The Train to Lo Wu (3 page)

Just listen, she says. I tell to you. Look to left side: there’s a big building there. Very tall white building, higher than us. Small windows.

All right. I can see that.

Right side is highway. Very bright. Many cars and trucks passing.

If I strain to listen I can hear a steady whooshing sound, and then the high whine of a motorcycle, like a mosquito passing my ear. OK, I say. Got that.

In the middle is very dark. Small buildings. Only few lights on.

Not enough, I say.

One window close to us, she says. Two little children there. You see them?

No.

Lift your arm, she says, and I do. Put your hand up. See? They wave to you.

My god, I say. How do you do that?

She squeezes my hand.

You promise me something.

Of course. What is it?

You don’t take it off, she says. No matter nothing. You promise me?

I do. I promise.

She lets go of my hand, and I hear running steps, soles skidding on concrete.

Alice! I shout, rooted to the spot; I crouch down, and balance myself with my hands. Alice! You don’t—

Mama,
she screams, ten feet away, and the sound carries, echoes; I can see it slanting with the wind, bright as daylight, as if a roman candle had exploded in my face.
Mama mama mama
mama mama mama mama,
she sings, and I am crawling toward her on hands and knees, feeling in front of me for the edge.

She is there, Alice shouts. You see? She is in the air.

I see her. Stay where you are.

You watch, she says. I follow her.

She doesn’t want you, I shout. She doesn’t want you there. Let her go.

There is a long silence, and I stay where I am, the damp concrete soaking through to my knees. My ears are ringing, and the numbness has blossomed through my head; I feel faintly seasick.

Alice?

You can stand up, she says in a small voice, and I do.

You are shaking, she says. She puts her arms around me from behind and clasps my chest, pressing her head against my back. I thank you, she says.

She unties the headband.

6 February

Man waves white hands at black sky.
He says arent you happy be alive arent you.

He kneels and kisses floor.

The American Girl

All night, half-asleep, the boy feels the train around him as it moves.

He is pushed tight against the wall of the compartment: his older sister sleeps beside him, next to the rail, curled around her doll. When the
train pulls into a station he feels its braking as a series of taps against
his body, and then a long, sustained push, as if hands had reached out
to restrain him. Once they have stopped, the folding stairs clatter
against the platform and the trainman’s boots thump along the walkway. Sanjiang, he shouts. Names the boy has never heard and never
will again. Muffled voices, a few stumbling footsteps. Cigarette smoke.

Is this it? he wonders. Is this the end?

Far down the tracks he hears the first whistle, and then a deep vibrationruns through the couplings, a tremor, as if the earth has
moved. The train groans, nudging his shoulder as it begins to roll.
He releases a deep breath. As they pull away from the platform, the
lights of the station flicker against his eyelids and go out.

Standing on the sidewalk, unfolding his cane, Chen sniffs the morning air. There is a certain dampness in it, a tang of soil and new leaves; it blows across his face like an exhalation. The city breathes, he thinks. Spring. He turns his face to the left, north, where he has been told green hills rise above Kowloon. He nods, slaps his cane against the sidewalk, and begins walking.

From the door of his building to Lao Jiang’s apothecary takes two hundred and thirty-four steps.

Passing Grandma Leung’s noodle shop, he lifts his head: the smell of fishballs, pig’s blood, fresh hot soymilk. Eh, Blind Chow! she calls from her window. His name is not Chow. But why correct her? He lifts a finger in the direction of the sound.

At the corner he turns left. A girl scolds her boyfriend for missing a date.

Dim gaai m’hoh yih da din wah
—

A bus stops at the corner: whoosh of air brakes.

Newspapers crumple underfoot outside the Jockey Club parlor.

Old man, he tells himself, pay attention. No daydreaming.

A whiff of bitter herbs: he turns sharply and ducks into the shop, folding his cane as he does so.

He and Lao Jiang have worked together so long they hardly need to speak. In the rare event of a new patient Jiang will come into the massage room and tap on Chen’s knee, or ankle, and grunt a few words in Shanghainese. Even that is usually unnecessary, for Chen’s fingers know the source of tension immediately, as soon as they touch the skin: they have long since stopped doing his bidding.

Cantonese opera plays on a tinny transistor in the back room. Some of his old women patients are so talkative they cannot stop themselves, even in his strange company, and so he has known them for years, their agonies and triumphs: thousands won at mah-jongg, sons made managing directors, grandchildren moved to Canada and Australia and America. His mind wanders and comes to rest.

Each day, it seems to him, it becomes harder to resist, as if a trapdoor has been pushed back in the floor of his mind, and light floods in. At first only details come into focus: the ragged edge of a blanket, rust flaking from an iron frame. Faces appear, their lips moving silently, then voices.

I have to go to the bathroom, the boy announces.

At the end of the car, his father mumbles from the bunk below.

He wriggles out of the blankets and scrambles down the rungs to
the floor. The cold blazes against his skin. Pulling his shoes on, he
gazes in wonder at the etchings of frost on the window glass.

North, he thinks. We are headed north.

He runs, soles thumping along the walkway.

Why, he wonders. Why, why? What good does it do anyone?

Mr. Chen?

He lifts his face toward the sound.

Mr. Chen? It’s Jill Marcus.

Sit down, he says, drink some tea. With you in a minute.

Her first name is unpronounceable to him: the nearest he can get is
jir,
no matter how hard he tries. So he calls her
Xiao Ma,
with a rising tone: Little Horse. His private joke. She is a full head taller than he is; when she comes near he feels himself speaking to her shoulder. Long hair, unbraided, that moves the air around her when she turns. Blue eyes, so she says. A smell of lavender enters the shop with her and lingers for hours after she leaves.

