OUR ROUTE WAS MISSOULA to L.A. and then west over the Pacific to Hong Kong. We went Northwest first cla.s.s-huge, plush chairs, bowls of sherbet on china followed by tea every couple of hours. Liquor was free, so Min and I drank it liberally. Over the course of that night, including our long stopover in Seoul, we became tipsy and sober again three times as we drifted in and out of daylight.
I was sure we would tear off the tips of the buildings as we descended straight into the heart of Hong Kong. Landing was intensely exotic, like swiftly entering a jewel, a ruby.
Albert was there to meet us. As soon as Min saw his father, he grabbed my hand and we rushed through the crowd. When Albert and Min hugged each other, I noticed that Albert was hugging with only one arm. The other was slack at his side. He"d apparently had a stroke.
Min pulled back. "Dad," he said, "are you all right?"
"Oh, yes, only a small accident. It"s healing rapidly." He continued to pat Min on the back as he turned to me. "And you must be Sarah. I"m always honored to meet a friend of my son"s."
"Thank you," I said. "Thank you for inviting me."
Moments later I was in the soft leather backseat of Albert"s silver-blue Jaguar, pa.s.sing under the electric canopy of Nathan Road, breathing in the scent of the city, which was-in equal parts-diesel exhaust, rank mango from the pyramids stacked on the sidewalks, and the keen salty air that rose off the Pacific.
We pa.s.sed through the tunnel to Hong Kong Island and drove down a quiet street lined with inverted pines, stopping at a dark-blue, turreted restaurant. Over dinner I discovered that Albert, like Min, was a curious, gracious man with a talent for asking personal questions that one might want to answer. Albert and Min got along well. As they talked, I studied their faces.
They looked alike, though racially they were obviously not identical. Albert, I knew, was pure Chinese. His family had once been refugees to Hong Kong from Manchouli, a northern city in Manchuria province, close to both Mongolia and the Soviet Union. Min"s mother had been from a tiny mountain town in the Himalayas, above Nepal. I wondered how that would be, to be a father and to stare across a table, through the crackling candlelight, and see your own face, younger, broadened and transformed by both time and race. How interesting it would be to see the future that precisely.
Albert lived in Kowloon, which is on the mainland, so we pa.s.sed back and began our steady climb upward, out of the lit city, into a dark, densely wooded area on the periphery called Clear Water. The house was green and sprawling, overlooking a small back of the South China Sea.
All around us rose small, jagged mountains. In the dark they looked alive, like giant blackbirds, staring down at their one treasure-the little sapphire bay.
MIN AND I HAD a week before we began our jobs. We set out the first morning in Albert"s Jaguar. Once downtown, we roamed on foot. The first street we stepped into was steep and lined with small stands selling slices of snake to eat and the bodies of fish that supposedly had been drawn from the ocean decades ago, in the 1950s. This was a delicacy, and if one ate it carefully, it would give a specific sort of knowledge, the fish-seller said, knowledge that all desire is one day satisfied. "Why?" Min asked.
"Why?" The man raised his eyebrows.
"Why will this fish give us this knowledge?"
"Because a fish"s desire is be eaten, and this fish has waited all these years." He seemed to have made this up on the spot.
"Seems counterintuitive," Min said.
The man looked annoyed with us, so we moved on. I carried the fish. It did have a sort of sad, waiting look to it. I took a bite. The texture was webby, bristly. It had a layer of crystalline, almost invisible salt, and my throat tightened against it.
"Mmm," I said to Min. "It"s working already. Have a bite."
Min took a bite, and made a gagging noise. We sucked on it for a while, until an incredible thirst overtook us both. I didn"t want to throw it out uneaten, though, in case what the fish-seller had said was true. "Wrap it up," Min said. "Send it to your sad Mr. Harrison. He"ll eat it." I smiled and eventually set it down in the gutter for a stray cat.
