Mr Wong Goes West (11 page)

All of them had talked with mock-seriousness of how much better the world would be if someone would ‘take out’ George W Bush, or any other members of the iconic class of big business leaders, but none of them would dream of actually harming anyone. They were the sort of people who took spiders out of their baths rather than wash them down the plughole. And actually shooting a stranger in cold blood? It couldn’t happen. He wouldn’t do it. Such a thing would not only be temperamentally impossible, it would clearly achieve nothing except to get Pals of the Planet into a heap of trouble—trouble it might not even survive.

‘It’s really bad,’ said Jason. ‘I’ve been crying all night.’

‘Yeah, Jason’s taking it really bad.’

Joyce stood up.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find Paul.’

‘He’s in jail.’

‘They must have visiting hours or something. Let’s go.’

There was silence.

‘Don’t you want to come and see him?’

‘My mum won’t let me,’ said Jason.

‘Mine’s the same,’ said Nina. ‘They’d go ape if we went to jail to visit Paul.’

‘You guys! You’re adults. You’re over eighteen. How can you let your parents stop you visiting a member of the gang in jail? That’s ridiculous.’

‘Sit down.’

Joyce sat down.

‘There’s something else,’ said Nina. ‘Abel went to see him last night.’

‘Who’s Abel?’

‘Professor Abel Man Chi-keung. A friend. A law professor. A member of Pals of the Planet. Abel said that Paul had taken a vow of silence. He’s not saying anything to anybody. And he wrote a message saying that he didn’t want any visitors. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. And then he snapped his pencil to show that he wasn’t going to talk in writing, either. So it would be a waste of time going to jail, anyway. He won’t see you.’

‘Paul just sits there in silence?’ Joyce asked.

‘Well, Abel said he sometimes hums tunes from the 1970s, or lists names of artists from that period. But that’s all.’

‘Maybe he was talking Obcom. Abel wouldn’t have understood.’

‘You can’t talk Obcom when you’re about to be done for murder. Especially not to your defence lawyer.’

Joyce sat in silence for a moment, and then stood up again.

‘Where are you going now?’

‘I’m going to see this professor guy. We can’t just sit here drinking coffee. We gotta do something. You coming?’

‘I need another latte,’ complained Jason. ‘My first went in my shoe.’

‘Nina?’

‘I’ve already talked to Abel, for ages. But you go talk to him. I’ll give you his address,’ she said, starting to write it on a napkin.

In the reign of the Tang, the people of Lower East Lake did not allow anyone imperfect to stay in the village.

After some years, there came to be two settlements there: the village of the perfect, and the village of the blind, deaf and lame.

Every year, the two villages each sent a representative for a one-on-one competition. And every year, the representative of the perfect won.

Then one year, a passing monk said he would organise the competition between the two. ‘But this time, we will have two from the village of the perfect and two from the village of the rejects,’ he said.

From the village of the perfect came two representatives: both strong, brave and healthy. From the village of the rejects came two representatives: one blind and one deaf.

The first test was for the contestants to sit in the dark and hear the approach of the monk from three li distance. The blind man won the competition easily.

The second test was for the contestants to look at a field of red blood-berries and find a single purple nut-berry. The deaf man won the competition easily.

Blade of Grass, it may seem that some people have disabilities, but the total amount of perception that each person has is the same.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.

Travel just twenty minutes away from the centre of Hong Kong and an extraordinary transformation meets your eyes. The shoulder-to-shoulder crowd of mismatched skyscrapers disappears. The world’s most densely packed layer cake of miniature, overlapping residences thins out. The yellow-grey haze vanishes.

But they are not replaced by a pristine wonderland of green mountains and beaches as the tourist brochures would have
you believe (those things do exist, but they are set well off the main thoroughfares). No, what you see is an angular landscape where man and nature are holding an ongoing contest as to who can throw up the most dramatic structures.

There are walls of mountains. There are walls of buildings. Everything is nicely spaced, with gaps in between for light and air. There are natural canyons, lined with green. There are unnatural canyons, lined with washing. There are thick woodlands of deciduous trees and bamboo groves, gently swaying in the breeze. There are forests of television aerials and telephone repeater stations, sternly defying the wind. There are Hakka women, wearing tribal outfits as they pick at crops of vegetables. There are men in denim overalls erecting Coca-Cola hoardings. There are tiny brown stalls from which tiny brown people sell tiny cups of brown Chinese tea, the whole caboodle appearing to have evolved naturally from the soil. There are glitzy, glassy shops offering pizza and internet connections, which appear to have been dropped in place by passing aircraft from a different planet.

At several locations on the road from urbanised Kowloon towards mainland China, there are huge cities that seem to have been built yesterday, or perhaps the day before at the earliest. The areas of green around them are still unspoiled, and look somewhat shellshocked at the fifty towers that have popped up overnight in their midst. Scan the buildings and you note that one-third of the windows have curtains and occupants; the other two-thirds have neither. The roads look new and fresh, and are an even shade of pale grey; they look as if no cars, trucks or buses have yet been allowed to belch their way over them.

Joyce is on a train, chugging its way into what is anachronistically called
Sun Gai
, or the New Territories. This name is highly politically incorrect. They are the ‘new
territories’ only in the sense that they were an extra bit added to the lands that the British claimed from China after the Opium War. These areas were appended to the pile of British winnings in 1898, more than fifty years after Hong Kong island had become a crown colony in 1842. So in a real sense, ‘new territories’ is short for ‘new British territories added to the old British territories’. The name should have been changed at the time of the handover of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. But memories were short in this city. People didn’t even remember the last stock crash, which was no more than a few years before, so it was unlikely that they would take note of anything that happened more than a century in the past.

