What an enchanting opening chapter, fueled by the propulsive engine of a father’s disappearance and helmed by two sisters whose relationship is portrayed with specificity and nuance. I’m also intrigued by the promise of ghostly elements, and their interplay with Hong Kong’s politics and history. — Tania James, Guest Judge
I. White Paper
New York, 1997
The summer that my father disappeared, my mother started to see the world in signs and symbols.
It began that night in June, on the cusp of the Hong Kong handover. The four of us sweating in our Bronx sublet, all the lights off, windows flung open to disperse the humidity that hulked inside.
Two global cities on either side of the world, streets sweltering on the brink of boil.
We stayed up late and clustered around the television, a rare treat for my sister and me, though the heat was making us fidgety rather than grateful. Andrea kept pressing her flushed face into the fan and saying dramatic things into it like a microphone—“I’m meeelting!” and “I peeerish!”—while I giggled at her distorted voice, until Ma snapped at us to sit quietly or go to bed. That shut us both up. We hated bedtime even more than we hated being bored. We instantly sat at attention, like the soldiers in their bright red uniforms and gold shoulder pads parading on the television.
A special program was crackling on the screen, a reporter recounting in a crisp staccato the events leading up to the Historic Milestone. The Epilogue of Empire. The camera panned across the harbor, where a giant naval ship loomed ready to remove the Last Governor of Hong Kong. An elegiac close-up meditated on the pale, sober faces of the departing colonists. British troops beat the retreat at Government House, feet marching in time to the crack of drums.
As the Union Jack was lowered, a brass band began playing “God Save the Queen.”
Abruptly, Ba lunged to his feet. A sheen of sweat stood out on his brow; he blinked rapidly; his jaw clenched. Something strange was flicking in his eyes, his pulse.
We stared at him, startled. But before we could react, Ma unplugged the TV.
Confused, but sensing bedtime, Andrea and I started protesting violently. “Hey, I was watching that—” “What’s going on?” “That’s not fair!” “I don’t want to go to bed!”
Sure enough, Ma started herding us out of the room and making noises about bedtime. Andrea hooked herself onto the arm of the couch; I hooked myself onto Andrea’s arm. We both began wailing.
Then Ma let out a strangled roar, and we knew the game was up.
The last thing I saw before I was hauled off to the bathroom was the image of my father, backlit against the window. He was leaning out into the night, the orange light from the streetlamps glowing around his shoulders. He had shoved the window up as far as it would go, and his head vanished into the darkness outside. His knuckles gripped the sill so tightly they had gone white.
He looked so precarious, hanging there, that I feared he would fall out.
Then my mother called out, “If you don’t get changed this instant—!” and fear for my own skin overtook me.
* * *
In the middle of the night, four loud bangs shattered the stillness. They reverberated through the thin walls of our sublet like peals of thunder. By my side, Andrea groaned and rolled over.
I sat up. An oblong of headlights moved across our bedroom wall and vanished.
From somewhere far away, a strange sound, like a woman’s keening, tore through the air.
For a couple of minutes, my ears strained, but all was quiet again. Above the bed Andrea and I shared, glow-in-the-dark stars shone wanly on the ceiling. We had pasted them there last month, but already the stickers were peeling, their edges curling in the heat.
Then another bang, and the sound of breaking glass.
In our parents’ bedroom, shouting. A muffled curse. I slipped my feet onto the ratty, carpeted floor. I padded towards the door and flicked on the lights to investigate.
The next thing I knew, Ma was at my side, her Cantonese frantic in my ear—Nei ci sin, aah? Turn that off! Get away from the window!
“Hey, what’s going on?” I piped. “What’s wrong with the window?”[1]
“Be quiet,” Ma hissed, pulling me to the ground. “Stay low.”
She smacked the light switch off. Then she went to Andrea, who was now sitting up, groggy but alarmed. Ma held a finger to her lips. She clutched us so tightly to her side that it hurt. My sister and I trembled with all our mother’s fear that we felt, but failed to understand. The sound of our breathing so loud it seemed to fill the entire room. The entire sublet heaving with our shared heartbeat.
“Where’s Ba?” I said, unease prickling along my scalp.
As from a great distance, we heard a man’s shout, and a car revving.
Ma’s eyes widened. For one long endless moment, she struggled, before making a decision. “Stay here,” she commanded. “Andrea, take care of Mui-Mui. Make sure she stays quiet.”
Little Sister.
She left our room and closed the door.
Something changed in the air, then: between my mother and us. Somehow, when our mother left us to go after our father, an imperceptible shift in our family began: a divide between the two of us and the world of our parents.
And something else happened between my sister and me. When Ma left me in my sister’s care, dividing us into Big Sister and Little Sister, Dzeh-Dzeh and Mui-Mui, at eleven and eight years old. It was the beginning of my sister protecting me: which is to say, hiding things from me.
Andrea’s gaze hardened with resolve, as she held my hand. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “She’ll be back soon.”
But thick seconds stretched into unbearable minutes. And still our mother did not return. As I stared at the closed door, I willed Ma to return and, for the first time, wanted her to put us to bed.
Finally, Andrea got up.
“Stay here,” she said, repeating our mother’s words to me. And then, she, too, left me.
* * *
I stayed put for as long as I could. But I hated being alone. So, I got up and went looking for everyone.
Ma was kneeling on the floor of their bedroom, a piece of paper in her hands. Andrea knelt by her side, her face pale and hands quivering.
