Chapter 5 The First Date
The First Date
He was already there when she came out of the building.
Danny Yeung was standing on the pavement in jeans and a plain grey shirt, hands in his pockets, watching a pigeon investigate a flattened takeaway cup. He looked up when the lobby door opened and smiled.
Natalie wore dark jeans, a cream blouse, flat sandals, and a light jacket.
"Natalie?"
“Yeah.”
He nodded, easy. "You look nice."
"Thanks," she said. "Am I late?"
"No, I was early. You hungry?"
"Yeah, actually."
"Good." He turned toward the street. "Let's go."
He turned toward the MTR station, and she fell into step beside him.
They walked down Des Voeux Road West together. The evening crowd moved around them: office workers with loosened collars, students in white shirts, delivery men steering handcarts through gaps that did not seem wide enough. Buses shouldered past close to the curb. A taxi leaned on its horn.
The street smelled of diesel and dried seafood.
At the entrance to Sai Ying Pun MTR Station, they joined the small downward stream of people heading underground. Natalie stepped onto the escalator first. Danny stepped in behind her.
At the bottom, they moved through the station. Natalie tapped her Octopus card at the gate. Danny tapped in beside her..
The platform was bright. Advertisements for tutoring centers, watches, skin clinics and property developments. A child complained softly to his mother. A man in a blue work shirt watched a Korean drama on his phone.
Natalie stopped near the yellow line. Danny stopped beside her.
Across the platform, a woman in heels shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Two teenagers shared earbuds and did not look up from the same screen. The station announcement came and went, calm and female and automatic.
They hadn’t really said anything to each other but it was still comfortable.
Danny nodded at Natalie and she smiled back.
The train arrived in a rush of air. Everyone along the platform tensed, ready to push their way in. The doors opened. Passengers stepped out. Then they moved in with the others.
They both grabbed hanging straps on the poles nearby each other. It was crowded. Within a minute, the train set off.
“You take this every day?” he asked.
“Most days.”
“Gallery’s in Central?”
“Near enough.”
“How long have you been in Hong Kong?” he asked.
“Almost three years.”
“You like it?”
“I like parts of it.” She shrugged. “There’s good and bad everywhere.”
The train slid into the tunnel.
At Sheung Wan, more people got on. The carriage compressed by a few inches. Someone’s tote bag pressed briefly against Natalie’s hip. Danny shifted half a step, just enough to give Natalie some extra room.
He looked up at the Island Line route map, studying it for half a minute or so.
Their reflections held in the dark window opposite them: her cream blouse, his grey shirt.
They started to chat some more. He asked whether her Cantonese was coming along, whether she'd found a good breakfast place near the gallery yet.
She told him about the cha chaan teng three blocks from work, the one run by the elderly couple who gave her extra condensed milk in her coffee without asking.
"Which street?" he asked.
She told him.
He nodded.
They got off at Central.
Natalie expected him to head toward a restaurant, or a taxi stand, or one of the exits that led back up into the city.
Instead, he kept walking.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“I was thinking that we’d take Star Ferry. We could hang out and talk.”
“That'll be fun.”
They followed the signs through the station and out toward the ferry piers, the air changing before the view did. Diesel, harbor water, warm concrete, the damp metallic smell that came off the sea. The Star Ferry terminal sat ahead of them.
In the terminal building, a cluster of older men sat along a bench reading newspapers. A family corralled three small children toward the turnstiles. An announcer’s voice crackled overhead in a way that made all three languages, Cantonese, Mandarin, then English, equally hard to understand.
Danny paid the fare for both of them. Lower deck, eight-something HKD.
The boat smelled of diesel and old paint. The benches were hard. A teenager slept with earbuds in. A woman unwrapped something from foil and ate it without looking at anyone. The engines started with a low vibration that rose through the floorboards.
Natalie looked ahead, then back, then ahead again.
The harbor opened up ahead of the ferry.
