The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [37]
If I disappear, that’s it, she had said. China will swallow me up.
Finally I gave up and opened my eyes.
When you take the train south from the border into Hong Kong, after you pass the small town of Sheung Shui, the countryside opens up into a lush valley, a lowland forest dotted with small farms that climb the sides of gently sloping hills. This is the valley of Fanling. In all my trips past this place I had never seen what I was passing: a hundred shades of green so rich and deep that it hurt my eyes to look at them. In the colonial days, I read once, the English governors and magistrates had huge estates in Fanling, and they played a game where they released a fox and then chased after it with horses and a pack of dogs. All the animals had to be imported from England—even the fox! But it was worth it to them, because it was the same game that they played at home in England, and they wanted to forget for a morning that they were here instead of there. I wondered what it would feel like to ride a horse through that incredible landscape, so green that it hurt your eyes to see it, and whether one of those Englishmen might have slowed his horse for a moment, and breathed the air, and felt in that instant that he belonged here, on the other side of the world from where he was born. I raised my head from the window, and the faces of the other passengers dissolved, as if I were looking at them from underwater; and I whispered to myself, peace, peace, peace.
The Ferry
This is what it’s like to be a freak, Marcel thinks. He strides across the empty arrivals hall, thrilled to be standing after a sixteen-hour flight, and the woman in the pale green uniform at the passport desk tilts her head back and stares at him, openmouthed, as if he has just swooped down from the air. Her lips form a single syllable: Wah. It’s like a chorus: the stewardesses, the pudgy kids in tracksuits, the old women in embroidered jackets look at him and say it immediately, involuntarily. That’s me, he says to himself, folding back the cover of his brand-new passport, looking around for the signs to the baggage claim. I’m Mr. Wah.
Hello? A hand touches his sleeve; he flinches and turns around. A young Chinese woman with silver spiked hair gives him a nervous half-smile, giggles, and covers her mouth. Excuse me, I wonder if you please sign autograph? She presents him with an open magazine, a picture of a basketball player in midflight over the basket, surrounded by Chinese characters.
But that’s not me.
She looks confused. Sorry? she says. Not you?
No, he says. I’m flattered. That’s Alonzo Mourning.
You basketball player?
No, he says. I mean, sure. I play basketball. But I’m a lawyer.
Oh, she says. OK. But she remains there with the magazine folded, expectant.
So that’s why I can’t sign this, right? You don’t want my autograph, do you?
Her eyebrows pucker. Sorry, she says. Don’t understand.
You don’t—for God’s sake, he thinks, make the woman happy. OK, he says. Give me the pen.
Peace, he signs, Marcel Thomas. But he scrunches up the words, and thinks, she’ll never know the difference.
Hong Kong is like no place he has ever imagined. Green hillsides rising out of a steel-colored sea. Rows of identical white apartment blocks that seem to sprout from low-hanging clouds, like mushrooms after rain. When he steps outside the airport terminal the air sticks to his skin, and he feels queasy, his joints rubbery, a bad taste in his mouth. He’d give anything for a shower.