The Nine Fold Heaven (14 page)

The little one rubbed his head on my chest, his lips found my breasts as if seeking milk. I caressed his head and planted a kiss on his chubby cheek. Such a handsome baby, why would his parents have the heart to leave him as an orphan?

Seconds later, Peiling came back with what looked like a leftover bit of bun. She put it in her mouth, chewed it briefly to soften it, then put it on her finger and then into Baobao’s mouth. Baobao sucked with all his strength.

“Sorry, little baby, that’s all I could find.”

After the baby finished eating, I said, “Peiling, I need to go now, please take very good care of yourself and Baobao.”

I took several bills from my handbag and secretly put them in her pocket.

“Can you come back soon to sing and hold Baobao?”

“I’ll try,” I said, blinking back tears.

I wish I could
.

PART FIVE

17

Goddess Behind the Secret Gate

A
fter an uneventful voyage back to Hong Kong, I took a taxi straight back to my apartment, a small, inexpensive one in the Wanchai district, next to Victoria Harbor. The neighbors paid no notice of my leaving or coming back. It was a big building where people rented, sublet, even sub-sublet. Tenants tended to ignore each other and go about their own business like ghosts wandering in a cemetery.

So I found myself back in this run-down neighborhood of blue-collar workers, street vendors, shady businessmen, and families down on their luck. There was also a large contingent of foreigners, seeking the favors of the ladies of Hong Kong’s most famous red light district, especially those vagina-starved young men from the sea—American sailors. These transients sailed away soon after their nights of luxury between accommodating thighs, but left behind exotic, mixed-race children. In this atmosphere, a young single woman would not stand out as she might in a more respectable district.

My two-bedroom apartment had everything I needed, including a kitchen and even a flush toilet, so I didn’t have to share either the preparation of my food, or its end result, with denizens of the other apartments.

Lonely again, my only comfort in this place where I knew no one was gazing out my window overlooking Victoria Harbor. I liked to watch the fishing boats come and go, and steamships depart for remote places. In the mornings, when the ladies of the night were still asleep, I’d go out and take a walk, then either buy one of the long doughnuts or dim sum wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper.

Other times, I would go to a working men’s tea house and sit by myself amidst the din, reading my newspaper and enjoying a pork bun or flat rice noodles with shrimp. But my preoccupation was trying to figure out my next move. Unfortunately, there was not much news about Shanghai in the Hong Kong papers, so I still had no idea what had happened to the Shanghai gangs, my little Jinjin, his father, Jinying, and my other lover Gao, the bodyguard.

Jinying’s diary said he was in Hong Kong looking for me. But how could we find each other in this dense city of several million? We couldn’t put a missing person ad in a newspaper, or post flyers on lampposts and walls. Unless I used a fake name, but then how would he know it’s me?

The people close to my twenty-year-old life, whether enemies or loved ones, had vanished like the fogs above the Huangpu River. Feeling totally disheartened, I thought maybe I should just accept the fact and move on. But to where, and for what? I didn’t think my life would be complete without my Jinjin and his father.

I felt my life was like a train that kept rushing forward and never stopped at a station.

My young, torturous life that seemed to pass so quickly in Shanghai. Now in Hong Kong, it seemed to wobble along at the pace of a tortoise. I had to admit to myself that I missed the life I had striven so hard to escape.

Maybe I should take a break. Since I had money, why not explore Hong Kong while fate was giving me a respite? Maybe what I needed was some diversion to recharge my energy and give me some ideas as how to find my baby and his father. I’d never had a real vacation, or even thought it would be possible for me. True, I’d gone to Paris with Lung, Jinying, and Gao, but every moment was haunted by the possibility of Lung’s imminent murder.

So during the following weeks, I tried to put aside my worries and live in the here and now, letting myself do whatever I felt like: read, stroll, sleep, sing. Leisure was a luxury I’d never experienced before.