Her skirt rustles as she crosses in front of the doorway.

I’m sorry I’m late.

Yes. I watch the clock for you.

She giggles, like a girl, and he hears the pages of the newspaper crackling as she opens it.

He doesn’t remember how long she’s been coming to the shop, having lost the habit of counting months and days. Since the previous summer, perhaps. Twice a week she sits in a chair to the side of the room, reading aloud to him while he gives massages and touches pressure points. The old women are respectfully silent, uncomprehending; even when she reads from the Chinese newspapers, her Beijing accent is impossible for them to follow. He prefers the gaps and slurs of her English, her flat, nasal way of making even familiar words strange. The name of her home place is
a ka la hou
ma,
Oklahoma; he savors the sound, like the taste of a strange fruit.

He has forgotten how she found him, whether it was through Community Chest or Services for the Blind, but it hardly matters. Nor does he care what she chooses to read: about China, anything happening in China—a fire in an oil refinery in Liaoning, a chess competition won by twins in Wuhan. She is a little bit obsessed, he thinks, even for a
yanjiu sheng,
a graduate student. But the important thing is that she comes like clockwork, like a wake-up call.

Today it is an article about village elections in Shandong province, long and full of difficult English words. He waits, half-listening, for a gap—a page turning, a sip of water—and changes the subject.

How your research is going?

Almost finished, she says. Soon I begin writing the first chapter.

I think you work too hard. Take rest before writing.

She closes the newspaper; the breeze fans his face.

I’ve had all the time in the world.

American, he thinks; you hear it in the way her voice squeaks, as if a demon were trying to leap out. Impatient.
Get
on with it,
Americans always say. She lived three years in Chengdu, teaching English at a shoe factory, and it didn’t change her a bit.

So what do you think, Mr. Chen? Will the village system work?

He smiles; this is the way she always is. You ask the wrong person, he says. How can I know about these things?

I follow the old saying:
Lao tou duo jing yan
. The old have more experience.

He laughs. Old or young doesn’t matter. Politics I not understand. You ask anyone and get better answer.

Mr. Chen, she says, you know you are a remarkable person.

I am not special, he says. Hong Kong blind people library only have English books, English records. So I learn English. There are many old ones like me. Before library hire Chinese people make recordings.

But you’re the only one I know, she says. To me you are special. So I ask your opinion.

He frowns, bunching his eyebrows together. Sometimes he doesn’t know what she’s getting at. Drink more tea, he says. This is special kind from Yunnan. Good for digestion.

The newspaper rustles again. Let’s see what else is going on, she says. A long moment passes; he asks Mrs. Sze to lie on her side, and puts a fresh towel over her shoulder and neck. Under the cloth her skin stretches like a loose-fitting shirt.

The shop door slams; a rough old woman’s voice calls out to Lao Jiang in a thick Hangzhou dialect. Outside in the street, a lorry’s brakes squeal, and ten horns sound at once: as if someone has smashed both fists down on a keyboard.

All day long his father paces up and down the walkway outside their
compartment, or stands at an open window, smoking cigarette after
cigarette. From someone he has bought or borrowed a blue jacket and
hat, but he still wears the gray wool pants of his suit, and brown leather
shoes with thin wooden soles, and his gold-rimmed glasses. Anyone
could see that he doesn’t belong, the boy thinks, and for the first time he
feels a vague fear, fingers pressing gently against his windpipe.

Baba, he asks, why are we going to Lishan now?

Your grandmother is ill. The cigarette crackles as his father smokes
it. She is very old. At any moment she could walk to the wood.

To the wood?

She could die. He squats down so that his eyes are level with his
son’s; his breath smells rotten, decayed. Eyes watering, the boy
stiffens his head so it will not turn away.

Do you know what they say about mothers when they die?

No.

If the children are there, then the mother can close her eyes. She
can rest. But if the children are not there she can’t close them—
she’ll always be looking, waiting for them to arrive. She dies with her
eyes open.

But what about your classes?

I won’t teach my classes. Not this year.

What about Mama’s job? Don’t they still need her?

We think it’s better to be in the country this year, his father rasps.
In my home place. Chairman Mao wasn’t born in the city, you know.

Of course not, the boy says stiffly. Chairman Mao was born
in Shaoshan.

So this is like going back to our Shaoshan. Back to our roots. Just
so you know that there are other places in the world than Shanghai.

Shanghai,
Chen says. Shanghai—he reaches for the counter behind him and misses. For a moment everything is black, as if someone has pressed a hand over his eyes. He lurches, losing his balance, and clutches the edge of the sink. Porcelain smashes near his foot, and his shoe is suddenly warm and wet. He feels her hands on his shoulders.

Lao Chen!
Ni xiao xin dian!

I’m all right, he says. You can speak English. Is it the teapot?

What happened? Should we call a doctor?

A little dizzy. I didn’t eat this morning. Lao Jiang, he calls out. Bring a broom.

Crazy old fool, Mrs. Sze says from the table. Come on! My eyes are killing me.

All right, he says. Xiao Ma pushes him gently from behind; he reaches out and feels the cracked vinyl cushion, and places his hands lightly atop the old lady’s forehead.
Aiya,
she murmurs. Better.

Were you thinking about Shanghai?

What?

You said something about Shanghai. Were you having a day-dream?

Ah. Yes, it must be. Maybe I hear something on the radio.

A moment passes. She turns the page, and begins to read again.

In the morning the boy opens his eyes and stares at the rusting
slats of the bed above them. The sky outside the window is the color
of dirty snow. He pulls a hand from beneath the blankets and holds
it up to the light; it is as pale as boiled chicken skin.