We pa.s.sed into the next street, which was, suddenly, a thoroughfare lined with marble-and-gla.s.s skysc.r.a.pers. The rest of the week would pa.s.s exactly like this-each street a small, soft shock. Because I was from the prairies, a city built on hills struck me as voluptuous, revealing. Beyond a row of gray shanties I could see a beautiful pink mansion on a hill, and beyond that another hill with a dark Catholic crucifix rising from it, and beyond that the Hindu monks crawling up a slope, tilling a small plot of berries. And every day I would see, here and there, the long silver barracks of the refugee camps, shining and surrounded by barbed wire.
I read in the Hong Kong Standard that Amnesty International had now declared conditions in the camps-erupting sewers, severe malnutrition, scant medical care-"deplorable." Relief groups in the United States also criticized the British and Hong Kong governments, calling the camps "odious." Even famously neutral Canada joined in. And when one of Margaret Thatcher"s attaches, the toady Mr. Olson, proposed a plan to send back some of the refugees as a message to other Vietnamese not to attempt the journey, the Pope, from his flowery balcony above Saint Peter"s, declared repatriation in this case "an a.s.sault on human dignity."
DURING THAT FIRST WEEK we went to the Wednesday night races. We ate dinner in a gla.s.sy booth high above the track. It jutted out far above the bleachers and seemed to float there, unattached to anything. It was the British club. We sat at a table with one of Albert"s colleagues, a man named Kingsley, and his silent wife. He talked about the Vietnamese all night. "I do find it best," he said at one point, "that we"ve decided to send them back."
"We haven"t decided that," Albert said. "In fact, I"m sure it won"t happen. If we send them back, some will surely be hurt."
"No, no. We"ll get the Viet government to agree not to touch them."
"The whole world is already against us. Even the Americans."
"Let me tell you something about the Americans," Kingsley said. "The only thing to remember is that, G.o.d bless them, they are vulgarians. The only thing they do reasonably well is entertain. They make amusing movies that the adult world indulges in for a few moments after dinner. But their political ideas? Worthless. They sympathize with the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds? We have forty-seven thousand of them washing up on our sh.o.r.e, and the Americans have offered to take two hundred of them." He looked at me. His face was covered in bristly gray hair. "Sorry," he said to me. Later, when some bagpipe music came over the loudspeaker, Kingsley leaned back and I thought he might weep.
After dinner the betting began. In the little hovering booth the very idea of betting seemed conceptual. These were extremely wealthy people, and money moved through the room as if it were oxygen, or time-in such abundance it was no longer visible.
Later Min and I took the shaky elevator to the ground level. There I saw money. People carried it crumpled in their hands. The cement floor was littered with slips of paper. We watched the end of a race through an opening in the bleachers. From above, the horses had seemed to move effortlessly, but from here I could see the froth at their mouths, and their eyes filling with tears as they stepped off the track.
"Can you believe that Kingsley guy?" Min said, loosening his bow tie. Bells rang, marking the start of another race. Somebody released a bagful of white birds into the air, for luck.
ON MONDAY, I DISCOVERED that Min"s job would be downtown, at the office, but mine would be in the house. Early that morning I followed Albert as he limped through a series of hallways and up some stairs, until we were walking down a long moss-green hallway. At the end of it, Albert opened a large door and introduced me to my office. It had vaulted ceilings and enormous windows that looked out over the Pacific. The sun fell in as if it were aimed directly at this room, which contained a large desk, gilded, with tiny rubies encrusted at its edges. I smiled at this room, so pleasant and dramatic simultaneously. "It"s beautiful, Albert," I said. "It"s so generous. I hope I won"t disappoint you."
"Impossible," he said. "When Min called me from America, he said he had found a woman as serious and as beautiful as his mother. I was skeptical at first, but I see you are a remarkable woman."
I was silent at this. I had never received such a grand compliment, and I was deeply flattered. "Thank you," I finally said.
"Have a seat," he said, walking over to the desk and pulling out a chair, which was upholstered and intricately carved. I sat down. Albert sat on the edge of the desk. "As you know," he said, "Min will be married in this next year."
"That soon?" I said.
"Yes."
"Has his wife been selected?"
"No. That is where you come in. You will be choosing the wife."
"Me?"
"Yes."
