigi thought that this was a story that made her mother feel better, as if his absence served a purpose and wasn’t just painful and futile.

At dinnertime, Gigi stared at his empty chair, where he would normally be reading a book, not looking at the food he shovelled into his mouth.

There had never been a chair for their father, but that didn’t matter because his absence was obvious and omnipresent.

Every time a classmate asked about him, every time she watched her mother haul their garbage down to the street herself, every time Gigi heard a noise in the middle of the night and there was no one to check the apartment for intruders, she felt the hole his absence left in her bones, like an ache.

At least her brother had promised to return.

Now Gigi had to walk to school alone. By herself, she could stop and stare at Nam Koo for as long as she wanted, morning and afternoon.

There was no one to rush her, and so she dawdled, peering through the foliage.

It was in this way that she saw, for the first time, people leaving the house, loading up the shiny cars with boxes and bags and trunks.

On either side of the driveway were two soldiers in khaki uniforms, standing still and straight, hands resting on the pistols in the holsters criss-crossing their chests.

Instinctively, Gigi stepped back into the shadow cast by a tall cedar.

The Japanese were already in Hong Kong, at Nam Koo of all places.

She thought her heart might crack in two.

She could see a girl standing in the driveway in a pale green dress, holding a straw hat at her side.

This girl was gazing at the house, as Gigi was, and at her feet was a leather suitcase.

Gigi hadn’t thought there were any young girls living there anymore, but then maybe the silk merchant’s sons had gotten married and had children of their own, daughters her age who had grown up in Nam Koo, swaddled by trees and velvet.

Gigi wondered what it must be like to be forced to leave a house like that, the kind of house that was big enough and grand enough to hold a lifetime’s worth of dreams and their inevitable fulfillment.

If this girl had wanted a pony, there was space for a pony.

If this girl had wanted a library of books, a room could be found to line with shelves from floor to ceiling.

How do you leave the manifestation of all the wishes in your heart?

What if you loved a place so much you couldn’t bear the thought of moving away?

Wouldn’t death be infinitely better? She wanted to know the answers to these questions so badly it ached.

She took a step forward and stepped on a pile of dried leaves. She winced at the crunching sound.