So Joyce was travelling through a place still called the New Territories, heading for an address scribbled on a piece of paper in her hand. She was feeling uncomfortable because she was at a disadvantage, not being able to read Chinese characters. Nina had asked one of the staff at the coffee shop to rewrite the address on the napkin in Chinese.

She left the train at Tai Wai station and stopped from time to time to show the address to people, who nodded and pointed. Something felt wrong about her mission, and after some minutes, Joyce realised what it was. What was a lawyer doing out here, working in the rural areas? The legal professor was a teacher from one of the universities—or had been. He must have retired as you can’t run either a law office or a tutorial series from the middle of a rural new town. And this was definitely a new town, with all the blandness that the phrase implied. A dull cluster of identical white residential towers seemed to stretch almost to the horizon in three directions—the fourth was occupied by a steep, craggy hill.

Joyce had been in east Asia long enough to know what happens when you ask people for directions. In some countries,
in the Philippines and Sri Lanka for example, the person you ask will often actually walk you all the way to the door of the place you are looking for, and sometimes come in with you. In other places—Hong Kong and Singapore—the person you ask will merely tell you the immediate next direction, so that if your journey is first left, second right, third left, first left, he will merely point you to the first left. He will expect you to ask at the next junction to get the next bit of the puzzle and so on, so you will speak to six or seven people before you get to where you are going.

After fifteen minutes, Joyce had consulted four people and been sent in various directions, along eight streets, all of which looked exactly the same. Indeed, the eight streets could have been the same street eight times over and she would never have known. But she had faith in humanity and believed she was getting closer to her destination.

At the next junction, she asked an elderly woman who was so tiny she barely reached Joyce’s chest. The woman stared at the piece of paper and pondered for a long time without saying anything. Joyce was getting frustrated. She was at a T-junction and assumed she needed to turn left or right.

She tried out a bit of basic Cantonese to hurry things along. ‘
Jor-been? Ding hai yau-been
?’ Left-side or is it right-side?

The woman thought for a moment longer and then pointed straight up. ‘
Gor do
,’ she said. Just there.

Joyce followed the line made by the woman’s finger and looked to the top of the block right next to where they were standing. ‘Thanks, I mean,
mm-goi
.’

Five minutes later, she emerged from an elevator on the forty-third floor of the building—was there anywhere else on earth where residential buildings could be sixty or seventy storeys high?—and started coughing. The air was full of smoke
or dust or something. Was the building on fire? She detected no heat. Instead, Joyce heard a grating, whining noise, and realised that workmen were cutting or grinding something.

The door of the apartment in front of her was open and she stepped in, her hand held over her mouth and nose. She waved her other hand in front of her eyes and eventually managed to get through the worst of the dust storm. In the small room there was nothing but a man at the top of a ladder, making a storm of powder, all of which was heading towards the front door because of the angle at which he was holding his tools.

‘
Mm-goi
,’ she said, grateful for the fact that ‘thank you’ in Cantonese was a useful portmanteau word that also meant ‘excuse me’, ‘please’, and so on.

The man looked down from his perch.

‘Professor Man? I want to see Professor Man?’

The worker just stared at her, saying nothing. She decided to try it in Chinese. ‘
Man Sin-Saang hai bin do
?’ Mr Man is where?

The worker’s head changed angle but he still said nothing.

Bother, thought Joyce. She recalled that many manual workers were mainland immigrants, legal or illegal, and spoke only Mandarin. How do you say Professor Man in Mandarin? ‘
Man Lau-sher?
’ she attempted.

The worker put down his electric sander. ‘You’ve bravely attempted three languages. Out of the three of those, I think I prefer the English,’ he said. ‘The others were hopeless.’

‘Oh. You speak English.’

‘Just a bit.’

‘I’m looking for Professor Man? He’s a professor of law?’

‘You’re not.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘
Yes
, I am.’

‘You’re
not
looking for him. You were, but no longer. You have found him.’

‘Ah. Right. Doing some DIY?’

The Professor laughed. ‘Certainly not. This isn’t my apartment. Wouldn’t catch me living in a small box at the top of a tower at cloud level.’

‘Oh. Helping out a friend?’

‘Goodness, you are polite, aren’t you?’ the Professor said, coming down the creaky ladder. ‘You cannot conceive that this sort of manual labour might be my actual job, can you?’

Joyce merely smiled, not knowing how to respond.

‘I run a company called Fat Man Interiors—
Fat
being Chinese for “prosperous”, as I expect you know. This is my day job, so to speak.’

‘Oh. I thought you were a professor of law. That’s what Nina told…’

‘I am trained as a professor of law. Did that for some years. It doesn’t pay too well, so I starting doing a bit of construction and interior design on the side. I discovered that the whole builder thing works rather well. So I do rather more of that than the legal lecturing these days.’

‘But I thought lawyers were rich?’

He pulled off his goggles and shook his head. ‘Never make the mistake of confusing professors of law with practitioners of law. Working lawyers earn the big bucks. We professors are merely another branch of the teaching profession. Poor as church mice.’

‘Really?’

‘Well, probably not really. I don’t actually have any data on the disposable income of church mice, so I shouldn’t be so cavalier with the statistics.’