"Albert, I am honored, I can"t tell you how honored, but I"m really not qualified to do that. I mean, after all, I"m a foreigner here."
"You are his best friend. Who better to discover a wife?"
"Well, Min, for one."
"Min is a fool in these matters, as was I, before Lada."
"What if I choose the wrong person?"
"It"s not that simple. You will actually choose a woman, and I will approve her, and then Min will meet her. He will not be required to marry her. We have all summer before you return to America, so there is plenty of time to make this decision. It must be somebody the entire family agrees upon, and since you are Lada"s eyes for now, your vote will count to the same degree that hers would if she were alive."
"I don"t know," I said, shaking my head.
Albert looked worried. "Of course, Sarah, if you prefer not to do this, that is fine. Please stay as our guest anyway. I do not want to drive you away with this request. I want you to be happy here."
This broke my heart. "Oh, I am," I said. "Of course I will be pleased to help you. I just hope I won"t disappoint you."
"That is quite impossible," he said.
"Well, then," I said, "when should I start?"
"Now would be perfect. The applications are in the desk."
"Applications?"
"Yes. Letters and photos of different women. Some have recommended themselves; others have been recommended by their parents or friends. You will look at those, and narrow the field to perhaps fifty or one hundred that you can interview."
"What about criteria?" I asked, and winced. All those years of feminist theory had led me here, to this little red-gem room, swathed in sunlight, me sitting at a desk, asking about criteria by which I should judge other women. Hands, eyes, heart.
"I trust your instinct. The only thing I ask is that you provide a description of each woman after you meet her."
"All right."
"My own mother, Min"s grandmother, sat at this same desk and determined that I would marry Lada. Her files are still in that cabinet. I"ve had them translated so that you can look through them."
"All right. Thank you."
"No," he said, "thank you, Sarah." He closed the door behind him.
I opened the large drawer to my left. Inside were stacks and stacks of letters. Most had a photograph clipped to them. I picked up the first one. The woman had a friendly, shy smile, and curious eyes. I thought she looked smart. I wondered briefly if this would be the one, right here. What a coincidence that would be. I read her letter. "I am a chemistry student in Beijing. I have moments of beauty. I will work, if that is your wish, or not if it isn"t."
Nah, I thought, too humble for Min. I placed her application on a small table behind me, which became from that moment on the place for discarded applications. As I reached to pick up the second application, I was suddenly horrified that I had slipped into this job so easily. I stood up and went over to inspect the cabinet where Min"s grandmother"s notes were kept. They were neatly organized. On the front of each woman"s file was Min"s grandmother"s a.s.sessment. She wrote in characters, and underneath, in parenthesis, somebody had translated them into English for me.
About the first woman the grandmother had written, "No, looks out of corner of eyes, suspicious and addicted to finding fault."
"Ouch," I said, flipping to the next file. Tough old broad, that grandmother. The next one said, "Possibility-Midnight-black hair, walk is like a leopard"s, carnal desires strong." The next few were all rejections: "Silly, without dignity, spoils everything she touches." "Monkey-woman, scurries through the day, loves confusion." And under one name Min"s grandmother had written only "Pleases no one."
I skimmed them all. There must have been close to fifty. On the very bottom of the pile I found a description of Lada. "Is not Chinese, but of lowland Himalayas. Has no wealth, but carries purple light. Seems like a cloud about to burst. Sleeps lightly, fond of G.o.ds."
EARLY THAT EVENING, BEFORE dinner, I changed into my bathing suit and climbed the several stories of the house to spread open the large metal doors that led to the roof, into the swirling, hallucinatory light of sunset. There I found Min, sitting in a stone whirlpool, his head tilted back on the ledge, half sleeping after his first day of work.
I stared at him for a while, wondering what would happen if I offered myself as the bride. But then, as I slowly slipped into the warm water, I realized that the hundreds of hours I had spent with Min had, by the mysterious alchemy of friendship, distilled out any romance, like the stream rising all around us now, leaving us pure, fast friends.
Min"s eyes opened and he smiled lazily at me.
"Min," I said, "do you have any idea what my job is?"
"I think so," he said.
"I"m supposed to find you a wife."
