Mong Kok Fiction: AC
One Night in Mongkok. Photo by Christopher DeWolf.
Wet. One second standing on the sidewalk, screaming at my cell, flick the clock forward, sopping wet. An air conditioner box exploded over my head. I remember it as a cutting, little slivers of time; first droplet, expected if unwanted, second, began inching towards the street, third, full, and I’m standing in abrupt silence, the phone running water and beginning to buzz. I watched water roll down the LCD for a naked minute before looking up. Rationalize, really, it’s like getting rained on out of nowhere, happens a lot in this city, doesn’t it? Sure the water’s dirty, but don’t kid yourself, so’s the rain. But, rationalizing the real damage was harder — but fuck, the cell phone!
The skinned knees dude, eyes squinted over his cigarette, wife-beater tight, sitting on the ledge of a cell phone place, staring at me. I think I stared back for a bare moment, feeling at my hair nervously. Finally I waved that sopping hand and smiled, praying he wouldn’t want to chat. That would be bad. So instead, droplets glowing in pink neon off the back of that hand, I pretended to dial, imagining a snazzy yingyu conversation with some invented, understanding, American banker friend as I took off across the street — where I was nearly run over by a red taxi. The whole damn planet spinning stupidly around as I leapt at the sidewalk, a hulking metal add for a pharmacy glaring overhead. Subterranean. Two girls stood laughing in the alcove to an upstairs noodle joint, glass mirrors in the stairwell shooting them out and grimy in every directions, a weird repetition of types. I didn’t bother waving this time. Instead I dodged closer, shaking my arms out against passerby. My brain its typical wayward cut of circuitry, frightened of old men who don’t infect you and running for chicks with the opposite of intentions. That AC didn’t help those wires anyway. Imagine if all the boxes on a tower came down on the same neon sign, advertising Joe’s Canting or plastic surgery. And I’m not half as durable as a neon sign—unimpeded by urban renewal they last longer than we do, but that’s a reflection on mortality best left to someone else.
Studded belts, cheap t-shirts, jeans that bagged a little at the crotch or denim skirts over black boots. Slight twist in the hair. They giggled louder as I approached, the white cotton of my shirt splashing to the overlit, crumbling roadwork. Pale arms snaked down in reflex and electric, all sides in reflection.
“Hello-blahblahblahblahbox, funny.” The shorter one, the side of her face going sickly green from the display board, turned to her girl-friend. The same jabber went the other direction. I stopped about a foot away, just out into the walk, hunching into myself a little, taking the time not to look up. Anxious for a jacket. The street kept on roaring, tear down wasn’t for a couple hours yet, packed, packed, packed. Her hand brushed her hair as she shifted.
“Hello, what’s your name?” The short one again, her thin face leaning in again.
“Yan. I don’t understand Cantonese very well.” I smiled, cutely, stupidly. Wetly? “Basically, I suck at life.” I spoke quickly, assuming she wouldn’t understand.
“Ooooh, that’s too bad. Where are you from?”
“America.” I answered in Canto.
“If your Cantonese sucks” — she missed a beat searching for the inflection — “why are you speaking—“
“Because I’m Chinese.”
“No, you’re American. You look…?” She turned to her friend again — the girl’d pulled on a baseball cap emblazoned with the phrase “Monkey poet God” and was staring off into the thronged eternity — I caught the word “only,” so I corrected.
“I only look Chinese.” Under my breath, “Birth defect.” Stupid joke, it’s not really. Who’d you rather screw, Tony Leung or Robert Redford?
And the taller, her hair better curled but stuffed beneath the cap, began to speak. She inched on leg forward in it’s boots, a habitual “off” stance, I guessed. Her English was only a touch atonal. Her look didn’t return to me, to anything close, until the third word.
“Where in America? Can you speak Mandarin? What kind of… what do you say, banana, are you?” Her mouth curled at the edges, in tiny little bursts, so quick that any gliding of the eyes lost the tick. It wasn’t cute. Not that I could take my eyes away any—
“No worries.” The shorter girl gave it another burst, brushing her hair back again as she started — hesitantly. Her English seemed to have hit the wall. I shifted my feet slightly, glancing up at the unlit, over worded, signs that hung on either side of the alcove. And then back at the mirrors in the stairwell behind them. Tight.
“So, what are your names?” Belated niceties.
“Call me Wendy—“
“Lin Na.”
“No English name?”
“No… what are you here doing here, Yan? Studying?” (Tourist dilettante?)
“No… back at you.” Her eyes sprung on their hinges — open in non-comprehension. Again, she hid the tick. But still. “No. I live here. It’s a long story. You want a drink?”
“I work at a bar.”
“You too?” I asked Wendy.
“Noooo!! I go to school.”
“Healthy, I used to.”
