Chapter Twenty-Eight
Hong Kong
The first thing I did was cut my hair. Ever since a bottle of Peaksoy had ended up on the cover of 今日世界 (World Today), my feathery bangs were copied by young ladies across the city.
I saw them everywhere I went, some of the women even plaiting their hair into a loose braid as I had.
With three snips, I set that girl on fire.
I became a singer at the Seven Wonders nightclub in Wan Chai, which wasn’t far from Happy Valley but might as well have been a different country.
There, even tailors and banks had illuminated signs above their storefronts, and at night so many people crammed the streets you couldn’t even see your feet.
I went looking for a job the morning after I left home, and Seven Wonders was the only club with its door open.
The owner was at the bar, diluting bottles of Viking beer with water.
“You look familiar,” he said, peering at me. “What’s your name?”
I didn’t think. I replied, “Helen. I’m a singer.”
“Of course you are.” A grunt. “I don’t need any more girls. Get lost.”
I parted my lips and sang the chorus of “Rose, Rose, I Love You.” My voice started out deep like the lowest note of a clarinet, mellow yet expressive, then, as it soared higher, overriding the barkeeper’s grumbles, he stopped waving me toward the door.
When I sang the chorus again, this time in English, I had his full attention.
“You speak English?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Come back tonight and you can start. But do something with your hair. It looks like you cut it yourself.” He resumed diluting the alcohol on his counter.
So began my life onstage. I curled my hair, wore a black cheongsam with a slit so high I didn’t dare sit down, and tottered about in heels tall enough to double as skewers.
It was exciting at first, singing into a microphone and hearing the walls reverberate with the sound of my voice.
The novelty quickly faded, as did my hope that I might be discovered.
Most of the men were British soldiers more keen on inviting me to bed than listening to me sing, the drunk ones chucking their beers at the stage when I rejected them.
I learned to carry a pen knife in case they got too close.
I wanted to leave, but I was trapped. I needed money to eat, to pay my rent, to find Mama.
Over a million Chinese had poured into Hong Kong over the last years, and like me, now they were trying to bring their family over.
I’d heard lurid stories about con artists who kept offices in high-rises and wore tailored suits, who’d swear that they could get anyone you wanted out of the mainland.
In actuality, they’d take your hard-earned coin and disappear.
More than ever, I thought about disappearing, too.
The parts of me that mattered were already gone. My name, Yut Ying, which I no longer dared use, as well as my home, my mother, my sister. My shadow.
At least I had my music, I thought. But nights at Seven Wonders were long and unpleasant—the shouting drunks, the booming drums, the shrill whine of my microphone were agony to my damaged ear, and the men would jeer when I found it hard to hear and stumbled in my song.
Soon the last thing I wanted to do anymore was sing. Even music was taken from me.
I found solace in turning invisible. With no shadow shackling me to my physical body, more and more I slipped out of this world, escaping into a reverie of nothingness.
The cold numbed my senses and took away everything I was willing to surrender.
Memories, pain, feelings. Sometimes I didn’t feel the air in my lungs running out.
It was addictive how easy it was. It was dangerous.
Each time I vanished, I took the chance that I might never return. I wouldn’t stop. It was my curse, I told myself, to become nothing. My destiny.
It would happen whether I wanted it or not.
After half a year, I left Seven Wonders and fled Hong Kong Island for Kowloon.
It was only a ferry ride away across Victoria Harbour, yet it might as well have been a thousand miles.
I rented a room above a watch repair shop and spent my first night there killing cockroaches.
One day, while I wandered through Mong Kok’s sprawling markets looking for a job, I saw Sui Chan.
She was carrying a baby on her back with two apple-pink cheeks and feet as plump as mooncakes. I shouted her name, almost getting run over by a rickshaw. I’d never been happier to see anyone.
“Heavens, Yut Ying, it’s really you!” she cried. “You’re famous now. I see your face twice a day on the way to work, so I didn’t miss you too much.”
I found myself smiling for the first time in weeks. “Well, I missed you.”
We chatted for hours, standing at the bus stop while her baby slept.
How good it was to laugh with an old friend and talk about things that didn’t make my heart hurt.
Recipes we’d learned, gossip about our former coworkers, and how she’d met her husband.
Before we parted, she mentioned that she worked at a bakery founded by a Chinese refugee.