Min didn"t look surprised but just lay there, a relaxed, confident grin on his face. "It"s strange, isn"t it, how things work out?"
"Yes," I said emphatically. "It"s very strange."
My bedroom was next to Min"s. Later that night, after we had played a gentle, courteous game of Mah-Jongg with Albert, Min cried out in his sleep. I sat up straight in my bed. This was the second time that week. It was such a sad, childish yelping, and so deeply at odds with his personality, that it shocked me. I couldn"t help thinking of his mother. I was seized with a sudden desire that she be alive and that she take on this job of finding Min happiness, finding him a wife.
Sometime in those early weeks I first saw Rapti. I often went for walks around the neighborhood late in the afternoon. I found a little shop called Asia Foodstore at the foot of the neighborhood. It was pleasantly crowded in the afternoons, full of Filipino amahs and expats shopping after work. Rapti was an amah. When I saw her, she was carrying a very large blond baby in a cloth carrier. The baby rested on her chest, facing her.
I noticed her because she was singing a quiet syncopated song to the baby, full of clicking baby noises. She had black braids and was quite tall.
Earlier that day I had found a sheet of paper on which Min"s grandmother had written her definition of the "superior woman." At the top of the page is said, "Formula for Woman, According to Dignity." The formula was "Has excellent posture, which is two-thirds contentment and one-third desire."
At first I thought this a bit arbitrary. But all day the idea had been pa.s.sing through my mind like a mantra. I began to think, in this strange place-half kingdom, half city-that the grandmother"s formula caught the entire world in its tiny palm. Two-thirds contentment, one-third desire. Of course, I thought, as I spiraled my way through the trees to Asia Foodstore, that is the composition of the world. And so when I saw Rapti walking up and down the aisles, singing contentedly to the baby, letting him reach for and touch every last thing in the store, she seemed, suddenly, to embody this formula.
I ran into her almost every day after that, going up or down the hills. We nodded to each other at first, and later had small conversations. I discovered that she worked for a Canadian couple, toy-makers, who lived a block away from Min. They worked during the day and left their baby, Jack, with Rapti. "He is my best friend," Rapti said, removing her left braid from his mouth. He liked to chew on her braids whenever he could.
When I told Rapti that I was staying with the Leung family, she frowned. "Really?" she said.
"Why do you frown?"
"I hear a lot about them."
"Yes. This is a hard time for Mr. Leung and Min, his son."
"I know who Min is," she said. "I guess I don"t feel too sorry for them. I feel more sorry for the Vietnamese."
I didn"t say anything. I didn"t want to quarrel with her.
Over the next month I discovered that she was the leader of a movement to unionize all the amahs from the Philippines. She was also a sort of unofficial consultant to other foreign-worker groups in Hong Kong. Often when I saw her, she and the baby had returned from a rally downtown or a protest outside the Regent. They returned by bus in the late afternoon to shop at Asia Foodstore and then walk with me up the hill. The baby often leaned back in the pouch and stared up at Rapti as she talked. I liked to imagine that baby"s future memories. The Canadian couple were planning on moving back home in a year, where the baby would grow up on some gentle, ordinary plain, in Alberta or Saskatchewan, and have exhilarating dreams of fantastic Asia, its red setting sun and soaring ginkgo trees, and of Rapti, too, her soft, intelligent voice, her tantalizing blue-black braids floating above.
AS THE DAYS Pa.s.sED, I slowly narrowed the list of candidates to a hundred that I would interview. I had tried to create different methods by which to sift fairly through the applications, but none was successful. Eventually I worked entirely by instinct, or, more accurately, by capricious reasoning-the tilt of her handwriting; the beauty of her name, Lily Chen, Mei-Mei Fai; or even an elaborate hairstyle I wanted to see in person.
