Mr Wong Goes West (8 page)

She phoned another friend, Nina Madranini, and got through to the young woman’s mother instead.

‘Nina can’t talk to you just now,’ the older woman said. ‘But she’s meeting Jason at Starbucks in Jardine House at ten tomorrow morning. You know Jason McWong, don’t you? Why don’t you join them? I imagine there’s lots for you to talk about just now.’

‘Fine, thanks, will do, Mrs Madranini.’

Joyce rang off, intrigued. What did she mean by saying they had lots to talk about it? What had happened? She was sorry not to have been able to arrange a meeting with Paul, but it would be great to see Nina, one of her favourite chat partners on her instant message list. Nina, a school friend of Joyce’s, had been born into an Italian family that had emigrated to Australia, and then moved to Hong Kong for work. She was twenty, and was studying law at Hong Kong University. Like Joyce, she was into global justice: her real love was campaigning for the environment, and she was chair of the city’s branch of Pals of the Planet.

Her boyfriend Jason was twenty-one, but somehow seemed younger, despite being large and hairy. His father was Scottish, and his mother Chinese: they had humorously combined their surnames (McCann and Wong) into McWong at their wedding. Jason was a gentle giant who had become a stalwart of the local environmental activist scene. Certainly his heart was much more focused on activism than on his day job—he was a computer programmer for an animation company.

But Paul—oh, what a shame it would be if she spent two days in Hong Kong without managing to see him, Joyce thought. Paul had once been the most important of her friends in this city and, at the same time, had always been the one she knew least well. Joyce got to know him at school during a period when they were both outcasts sitting near the back of the classroom (it was the same as other schools all around the world—the good kids sat in the front half, the bad kids sat in the actual back row, but the non-entities filled the gap near, but not quite, at the back). She had been a shy new girl who had never been good at making friends. He had been a loner with little interest in anything except music and green politics, and had been known in class as an ‘environmental Nazi’, criticising teachers for not turning off every light when leaving the room. Both of them were children of busy, divorced parents who had given them plenty of material possessions but little in terms of affection or attention. Unsettled at home, neither managed to relax enough at school to make friends. Finding themselves unable to muscle into any of the cliques, they fell in together and fashioned a sort of low-temperature relationship by default.

It could not even be called a half-hearted friendship: quarter-hearted at best. It had grown with glacial slowness, and they really only got to know each other in Joyce’s final year. That period was known in the lore of their social group as The Year of Masterbrain. Paul, an obsessive character, knew a great deal about what he called ‘classical music’—a term that included all pieces of popular music composed or recorded in the two decades before he was born. His favourite period was the 1970s, a period about which he had encyclopaedic knowledge. That year, a teacher had arranged for him to be lined up as a contestant on a touring schools version of a
UK television show called ‘Masterbrain’, on which he would be asked questions about his specialty topic.

There were a dozen or so members of the Music Appreciation Society in school at that time, and a few of them, including Joyce, Nina and Jason, had undertaken to meet after school at regular intervals to spend an hour drilling Paul with questions about the music of the 1970s. By the time the show was due to be recorded, Paul was an expert on the subject, and so were Joyce, Nina and Jason.

On the day of the show the Music Appreciation Society got seats in the studio audience to cheer on their creation. The cameras started rolling and Paul got an almost perfect score on music of the 1970s. But he performed atrociously on the general knowledge section. He didn’t make the final cut for the next round, and that was the end of it.

After the show, the four of them had broken off from the other group members to start a subset of the Music Society called the Obsessive-Compulsive 1970s Music Trivia Group, or Obcom 70s for short. They had entire conversations about classmates that consisted only of references to song titles and artists of pop songs issued between 1969 and 1980.

‘Joe Jackson, 1979?’

‘“Is She Really Going Out With Him?” I don’t know. I think it’s more a case of Doobie Brothers, 1979.’

‘“What a Fool Believes.”’

While the friendship between Joyce, Nina and Jason had gathered depth, none of them became particularly close to Paul, who seemed to find it difficult to put as much effort into his relationships as he did into his campaign to fashion a life for himself out of idly collecting music tracks and complaining about other people’s wastefulness. Joyce and Paul drifted apart,
and on her last day in Hong Kong, they had not bothered to seek each other out to say goodbye.

What had failed to blossom face-to-face had thrived remotely: a more solid friendship between them grew by email. Joyce had often wondered whether they would meet again and actually move on to an actual face-to-face friendship with a bit more depth to it—or even something deeper: a
relationship
. He wasn’t bad looking. He was clever. He didn’t have much personality, but he might grow one. It was as if she had known two Pauls—one an uncommunicative face across a classroom, the other a likeable email correspondent whose letters were filled with passion about music, movies and global warming.

Paul, like Joyce, had refused to go to university. He had instead taken a job at a rare records company, where his encyclopaedic knowledge of rock stars had been useful. But then he’d changed. He became the first chairman of Pals of the Planet Hong Kong and had become more obsessive about that than he had ever been about his fabled music collection (which was so extensive it was eventually held across three separate iPods). In the past six months, he had hardly written to Joyce. He had become secretive, complaining about people intercepting his email and spying on him. He had not replied to her last two emails.

The only way to re-establish the friendship would be face to face, she decided. Nina and Jason would know where he was. And whether he had gone right off the rails, or was worth pursuing, for friendship or just possibly something deeper…

In the meantime, what? She was on her own for the evening. How to occupy herself? A bit of shopping perhaps and then another visit to the pool? Shopping was more fun with buddies, but was still enjoyable as a solo pleasure. She skipped down the
stairs and was soon heading to the Lanes, a little network of bargain stalls and barrows off Des Veoux Road.