Kennedy Cake Shop, it was called. It was doing well—so well, in fact, they were relocating to Shanghai Street and needed more help.
“Do they sell egg tarts?” I asked.
“They’re the gods of egg tarts! It’s their specialty.”
I applied for a job the next day. It was like old times, Sui Chan and I working together again. I met her husband and played with her baby, and after a while, she convinced me to live with them. She’d saved me when I first moved to Hong Kong, and she saved me again now.
Work started at four-thirty in the morning.
My first duty was chopping and frying onions for the barbeque pork bun fillings—a task that stung my eyes raw.
Eventually I graduated to kneading the dough, learning when to stop so the buns would come out soft as tofu.
I pleated, filled, and steamed them. I wasn’t going to be allowed to even touch the egg tarts for another two years, but providence was on my side.
Demand for the tarts was growing. By the end of the year, Sui Chan and I had been entrusted with the precious recipe.
All day we rolled pastry dough and beat egg yolks, working until our arms were ready to fall off.
Once we got home, we took turns striking each other’s backs, a brutal sort of massage that reinvigorated our muscles for the next day.
I couldn’t say that my new work was easier than Chan Kiu Factory or that the pay was better than at the nightclub, but I was happier.
It felt good to knead dough with my hands and produce something beautiful that others could enjoy.
For a while it was enough, but I knew I couldn’t stay in Hong Kong. If I so much as let my hair grow past my ears, someone on the street would stop to comment that I looked like the girl in the Peaksoy ads. Sooner or later Sai Ma would find me. Or Tommy. I couldn’t decide which I dreaded more.
Then, in the spring, I overheard my colleagues talking about a shoe factory that had burned down. It was lunchtime, and I sat with Sui Chan by a rain gutter outside the bakery.
“Do you know which factory?” I asked her.
“Chan Kiu,” Sui Chan replied. “A mob ransacked it last week, then set it on fire.” My friend offered me an egg tart. “Good thing we don’t work there anymore. The place is cursed.”
Cursed? The word jolted me like a pinprick. “Why do you say that?”
“Didn’t you hear about Madam Chan? She killed herself.”
“What?”
“It was all over the news. Sordid stuff—they say the gun she used was Japanese, the same gun that killed her husband apparently. And some spy.”
“What spy?”
Sui Chan sipped hot water from her thermos. “You remember when the factory closed down for the investigation? The authorities finally found proof Madam Chan was collaborating with a Japanese operative during the war. Guess the relationship must have gone sour, because she shot him—in her own home!”
I was reeling. Could the spy be Zhou Hin Kong?
“The police found his remains in the neighbor’s garden half eaten by worms. They say it happened years ago.”
Gu Ma’s taken care of everything, Yi Gor had told me that last night I saw him. Finally, I understood what he meant.
“I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead,” Sui Chan was saying, “but Madam Chan had a wicked heart. That snake betrayed her own country with no shame—yet look at her, as soon as she’s caught and has to lose everything, then she kills herself?
You learn a lot about people from what brings them shame.
” Sui Chan scoffed. My friend noticed that I hadn’t been eating. “What’s wrong? You look sick.”
I lowered my egg tart to my lap. “Madam Chan was my aunt.”
“Your aunt!”
“My father’s older sister. I . . . I should have told you sooner, but it’s not something I like remembering.”
“I can’t blame you.” Sui Chan whistled. “You were her niece and she made you walk to work every day.”
“She took my pay, too.”
The petty part of me hoped Gu Ma was baking in hell as she deserved, while deep down, I also felt a stab of guilt. The last time I’d seen her, I’d pretended to haunt her as Lily’s ghost. I knew how superstitious she was—could I be to blame in any way for her fate?
I finally bit into the tart, the sweetness in the velvety custard soothing the familiar pain in my ear that flared up whenever I was anxious. No. Absolutely not.
“I take it you aren’t going to the funeral,” said Sui Chan. “Are you still worried they’ll look for you?”
If Gu Ma was dead, that meant Sai Ma would be the lady of the house. At the realization, I lost my appetite again. I folded over my knees, throwing the crumbs from my apron to the pigeons.
“I need to get out of here. My face is on every Peaksoy bottle—it’s getting harder to hide.”
“You could write to Tom—”
“No,” I cut my friend off. There was no chance I’d write to Tommy. Just the notion of asking him to take my face off his precious soymilk made me want to punch the concrete slab under my knees.