My life had seemed like a slippery fish always about to slide out of my grasp. Yet, now, after days of touring the city and the outlying islands in a tourist’s frame of mind, I began to think it might be possible to get a life, a normal one, even if only temporarily.

One day, flipping through a tourist guidebook, an area called Shek Tong Tsui caught my attention. A decade ago this place, which was close to Wanchai, not far from where I now lived, had been famous for prostitution houses. Like Shanghai Lily on the screen, Shek Tong Tsui’s night ladies had to “sell their smile,” meaning their body, to survive. Since I was an orphan and a spy, I felt a certain bond with women who live by love at society’s margins: prostitutes, mistresses, concubines.

I decided to visit this place where once lived these “goddesses behind the secret gate.”

So, on a pleasant, balmy evening, I found myself seated on the more expensive upper deck of a tram rumbling its way to Shek Tong Tsui. What you got from the extra ten cents difference was having a wide seat without being forced to rub your arms, back, and bottom against those of your fellow passengers, or of having their offensive body parts massage yours.

However, the young couple across from me who’d together splurged an extra twenty cents, only used the opportunity to rub against each other like their poorer comrades downstairs. A middle-aged man two rows in front of them was holding a radio from which spilled the song “When Will You Come Back?”

The unexpected bittersweet tune brought tears to my eyes. Could this man be playing this song because he somehow knew what was in my heart?

I thought of how this song was composed. A woman, after her husband had been killed by the black society, escaped with her small child to Hong Kong. Having no friends or money, she had no choice but to work as a prostitute in Kowloon Walled City, a lawless district even the police were afraid to enter. Every morning after work, she would lean on the door and sing to her vanished husband, “I’ll always be waiting for you, why don’t you return?”

With this song ringing in my ears, my question was: “Jinying, when will you come back to me?”

Soon the tram reached Shek Tong Tsui and I quickly got off, leaving behind the heartbreaking melody, but not my broken heart. I walked slowly by the harbor to enjoy the salt-smelling breeze and the twilight on the waves. Along the roadside in front of dilapidated buildings, a few women leaned by doors, chatting, smoking, and throwing hopeful glances. Despite the British having recently banned prostitution in their colony, it was obvious that these gaudily dressed and flirtatiously acting women were not here to appreciate the view, but to practice women’s oldest profession.

Among them, a fortyish one, her face plastered with white powder like a geisha’s, yelled toward me, “Hey, little beauty, if you were a man, I’d give you a big discount!”

I smiled back but didn’t respond.

Her “colleague,” another past-her-prime goddess, laughed hilariously. “Ha! A discount? Are you joking? If Little Miss Beautiful were a man, it’d be free!”

A third grandmother echoed. “Free? How about I pay him for it?”

The whole group burst into thunderous laughter. Of course they were joking to make the best of their lot. Business was bad and they were bored. No man would pay for these pathetic women except the equally old, ugly, and poor. But once they had been young, pretty, and highly sought after.

I felt a chill. If I didn’t start to really plan for my future, near or far, would I end up like these women? I had some money, but what would my future be?

Just then, suddenly there appeared a group of fiftyish men in rags, smoking, stinking of alcohol, and talking loudly, their conversation mainly insults regarding each other’s parents’ sex organs.

Once the run-down goddesses saw the even more run-down coolies, instead of running away like ghosts from daylight, they flocked to them like moths toward light. But the coolies outnumbered the goddesses. So the former clustered around to wait for their turn.

I overheard one of the women say, “Three dollars for five minutes. Five for ten, and one hundred overnight.”

One coolie laughed. “Grandma, you have a mirror at home? If not, I’ll bring you one next time, on the house.”

Now all the coolies burst out laughing like there was no tomorrow.

I wondered about these women who were the age my mother would have been, had she lived. They all must have sad, convoluted tales of how they ended up on this ill-reputed street selling their smiles.