Just as she turned into an alleyway of stores selling fashion wear and cheap watches, something caught her eye: a shape, a man, a tall, stocky figure of some sort who seemed to be following her from a distance. But as she turned and scanned the crowds behind her, she couldn’t see anyone looking her way. She must have imagined it. She turned back to the Lanes, and allowed the tightly packed Aladdin’s cave of good things to suck her in.

Wong stepped tentatively into a small motorised buggy as a public relations officer from the airport staff minced around to the other side of the vehicle. He had never been invited to step into a car indoors before. There seemed to be something incongruous about vehicle tyres nestling into thick carpets. It seemed wrong for a car to brush past people in corridors. Was this not illegal? Or immoral? Or at least uncivil? Or had he been living in Singapore too long? He reminded himself that in China, his homeland, the rule was that anyone who owned a motorised vehicle was above the law, and vehicles often pushed people out of the way.

Airport spokeswoman Nicola Teo set the vehicle in motion by grinding it into gear. As they jerked forwards, she prattled on
with her eyes fixed on the passenger-strewn concourses ahead of them. The PR woman spoke so quickly that her strings of over-rehearsed sentences turned into a wordless drone in his ear, and Wong soon became lost in his own thoughts.

He had spent less than an hour looking around the airport, but had already been impressed by what he saw. It was not so much an airport as a medium-sized city. As he gazed around, the young woman touched his arm to emphasise a point.

‘We process forty million people a year,’ she said. ‘That’s more than the population of New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo combined.’

He wondered what she meant by ‘processed’. Was that not something Westerners did to food?

She turned briefly to him and flashed him a smile to give him a chance to react. When he did not, she continued unabashed with her flow of conversational factoids, gently easing the small vehicle around groups of straggling passengers. ‘The long-term plan sees us growing to a maximum passenger through-load of eighty-seven million people.’

The feng shui master still did not visibly react, but he let the numbers enter his consciousness. Eighty-seven million people! Where would they put them all? If the city was built for seven million, what would they do with the other eighty million?

He scanned the floor plans on his lap. They showed that the airport was shaped like a giant letter Y. When you looked at photographs from above, it looked like a two-headed centipede, with lots of little leg-like protrusions attached to the main body and the two necks sticking out of one end. Of course, there was no need for him to do a feng shui reading of the airport itself, as his assignment was merely to look at the conference facilities on the Skyparc super-jet. But most modern architects tried to acknowledge the principles of energy flow in their buildings
these days, and he was pleased to have an opportunity to see how these elements had been handled at this vast and futuristic new mini-city in Hong Kong, one of the few places on the planet which took feng shui completely seriously.

As they skittered along, Ms Teo pointed out the stairs leading to the internal railway station. ‘The building is so large—more than one point two-five kilometres from end to end—that we have an internal railway system taking people from one end to the other, speedily, safely, and in comfort.’

Wong wondered what it meant in practice to have railway trains inside a building. Probably it led staff to have ridiculous conversations. ‘Excuse me, I have to take the 2.50 to the kitchen and 3.05 to the toilet before catching the 3.10 back to my desk.’

‘This new airport at Chek Lap Kok is nine times the size of the previous one at Kai Tak,’ she continued. ‘We have more than one hundred immigration arrival counters, so we can minimise the queuing time for passengers who have come in after a long flight.’

As she slowed the vehicle down, nearing their destination, she turned to look at him: ‘Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? I know everything there is to know about this place…well, nearly. I’ll be glad to answer any queries you have. Incidentally, in case I didn’t mention it earlier, we handle fifty-three flights an hour at peak time, which is equivalent to almost one per minute.’

The feng shui master turned to her: ‘I have a question.’

‘Good.’ She was delighted. Most of her victims were so stunned by her torrential onslaught of facts that they were barely able to speak.

‘Where’s the front door?’

‘The front door?’

‘Yes. Where’s the front door? I want to know which way it faces.’

For Wong, it was a natural question to ask: how could you understand the feng shui of a building without knowing where the front door was? The main door of the house had to be aligned with the most positive direction for the director of the group of people who used the building. For example, if the most senior man had a
kua
number of seven, a northeast facing door would make the house prosperous, while a southwest door would see the property expanding in size; other directions would be less positive.

Nicola Teo was momentarily silenced. It appeared that no one had ever asked that question before. But the confusion in her face suggested that she was surprised to be unable to answer such a simple question. She pointed to his diagram.

‘Well, that’s easy. The front door is, well, at the front. And, well, I would say the front was this bit, where the airport express train arrives—at least, it is from the passengers’ point of view. The passengers on the trains, that is. But from the air passengers’ point of view…well, they arrive at gates mostly down that end, so they would probably see that end as the front. But then the car drivers…well there are five car parks—well, two main ones, you could say. And they come in sort of from one side or the other. So they would probably think the front doors were probably at this side, or that one. Did I tell you, we have a total of two thousand four hundred car parking bays? So let me think, where exactly is the front door?’

Wong let her chew over the question and returned to his study of the plans. It became clear over the next few minutes that his question had more or less silenced the young woman, although she still spewed forth a fresh factoid at irregular intervals, like a short circuiting copy of a child’s talking
dictionary. ‘Did I tell you there were ninety-eight separate elevators in this building alone?’ she gushed. ‘Did I tell you we serve the passengers from two hundred and ten thousand, one hundred and twelve flights a year?’