The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [1]
—Taipei Times
“The stories in The Train to Lo Wu . . . are sensitive in exactly the right way. In a brave new transnational world they explore the intersection of loneliness and responsibility, where human contact may have to be fleeting in order to be genuine. Futuristic yet leading to a sense of lasting knowledge, these stories make a wonderful collection.”
—Kate Wheeler, author of Not Where I Started From and When Mountains Walked
“These are not outsider’s tales, taking their pleasure by making fun of a strange and foreign culture. This is a book about insiders of all kinds, smothered in their own heads, searching for a way out. It’s an impressive debut collection, one that establishes Row as a promising young voice, with a voice spare and penetrating and, it must be said, entertaining.”
—New Haven Advocate
The Secrets of Bats
Alice Leung has discovered the secrets of bats: how they see without seeing, how they own darkness, as we own light. She walks the halls with a black headband across her eyes, keening a high C—cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat— never once veering off course, as if drawn by an invisible thread. Echolocation, she tells me; it’s not as difficult as you might think. Now she sees a light around objects when she looks at them, like halos on her retinas from staring at the sun. In her journal she writes, I had a dream that was all in blackness. Tell me how to describe.
It is January: my fifth month in Hong Kong.
In the margin I write, I wish I knew.
After six, when the custodians leave, the school becomes a perfect acoustic chamber; she wanders from the basement laboratories to the basketball courts like a trapped bird looking for a window. She finds my door completely blind, she says, not counting flights or paces. Twisting her head from side to side like Stevie Wonder, she announces her progress: another room mapped, a door, a desk, a globe, detected and identified by its aura.
You’ll hurt yourself, I tell her. I’ve had nightmares: her foot missing the edge of a step, the dry crack of a leg breaking. Try it without the blindfold, I say. That way you can check yourself.
Her mouth wrinkles. This not important, she says. This only practice.
Practice for what, I want to ask. All the more reason you have to be careful.
You keep saying, she says, grabbing a piece of chalk. E-x-p-e-r-i-m-e-n-t, she writes on the blackboard, digging it in until it squeals.
That’s right. Sometimes experiments fail.
Sometimes, she repeats. She eyes me suspiciously, as if I invented the word.
Go home, I tell her. She turns her pager off and leaves it in her locker; sometimes police appear at the school gate, shouting her name. Somebody, it seems, wants her back.
In the doorway she whirls, flipping her hair out of her eyes. Ten days more, she says. You listen. Maybe then you see why.
The name of the school is Po Sing Uk: a five-story concrete block, cracked and eroded by dirty rain, shoulder-to-shoulder with the tenements and garment factories of Cheung Sha Wan. No air-conditioning and no heat; in September I shouted to be heard over a giant fan, and now, in January, I teach in a winter jacket. When it rains, mildew spiderwebs across the ceiling of my classroom. Schoolgirls in white jumpers crowd into the room forty at a time, falling asleep over their textbooks, making furtive calls on mobile phones, scribbling notes to each other on pink Hello Kitty paper. If I call on one who hasn’t raised her hand, she folds her arms across her chest and stares at the floor, and the room falls silent, as if by a secret signal. There is nothing more terrifying, I’ve found, than the echo of your own voice: who are you? It answers: what are you doing here?
I’ve come to see my life as a radiating circle of improbabilities that grow from each other, like ripples in water around a dropped stone. That I became a high school English teacher, that I work in another country, that I live in Hong Kong. That a city can be a mirage, hovering above