The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [46]
Tenement buildings with cheap-looking ground-floor flats made up most of Kansu Street. You couldn’t really call the buildings slums, but they were dirty and in need of a paint job. One of the main landlords must have gotten a great deal on pastel green paint, because the color dominated several buildings on one block. Narrow balconies, open to the street but roofed with corrugated metal, edged most of the buildings. Television antennae poked out over the balcony railings and made a convenient place from which to hang laundry. Beds and hammocks also filled a lot of the balconies, and here and there the tenants had nailed up sheets of tin to provide a little privacy for the family members who lived out there.
Hong Kong couldn’t stretch out, so it stretched up. Everywhere you looked, the older, lower tenements were giving way to massive, block-long high-rises that had the unmistakable anonymity of government housing projects. The private sector was on the move, too; when the existing buildings had overflowed, people had simply moved themselves and their belongings out into the side streets and jerry-rigged shacks out of tin, old sheets, and cardboard. A few of these pioneers with a little more cash or some connections had scored some precious wood and built actual walls.
Neal felt as if he had stepped off Nathan Road into a Malthusian scenario in which the eye could never rest. The landscape was literally crawling; there was motion everywhere he looked. Children scampered along the balconies and played the same games played by kids everywhere, but their games of hide-and-seek seemed to encompass hundreds of contestants, and there was no place to hide. Merchants lined the sidewalks hawking an infinite variety of goods. Old women stood at windows or balconies shaking out sheets and towels, while their husbands leaned over the railing and smoked cigarettes or spat out sunflower seeds while they talked with their neighbors.
The noise was incredible: a din of conversation, banter, argument, negotiation, advertisement, and protest all conducted in the singsong but rapid-fire Cantonese dialect. Old women expressed outrage over the price of a fish while their sisters moaned in triumph or despair over the clackety-clack of mah-jongg tiles. Men trumpeted the virtues of bolts of cheap cloth or the undoubted tenderness of a particular chicken, while their less ambitious brothers argued over the chances of a two-year-old filly at Happy Valley that afternoon. Children squealed with unrestrained joy, or giggled at some private joke, or wailed in misery as a mother hauled them by the hand back into a building.
Then Neal noticed the smell—or, more accurately, the smells. The aroma of cooking predominated. Neal could distinguish the smell of fish and rice, and it seemed to him there were dozens of odors that he didn’t recognize, smells that rose from steaming woks in the street shacks and hung over the area like a permanent cloud. There was also the smell of a sewage system that couldn’t begin to cope with the demands placed on it, and the underlying stink of standing human waste permeated the air. The acrid smoke of charcoal braziers, masses of burning cigarettes, and building power plants made the air thick and hazy, and competed with the salt air of the nearby sea.
Yaumatei was a total crowding of the senses. Neal, after spending the last six months as the only occupant of an open moor, could only imagine what it might be like to to inhabit a world where, from the moment of birth to the moment of death, one never experienced a single moment alone.
Chin and his crew moved through the crowd like sharks through the ocean, constantly in motion and serenely calm. Their eyes never seemed to move from a straight-ahead gaze, and yet they seemed to take in everything. Neal noticed that people in the crowd would spot them and then quickly find something fascinating to look at on the sidewalk until the gang passed by. No hawkers or loiterers or curious kids approached Neal, even thought they