Hong Kong Island began to pull back behind them: towers lit in grids, bank logos bright against the dark, windows stacked on windows stacked on windows. Ahead, Kowloon waited.
A container ship moved slowly somewhere to the left, its running lights low.
Danny motioned to her and led her toward the front rail.
Natalie rested one hand on the rail.
"You take this a lot?" Natalie asked.
"Not anymore." He was watching the water. "When I was first in the city—like, early twenties, still doing bit parts, living in a flat in Sham Shui Po with three other guys—I used to take the ferry after late shoots. Sometimes after nothing. Just because it was cheap and it went somewhere."
"Where were you going?"
He shrugged. "Nowhere. That was sort of the point. You could sit on this thing for twenty minutes and feel like you were making progress towards a goal." He glanced at her, a little self-aware. "It sounds stupid now."
"No, it doesn't," she replied.
She meant it. She understood the ferry in that moment—not as a tourist attraction, not as a charming relic, but as the thing it had been to him: the feeling of progress when you were stuck.
It was a strange thing to notice. She was Chinese, her parents were from Guangdong, she'd grown up hearing Cantonese in the kitchen.
But Hong Kong had always felt to her like a place where her family was from, not her—her language slightly off, the references she didn't catch, the social shorthand running just below the frequency she was tuned to.
Danny had none of that problem. He was a native.
Natalie watched him watch Kowloon grow larger, and thought: he belongs here.
They came off the ferry on the Kowloon side with the rest of the passengers. The crowd broke apart and moved in practical directions: buses, taxis, the promenade, the bright mouth of Tsim Sha Tsui. Danny let the flow move around them and guided Natalie north.
The first person to recognize him did it uncertainly.
They were walking up from the pier toward Nathan Road when a young woman, maybe nineteen, slowed so abruptly that her friend nearly walked into her.
“Sorry,” she said, staring at him with intense concentration. “Are you Danny Yeung?”
Danny smiled, a little embarrassed by the question and already kind about it. “Yeah.”
The girl grabbed her friend’s wrist. “I told you. From Black Harbour. The warehouse fight.”
Her friend looked at Danny again. There was a blank second. Then she made a small sound. “Oh!”
“Can we get a photo?” the girl asked.
“Sure.”
The friend lifted her phone, fumbled the angle, and laughed at herself. Danny took one step to the side so the light would not hit them from behind.
“Here is better,” he said.
They took two photos. In the first, someone blinked. In the second, both girls laughed. Danny said something in Cantonese that Natalie mostly caught—exams, sleep, eat properly—and then he was free again, the girls walking away delighted.
He fell back into step beside Natalie.
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“That.”
“You were nice.”
He nodded.
She looked at him.
He is a nice guy, she thought. Nice enough to stop and take a photo with the two girls.
“Does that happen a lot?” she asked.
He considered it. “Not a lot. Occasionally.”
“Do you like it?”
He did not answer immediately. They waited at a crossing while buses dragged hot air through the intersection.
“I like it because they like it,” he said thoughtfully.
They walked north. Luxury frontage gave way to pharmacies, watch shops, phone repair stalls, upstairs signs advertising clinics and tutors and foot massage. Buses shouldered past. Men smoked beside shuttered storefronts. The sidewalks narrowed, then opened, then narrowed again.
The restaurant was on a side street off Temple Street, down a half-flight of steps. No English sign. The laminated menu on the wall was handwritten in marker and hadn't been updated since at least 2011, judging by the prices that someone had crossed out and corrected in red.
Six tables. A ceiling fan. The kind of fluorescent light that made everyone look like they'd slept badly, but nobody minded because the food was fantastic.
The woman behind the counter looked up when Danny came in. She was probably sixty-five, in an apron, with the expression of someone who had seen everything and remained largely unimpressed.
"Aah, fei jai," she said. Fat boy.
Danny grinned. "Mhóu gam giu ngóh lā, Ah Gū. Ngóh daai jó pàhng yáuh." Don't call me that, auntie. I brought a friend with me.
He gestured at Natalie.
