The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [3]
You could say that.
Hai yat yeung, she said. This same. Maybe if you read you can tell me why.
This is what’s so strange about her, I thought, studying her red-rimmed eyes, the tiny veins standing out like wires on a circuitboard. She doesn’t look down. I am fascinated by her, I thought. Is that fair?
You’re different from the others, I said. You’re not afraid of me. Why is that?
Maybe I have other things be afraid of.
At first the fifth-floor bathroom was her echo chamber; she sat in one corner, on a stool taken from the physics room, and placed an object directly opposite her: a basketball, a glass, a feather. Sound waves triangulate, she told me, corners are best. Passing by, at the end of the day, I stopped, closing my eyes, and listened for the difference. She sang without stopping for five minutes, hardly taking a breath: almost a mechanical sound, as if someone had forgotten their mobile phone. Other teachers walked by in groups, talking loudly. If they noticed me, or the sound, I was never aware of it, but always, instinctively, I looked at my watch and followed them down the stairs. As if I too had to rush home to cook for hungry children, or boil medicine for my mother-in-law. I never stayed long enough to see if anything changed.
Document everything, I told her, and she did; now I have two binders of entries, forty-one in all. Hallway. Chair. Notebook. As if we were scientists writing a grant proposal, as if there were something actual to show at the end of it.
I don’t keep a journal, or take photographs, and my letters home are factual and sparse. No one in Larchmont would believe me—not even my parents—if I told them the truth. It sounds like quite an experience you’re having! Don’t get run over by a rickshaw. And yet if I died tomorrow—why should I ever think this way?—these binders would be the record of my days. These and Alice herself, who looks out her window and with her eyes closed sees ships passing in the harbor, men walking silently in the streets.
26 January
Sound of lightbulb—low like bees hum. So hard to listen!
A week ago I dreamed of bodies breaking apart, arms and legs and torsos, fragments of bone, bits of tissue. I woke up flailing in the sheets, and remembered her immediately; there was too long a moment before I believed I was awake. It has to stop, I thought. You have to say something. Though I know I can’t.
Perhaps there was a time when I might have told her, this is ridiculous, or, You’re sixteen, find some friends. What will people think? But this is Hong Kong, of course, and I have no friends, no basis to judge. I leave the door open, always, and no one ever comes to check; we walk out through the gates together, late in the afternoon, past the watchman sleeping in his chair. For me she has a kind of professional courtesy, ignoring my whiteness politely, as if I had horns growing from my head. And she returns, at the end of each day, as a bat flies back to its cave at daybreak. All I have is time; who am I to pack my briefcase and turn away?
There was only once when I slipped up.
Pretend I’ve forgotten, I told her, one Monday in early October. The journal was open in front of us, the pages covered in red; she squinted down at it, as if instead of corrections I’d written hieroglyphics. I’m an English teacher, I thought, this is what I’m here for. We should start again at the beginning, I said. Tell me what it is that you want to do here. You don’t have to tell me about the project—just about the writing. Who are you writing these for? Who do you want to read them?
She stretched, catlike, curling her fingers like claws.
Because I don’t think I understand, I said. I think you might want to find another teacher to help you. There could be something you have in mind in Chinese that doesn’t come across.
Not in Chinese, she said, as if I should have known that already. In Chinese cannot say like this.
But it isn’t really English either.
I know this. It is like both.
I can’t teach that way, I said. You have to learn the rules before you can—
You are not teaching me.