The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [17]
Before Hae Wol became a monk he was Joseph Hung, an accountant at Standard Chartered Bank and the secretary of the Hong Kong Shim Gye Zen Center. Lewis met him for the first time two years ago, when a Zen master from Korea came to give a public talk at Hong Kong University; Joseph was the English translator, and afterward, Lewis walked up to him and asked, can you help me? For months they met every Friday for coffee at the Fringe Club in Central, and after Joseph left for Korea they kept in touch, using the temple’s e-mail account, until he finally told Lewis, You have to try it for yourself. He repeated the instructions for sitting Zen, and wrote, No more letters for six months, OK?
How are your legs? Hae Wol asks as they load shopping bags into the back of the temple van.
Do you really have to ask? Lewis says. They hurt like hell.
Hae Wol laughs hoarsely. Good answer, he says. One hundred percent. And how does your heart feel?
Worried. Still worried.
Too much thinking. What are you worried about?
I’m afraid I’ll forget why I’m here. Lewis puts his hands on his hips and bends over backward, trying to work the kinks out of his spine. But I don’t want to dwell on it, either.
So why are you here?
He glares at Hae Wol. The small matter of a divorce, he says. That’s all.
Wrong answer. The monk folds his arms and grins at him. You’re supposed to say, to save all beings from suffering.
I’m supposed to lie?
You’re supposed to let it go. If you’ve already made up your mind, not even the bodhisattva of compassion herself can save you.
But I’m not supposed to want to be saved, am I?
Here, Hae Wol says. Try me. Ask me the question.
I hate these games, Lewis thinks. All right, he says. Why are you here?
The monk puts his hands together and gives him a deep, elaborate bow. Two young girls passing by burst into loud giggles, covering their mouths.
For you, he says.
The retreat was Melinda’s idea, and that was what made him take it seriously. She’d always been suspicious of Eastern religion—her father had left her family for two years, in the late seventies, to live on a commune that practiced Transcendental Meditation—and she mocked him pitilessly when he brought home Buddhism Without Beliefs and Taking the Path of Zen. Then, during their second year in Hong Kong—when the fighting never seemed to end, only ebb and flow—she bought him a cushion and refused to talk to him in the evening until he’d sat for half an hour. This is for my own good, she told him. I don’t know what it does for you, and I don’t really care. I just need the quiet, understand?
He didn’t understand: that was the first and last of it. Hong Kong was supposed to be a temporary posting for her, a two-year stint at PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Asian headquarters, with option to renew, and now it seemed that every month her staff was expanded and her division given a new contract. In Boston she had been a star analyst, famous for her uncanny ability to find errors and gaps in a quarterly report; more than once she’d spotted a looming disaster months before it emerged in the market. But the word was that the American executives were afraid of her because she wasn’t enough of a team player . Expert exile, it was called. If she stayed in Hong Kong, and played her cards right, she finally told him, she would be a division head in five years, and then could transfer herself anywhere—back to Boston, or to New York, London, even Paris. If not, she would have a year of severance pay, and would have to start again at the bottom.
But I can’t work, Lewis said, staring into a plate of pad thai. They were sitting on plastic chairs at an outdoor Thai restaurant downstairs from her office. No one hires American photographers here. In five years my career will be over.
And if I quit now in zero years my career will be.
And in six months