Aside from this impossible task, I began to love my summer in Hong Kong. What had made me such a poor traveler in the past, getting no farther than Canada and once, briefly, Mexico, and disliking even that, was that I had a love of repet.i.tion and schedule. Perfect days, for me, began with identical food and drink and activity; not until dusk would I develop the restlessness that is supposed to mark people in their twenties, the desire for the day to flower, to reveal something or somebody never imagined. So in Hong Kong each weekday morning I went to the roof, sat in the whirlpool with Min, drank coffee as the sun exploded over the mountains, read the previous day"s New York Times and the present day"s Hong Kong Standard. We listened to BBC at eight-thirty, and when Min left for work with his father, I retired to my office to do my strange work. At noon I ate one cuc.u.mber sandwich, one bag of squid chips, and one pomelo. Then I worked until two o"clock. I spent the afternoons swimming in the pool, reading, buying groceries down at Asia Foodstore with Rapti.
Each night, though, was different from the last-horse races, restaurants that seemed carved out of pure blocks of ivory or bronze, meals of pastel lobsters as large as infants, psychedelic fireworks on the harbor. We also went to many gritty movies that were shot locally-Hong Kong Gigolo, Warrior of the Harbor-where in every single scene, even the most deeply romantic ones, something would explode.
But my favorite thing to do at night was to take a boat ride to the island Lantau, where we would hike in the dark jungle to a small monastery built on stone. There they served us thin soup that looked like water but tasted like the ocean-salty, warm, the smell a hint of every creature in the world-eel, fish, lizard, horse, human being-had at one time pa.s.sed through it.
ALL SUMMER WE HEARD murmurs that the Hong Kong government, despite internal dissent, was actually going to attempt to repatriate some of the Vietnamese. The first group, we heard, would be sent back to Hanoi secretly and suddenly, in order to avoid riots. They would be awakened in the middle of the night and forced onto a boat or a plane.
The Vietnamese had publicly announced that they would use their homemade weapons against anybody who came for them. Relief workers and guards inside the camps reported that each night they fell asleep to the steady grinding sound of metal being sharpened into weapons.
One week in early July, Margaret Thatcher visited Hong Kong. The Vietnamese had asked that she come to the camps on her visit so that they could discuss their situation with her, but she had refused. Late on a Friday afternoon Albert took Min and me up in a small government jet to see what the Vietnamese had done to protest her refusal. The sky was cloudless, the sun a bright pink. We drank beer, circling, sweeping over the city. At first I didn"t see it when Albert pointed, but then it caught the sun and sparkled. Along the silver roofs was spelled out in white stones. "Thatcher has no heart."
Albert shook his head sadly. From this distance you could see his entire problem mapped out. In the troubled, sun-gilded water surrounding Hong Kong hundreds of people were bobbing in small boats, waiting, begging Albert and his colleagues to let them in. But if he did, they would be held in the crowded camps as illegal immigrants and treated worse than prisoners.
From here repatriation might seem to be the only answer. Min asked, "Do you think we"ll end up sending them back?"
"No," Albert said. "No. I couldn"t live with myself if we did that."
After the plane landed, I walked behind Min and Albert across the tarmac. I didn"t want to intrude on their conversation. Watching them, I was surprised again by the severity of Albert"s limp. He put his arm around Min and walked straighter. The two had a private understanding, an understanding of happiness. Each wanted the other to be happy and content, and each knew that the way to make the other happy was to be happy himself. This straining toward happiness in the midst of a difficult summer gave their home an aura of warmth and cheer, with a subtle undercurrent of sadness. Only once had I seen Albert falter in this regard. On a bright afternoon he had burst onto the roof with a letter fluttering in his hand. He handed it to Min in the whirlpool. The two men laughed and shook hands. The letter announced that they would be receiving special pa.s.sports that would allow them to leave Hong Kong if things got brutal when the Chinese government took over, in 1997. Only fifty thousand families would receive these. But then, while they were congratulating each other, Albert began to choke up, and eventually he cried openly. Min leaped out of the pool and stood beside his father, patting him on his back. After his father went inside, I asked, "Why is he crying?"
"He is ashamed of his privilege."
"Hmm."
"Only a man who hates his privilege can be trusted with it."
IN JULY, I BEGAN the interviews. Outside I could see the relentless waves of heat, but inside, cool lavender air was piped into my office. I actually enjoyed the interviews, though my method of choosing became more and more arbitrary.