The auntie looked at Natalie. She said something rapid that Natalie caught only partially—so thin, she needs to eat, you're not feeding her?—and then waved them toward the table in the corner. The one that was slightly more private.
They ordered without menus. Danny asked Natalie a few quick questions—did she eat offal, was anything off limits—and then spoke to the auntie's teenage son, who was apparently the waiter. He ordered for both of them without making a big deal out of it.
What arrived first was wonton noodle soup, the noodles thin and springy, the broth clean and hot enough to fog her face when she leaned over it.
Then char siu sliced thick and lacquered properly, not the dry red-edged kind from bad lunch boxes.
Then a claypot rice with chicken and Chinese sausage, the rice crackling at the edges, dark soy sauce poured around the rim while the pot was still hot.
A plate of choy sum. White rice in small clay pots.
Two cold bottles of Vitasoy from a plastic crate.
The auntie brought out a plate of pickled vegetables that no one had ordered, set them down with a word in Danny's direction that sounded like an instruction, and left.
Natalie was halfway through the char siu before she realized she hadn't spoken in perhaps three minutes.
Danny was eating steadily. He reached over and added the last of the char siu to her bowl without asking.
She liked that.
"Tell me about the gallery," he said finally. "What do you actually do there?"
She told him. Danny listened without his attention wandering. How did you end up doing that? Do you like the work? What's the artwork like?
"It’s fine. The owners are nice but the gallery is struggling."
Danny nodded.
Dinner wrapped up and Danny paid at the counter.
Outside, the night market was loud and warm.
Stalls crowded both sides of the street: phone cases, jade trinkets, fake watches, T-shirts, toys that flashed in irritating colors.
The air smelled of incense, grilled meat, hot sugar, engine exhaust, and something synthetic from a stall selling plastic sandals.
Natalie walked beside Danny through the crowd.
A vendor selling cheap bracelets called out to him. Danny answered without slowing.
An older man at a watch stall lifted his chin in greeting. Danny lifted his back.
At a low shelf cluttered with brass animals, he stopped briefly and picked up a small horse, turning it over once before setting it down again.
“You like horses?” Natalie asked.
“No.”
“Then why look?”
“My mother likes them.”
They kept walking.
A boy of about twelve appeared at Danny’s elbow near a stall selling phone cases and plastic watches.
“You’re Danny Gor,” the boy said. Brother Danny.
Danny looked down. “Am I?”
“My brother was an extra in Police Line Seven. He said you kicked through the glass door.”
“That was sugar glass,” Danny said with a laugh. “If it was real glass, I’d have been in trouble.”
The boy considered this, then grinned.
“What’s your brother’s name?” Danny asked.
The boy told him. Danny smiled. He remembered him.
“Tell him to keep going,” Danny said. “And tell him not to give up.”
The boy vanished back into the crowd.
At a roasted chestnut cart Danny stopped and bought a paper bag without asking her. He handed it over while it was still hot.
Natalie peeled one open, burning her fingertips slightly, and ate it. It was sweet and slightly smoky and she thought: this is the best chestnut I've had in my life, which was probably not true but felt true.
They walked until the market thinned and the street became quieter. Metal shutters. Stacked plastic stools. A man hosing down pavement in front of a restaurant. A woman counting cash under a fluorescent tube.
They walked to the end of the market and turned back toward the quieter street.
Danny took out his phone. She saw him tap a transport app.
They waited a few minutes.
She tucked the last of the chestnut bag into a bin.
A black Toyota drove up. The driver leaned over when he saw Danny and they exchanged a few words in Cantonese.
Danny opened the door.
“This will take us back.”
He gestured to Natalie to get in.
Natalie got in first, sliding across the seat to the far side. The interior smelled of air freshener and something faintly herbal from a string of wooden beads hanging from the mirror. Danny got in beside her and closed the door.
The car pulled out from the curb, and the lights of Temple Street slid past the window, and Natalie watched them go.
She and Danny chatted as the car drove back to Hong Kong Island.