Seeing these near-destitute women, I wondered, had any been the beautiful mistresses of wealthy men? I had read so many tragic stories about courtesans who prospered from the scholar-officials and rich dandies who were infatuated with them, only to be discarded because of pressure from their lover’s powerful families. It seemed that no love, however deep, could survive the threat of disinheritance.

The women, once their looks had begun to fade, were abandoned, while the men, passion cooled, would marry proper women chosen by their parents. After years of tedium with an increasingly demanding wife, the man would be worn down with the pressures of supporting the family. All that was left of his earlier, seemingly unquenchable passion for the beautiful courtesan was mere memories. As more years went by, and his grandchildren were nearly grown, he’d begin to wonder if this love affair really happened, or was but a fragranced figment of his youthful imagination?

Of course, a young scholar might break off with his family and marry his beloved courtesan. And they would live happily ever after—for a few years. But sooner or later the money would run out and the man would have to work, perhaps as a tutor, or even by setting up a stall on a busy street to provide letter-writing services to the poor and illiterate. The wife would be forced to supplement his meager earnings as a maid or perhaps selling home-cooked food on the street. Even combined, their earnings would not pay for an amah to look after their children. So the wife would drag her brood along to her stall and the children would become street kids, taunted by the better-off children on their way home from school.

But no matter how hard the couple worked, their financial situation grew ever more dire. So the lovers who could never live without each other began to quarrel. As time went by and the exchanges of words became nastier, hate began to seep in. And now the man bitterly regretted that he hadn’t listened to his parents in the first place. And his wife began to ask herself, why did I waste my beauty and my life on this man, instead of staying with a rich patron?

I sighed inside. For I feared to think that Jinying’s love for me would be the same as these men’s. And that, if fate brought us back together, as the years passed, we’d forget the love we once cherished and end up hating each other.

I tried to suppress these unpleasant thoughts and continued to walk. Soon I entered the busy part of the street where crowds milled around shops and stalls. I felt some relief becoming one of the crowd—like a drop of water in the sea.

Happy for the distraction, I enjoyed the sights: street vendors selling cigarettes, chestnuts, bowls of steaming red bean soup, towels, blouses, underwear, mahjong sets, and anything else one imagine one needed. For the better off there were restaurants, Cantonese opera theaters, gold stores, and many others.

At the red bean soup stall, a young mother was feeding her child by first sloshing the hot liquid in her own mouth, then spewing it between her toddler’s lips. This way the hot soup cooled more quickly, I assumed.

At one stall a child about ten stood by herself, selling something sticky, gooey, but strangely appealing.

I walked up to her and asked, “Little friend, what is this?”

“
Lomaichi
with black sesame filling, very sweet and tasty, have one,” she said, already thrusting one patty into my hand.

I paid, took a bite, and immediately felt the sesame oozing into my mouth and warming my palate. It was as sweet and tasty as the little girl had promised.

She looked so vulnerable here by herself that I was tempted to ask, “What if gangsters come here to demand protection money?” but decided to swallow my words.

In between chewing and swallowing, I asked instead, “Where are your parents?”

“They are selling other things over there.” She pointed with her dirty little hand. But there were so many pedestrians and sellers that I couldn’t possibly tell whom she meant.

“Good luck, little friend,” I said, then swallowed the whole
lomaichi.
But this time the glob of sesame burned my mouth. As if a foretaste of the hell that awaited me because of my bad deeds.

I resumed walking and soon passed by a grand restaurant with a huge signboard surrounded by flowers and blinking lightbulbs:

Though I could not see the happy couple, I envied them. Would I ever find my own happy nuptials and hundred years of harmonious union? My life so far had been a matter of kill or be killed. I had not allowed myself to think so far into the future, since my concern was usually surviving the next few days. Happiness seemed as out of reach as the dead rabbit dangling in front of a race dog.

Into the gaily decorated restaurant flocked a procession of guests, men in Western suits or Chinese silk gowns, women in the latest Paris frocks or fancy embroidered
cheongsams
. Their happy laughter and congratulatory sayings only intensified my loneliness.