I paused to think about that, but only for a moment. Wendy looked away. Lin Na began fiddling with her purse.
“Do you like your job?” I asked.
“Yes. I make money.” She smiled, unnervingly. I didn’t think she’d really understood the question. But I tore out of those thoughts, that exploitive kick. I tried to read the minute signals rushing across her face, like a chain of lights on a skyscraper, maybe from a distance they made sense but at the foot it was a giant mess of device and artifice, and as incomprehensible as my speech. But she started speaking again.
“I need someone to practice English with… sometimes foreigners come out, the bar, and I cannot talk to them.”
I smiled as broadly as I could think to, even as, against my will, I began to feel cold, the water cooling my skin, the humidity keeping it there. Lin Na rescued me from a weak moment by rooting around in her purse again and coming up with a pink cell phone. A cartoon frog swung from the clip.
“I have to go to work — call me later, will you?”
“How much later?”
“Give me — two hours?”
The vowels swam funny, she pronounced “give me” like she’d watched two many episodes of Laguna Beach, and would have rather said “gimme” but fought it off. I was only uncomfortable for a second. Wendy clutched at my arm.
“Can I have yours?”
“Sure.” She dialed my number, but my phone didn’t ring. Instead, it buzzed, throbbed a little in my hand, and seemed ready to spark. A strange red light appeared by the battery meter. But finally it did ring, if weakly. A little constipated yelp in the Mong Kok roar. A little yelp in the shadows of lights and towers and humanity far bigger than it, so no wonder it was scared. I was scared for it. A hawker slipped by with a Chinese restaurant ad, pushing against me. Lin Na moved off without turning, I watched her until she disappeared into the crowd. Wendy played with the rose ring on her middle finger. She turned to me and I caught, weirdly, the smile on her lips. She looked young, younger than I’d expected, but I didn’t think it was real. It was an appearance, a way of registering a perpetual state of shock with the world. We began walking.
“So you are American — what state?”
“Minnesota. Do you know where that is?”
“Yeah.”
She began walking and I followed, her hips swaying quietly at just below eye level. I nearly gagged as we passed a street side stinky tofu joint. When she turned back to me her eyes caught the overhead, she looked up at me. That was new.
“What do you do?”
I go to the Chinese University. Know it?”
“No.” And her face fell, as suddenly as it had opened up, standing at a crosswalk, the shrill beating of the chimes everywhere, and she slipped into the shadow of the tenements again as we snaked beyond the guard rails. I stared nervously at the busses, trying not to look hurt. Hurt by hurting. But I hadn’t heard of it — why should I have heard of some university in Hong Kong anyway? I had no truck here. Kids in thick framed glasses and spiked hair slipped by, ranting, losing themselves. Wendy slumped her shoulders.
“I need to go back to the university tonight.”
“Why do you hang out with a bar girl?”
“She used to study more.” It was a non-answer. A mirror of my own, I realized with a quiet start.
“She’s pretty… but not really cute.”
“She has a lot of male friends, but I think most of them just want free drinks.” She did not turn to look up at me. I looked out over the spotted, maddened, street.
“Any gwailos?” She burst out laughing at that, as we crossed over, the streets quieting, darkening, I registered the switch with shock, from white light and shadow to dim, soulless and outside-town gloomy in a couple heart beats. I hadn’t seen this neighborhood before, at all. High windowed stump houses stared down over well-kept, spike tipped walls. Further down the road a moving van fumed, two shirtless coolie looking dudes rolled furniture in and out, calling to each other in weathered voices. But the change lessoned the white noise and focused us, weirdly, like anywhere in Duluth, on each other. I wanted to get back.
“You don’t live here, do you?” I asked.
“My family lives near here.”
“Is it expensive?”
“A little.”
“Fair enough.”
“I should walk back to the KCR station.”
“Have you ever met any Americans before?”
“What? I’m a student.”
She claimed to be offended, but her face went all smiles as we snaked ourselves up a pedestrian bridge. A parking lot below. Kowloon warped out like some giant termite colony. I caught myself staring at a skyscraper a few blocks away, a pink ball at its tip, like a glowing planetarium for hippies.
“Sure, I’ve met real gwailos.”
“White guys.”
“Bu-bye, banana.”
“Bye Wendy.”
My phone seemed to glow another weird color as I glanced at it on my way down. Back into the street. Waiting for my dad to call. But he didn’t and I sure as hell was not going to call him, the old phony — you should not be surprised by my mixed feelings about him, but more in time, more in time. I decided not to try the stinky tofu that night. Something about being the son of common nobility to take the adventure out of you.
