The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [27]
I obeyed her, of course. And that’s why I was so surprised the one time she broke her own rule. We had just turned the corner at the Kuroda hotel; we were five minutes away from Lo Wu, the border crossing to Hong Kong. She turned to me and said, If I don’t call you this week, what will you do?
I’ll call you, of course. Why do you ask?
No. That’s not what I mean. What if I never called you again?
She had put on a new shade of lipstick that morning, one I had bought for her; against her skin it looked like fresh blood. It made me shiver.
Then I would come and find you. One way or another.
But you couldn’t, she said. If you never called me, I could find your number in the Hong Kong directory. I could find your family and where you worked. But what could you do? China is too big. If I disappear, that’s it. China will swallow me up.
She was right about the driver: he turned his head toward us as he drove, to hear better, and when we came to a traffic light he turned and gave me a salacious grin. I wanted to curse at him. But all the curses I know are Cantonese, and he wouldn’t have understood.
Lin, what do you want me to say? I said. You’re right, of course. If you want to disappear, you can. One way or the other, it’s in your power.
Her eyes widened, as if my answer had made her suddenly angry. What makes you so sure of that? she said. What makes you so confident?
I didn’t know what to say. We were pulling into the long line of taxis in front of the station; the street was filled with people hurrying toward the entrance. My legs itched. I’ll see you next week, I wanted to say, but I knew, without wanting to know, that the words didn’t matter. The driver turned around in his seat and looked from my face to hers, eager to hear the last line. I took out a wad of hundred-yuan bills and gave him the dirtiest one.
When you get on the train, she said, it’s like a dream, isn’t it? As if none of this ever really happened. That’s good. You should keep it that way. Sometimes dreams happen over and over again, sometimes they don’t.
Lin, I said, that’s the most ridiculous—
She opened the door and strode away quickly, pushing through the crowd, like a fish fighting its way upstream.
If it were not for Little Brother I would never have thought about China. I live in the New Territories, not far from the border, and the train to Lo Wu passes through the station I use every day, but I had never once considered taking it there. I don’t have any relatives in China—my family has lived in Hong Kong for five generations—and I don’t like to travel. I’ve never had that kind of curiosity. And I suppose I still remember the stories my parents’ friends told, about the Communists and the Second World War—stories that gave me nightmares as a child. Rows of bodies and babies impaled on bayonets. You could say that for me China was a place that existed only in the past, but not my past, a memory that wasn’t mine to have.
My own life is really very simple. My parents died years ago, when I was in college; I was an only child, and they left me a portfolio of real estate holdings, and their apartment in Tai Wo. During the day I manage the accounts at an oil trader in Kwai Hing, and in the afternoon, every afternoon, I take the bus to the Shek O Sailboard Club, at the far southeastern tip of Hong Kong Island. If you’ve ever taken a ferry or a junk trip around the island you’ve probably seen me in the distance, crossing your path: a tiny, dark figure attached to a bright triangle of sail, hurtling across the waves