I walked south along Nathan Road, stopping at a McDonald’s to a buy a snow cone. My clothes, even the white shirt, dried off and I stopped shivering, but the white cotton wrinkled and my hair lost itself. I looked like a bum; a triad cast off, and couldn’t stop worrying about my cell phone. I tried, again, to keep watching the streets, at least so I didn’t run into anyone. I caught myself fixating on Lin Na’s hips, straightened back and walking the other direction. Go figure for that. I counted the towers as I walked along, wondering who lived in one or another, what they did when they weren’t drying laundry on the rotting windows, wondering what it was like back in Duluth right now. Cold, sure. Worse than this shivering. Worse than anything that could be said to me by anyone. Worse, far worse. The colors on the passing minibuses were puke ugly.
I’m told I was born here, in Hong Kong, but I don’t really believe it. But mom’s breakdown, and bang, here I was again. 19 and bored. Dual citizen with no knowledge of my native language. I promised myself that I’d buy a camera somewhere off Shandong Street, because I was sick of passing signs, plastered up and ancient, on the 8th story of crumbling buildings, adds and slogans, general bullshit of living somewhere with too many other people. If I photographed them I could home and look up the characters, or ask dad. A Jay Chou song floated by, adds for twins and movies and KFC scraped overhead and dripped down. I decided to walk down to the pier at TST and take the MTR back to the bar. On Sai Street. The air hotter, sicker, more fragrant, as I crossed towards the harbor. A girl in tight black jeans at a corner, shirt screaming “Monkey King Poetry 1642” brushed by, yapping on her cell phone. Short hit of scent, deeper and harsher and infinitely touchier in the throat than the harbor scent, and it was gone. Hard-on. City as hard-on, I hadn’t expected that. My phone buzzed once and stopped. Too much. A single HSBC sign glowed off in the distance.
–
“There are nights here, maybe everywhere but certainly here, when the smog rolls in and—you get scared that you could just drift off into nothing. That you could keep walking and never see the end of the alleys, the bamboo beams, the stained concrete. You’re afraid, desperately, of disappearing, of becoming part of it.”
“But isn’t it better to be part of something, than to…?” (Die? Does Jay Chou ask this question?)
“Ngoh M… maybe, but if there was ever a city built to drown people in others, to prove Sartre right on the hugest stage imaginable, this would be it. You can only see the bottoms of the spires. These buildings, these blocks of over-done fake stone — what are they telling us besides that you’re only one ant? That, with one step, one change of wardrobe, you are absolutely nothing, not just to the universe, but even here, within feet of home, in your own home?”
But, I thought to myself, you never know what’s just outside your door then, and there’s always that dreamy chance of rising out of the smog to stand on top of the heap. But I leaned slowly back, slowly exhaling, and said nothing. On a balcony across and two floors up I can hear a woman flipping pages as she studies.
–
A text message, not from Lin Na, but from one of the Korean bandits, asking what I was up to. Take the bandits with a grain of salt. I reached the pier in under a half hour, and wandered along the skyline, running my hands along the light. I watched a couple necking, against my will (almost). The wet, virile smell of the sea. Juggled my cell phone. She wore a Mickey Mouse skirt, but leaned full into each stroke, definite sex rhythm. I found a place to sit against the metal, against the wall of light to the south. A nervous breakdown. That’s all there was to it. (Why is not a helpful question, part of the problem, not the solution.) You couldn’t control the world, you had to take it as it came, and your chances. All I wanted tonight was fragrance, not reflection. Guarding nothing. Finally the phone rang.
“Hey Yan, do you wann– want to come over to the bar?”
“Sure… be there in a few.”
I took the subpath across Salisbury, passed by a construction site a swanky hotel, nearly knocked over a couple British tourists and struggled to the subway, its cheap color, its fluorescence, the muffled breaks behind glass. When I emerged, the heat choked the shirt to me so fast I though I’d been dumped on again by the AC. But it was only hot air and sweat, nothing abnormal. I looked both ways, out of scared habit, before crossing the street.
A bale of taxi claxons. Not only beginning but always steaming up. And time did that little tap dance again as I skated out past those mislaid wires and somewhere else. Yeah. Here. With two girls. I’d taken to dreaming about karma a lot before, to wondering if I hadn’t brought it all down as a form of penance, a Christian concept I would have loved to forget. If the end of the spear, a stupid taxi or AC, was just the comic denouement of that whole awful vengeful God process. But I’d cheated death, here I was with two snazzed up, bored Mong Kok girls, and the taxi had flipped over just a pinch to the right. So the spear had gotten caught on something, so God’s aim was a little off. I promised myself that I’d never miss another sexual opportunity again. I turned a corner, without running into anyone.
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Tags: Hong Kong, Kowloon, Mongkok, Streetlife
Montreal Apartments
Christopher DeWolf says:
Interesting story. Distracted and dizzy with a sense that something has been left unsaid. A lot like Mongkok itself, really.
October 6th, 2006 at 7:54 pm