Our father was nowhere in sight. His drawers had been pulled open and ransacked. The closet was open: empty hangers rocked back and forth. His side of the bed was empty. Where he usually slept, the sheets retained the inverted contours of his body, but none of its heat.
An unnatural sound was coming from my mother’s throat—a kind of rasping, gasping cry that rent the early morning. She looked strangely delicate, like a bird that had fallen out of its nest; her thin nightgown wrapped around her shoulders like wings, her neck outstretched at an angle.
Their bedroom window was chiseled with cracks, jagged lines radiating from a single hole, like a spiderweb with the spider missing from its center.
A tremor ran through the ground. The glass on the bedside table quivered and sang, the water vibrating ripples. As the ground shuddered beneath us, I tried to sift through the sliding layers, find something that would make sense of the mystery unfolding before me.
Missing Ba.
Crying Ma.
Spider window.
All the fragments that did not add up.
My mother smoothed out the piece of paper in her hands. But there was no note, nothing written on it at all.
Just a blank, white paper: all that remained of my father.
The vibrations slowed, then ceased. In the glass by the bed, the rings on the water disappeared. The surface seamless once again.
* * *
In later years, my sister would insist that the tremors we felt were just the late-night subway train rumbling underneath us. One more strike she counted against our childhood, growing up in an unsafe building with shoddy infrastructure. But as I watched my mother weep, I sensed the deeper truth: the foundations of our family were giving way to a chasm that had always lurked just beneath the surface.
That night, we huddled sleepless together on our parents’ bed. Ma in the middle, my sister and I on either side. My sister and I held each other’s hand tightly, as though we knew even then that one of us might also disappear if the other let go.
ii.
“There are always signs of danger,” my mother told us, after we failed to find my father. We had spent the weekend searching the neighborhood for him, calling out his name, like a bad game of hide-and-seek. Ba worked long, unpredictable hours at the hospital as a medical resident, and there were really only two places he frequented outside of work: the corner bodega where he ordered black coffee loaded with sugar when he had to leave before dawn, and the 24/7 diner, Giorgio’s, where he ordered greasy sausages and scrambled eggs when he had to stay after midnight. But he was at neither haunt.
We visited his workplace, where Ma spoke with his supervisor, a gruff, bespectacled man who barely had time for my father, much less his wife. In the waiting room, the receptionist gave me and Andrea a pad of paper and some pencils to draw quietly. Instead, we used them to take notes while we went around asking everyone if they had seen our father, like detectives.
“Kinda short, black hair, skinny neck and thick hands,” Andrea said, making a rough sketch that resembled a marshmallow on a stick with washing-up gloves. “Big square glasses.”
“Fast and strong,” I added, tapping my pencil on the pad importantly. “He can carry me all day, and throw me into the air if I ask nicely.”
We received five smiles and two pieces of candy, but no one had seen any sign of our father.
Ma, however, was seeing signs everywhere. “Don’t talk to strangers,” she told us, after she had made us throw out the candy. “That could be poisoned. Don’t you see the warnings? That teen without fingers—how did he lose them? Probably a gangster. That man with a plastic leg, what do you think he’s hiding inside?”
Snacks? I thought guiltily, wondering if she knew about the gummy worms I hid in my pockets.
“If I recognized the danger signs earlier, we might not be in this mess,” she berated herself. “In the place of your father’s birth, there was a temple. Within that temple, there was a scroll. To most people, it would simply look like a piece of paper.” She took out the white paper—the same one that had been in her hand the night my father disappeared—and held it up to the light. “That paper was the first sign of trouble.”
We peered at it eagerly, but saw nothing special: just a creased, blank page.
“When I first saw it, I too missed its meaning, blinded by love for your father.” Her eyes slid towards ours. “I know now that scroll inscribed a demon: one that was intended to bring his family prosperity and power, but instead enslaved them to the underworld.”
She drew four lines on the paper to form a box, then three to form a triangle inside.
“It was his family’s curse,” she concluded. “They made deals with devils. Those whose only gods are themselves. Those who spread death through ceong. Fei zai.”[2]
This only further confused us. Who were these devils who flew through the air, scattering death through windows? And why would our father’s family have anything to do with them?
But Ma just nodded gravely, as though that said it all: of course, his family invoked demons. Of course, her mother-in-law was herself a demon.
“Ma, what are you talking about?” Andrea said.
“Don’t you see?” Ma said. “We tried to escape. But they followed us here. They found us.”
I shivered, sensing the gravity of her words, even if I could not understand them.
“Never open the door when I am out—not even to our neighbors,” she warned us. “You don’t know who, or what, is outside.”
That night, I dreamed of dark-winged youths moving through the streets at night. Shadows leeching at the door, shape-shifting across the bedroom walls, ceiling, floor. In the blurred moments of dawn, I saw the silhouette of a fleet-footed fei zai flicker across the window.
I sat up, sick with fear: something, or someone, had entered our home with my father’s departure. Despite my mother’s compulsive ritual of locking and double-bolting the doors, we were no longer safe. What I didn’t know then was that the greatest danger would not come from outside our home, but from within its very walls.
* * *
In the weeks that followed Ba’s disappearance, I was restless, unable to sleep. I had so many questions—where had Ba gone, when would he be back, why was Ma so scared. But I was too frightened of Ma’s strange, forbidding mood to ask. Every time I came close, something in the corridors of her eyes slammed shut, as though they led to doors that were also locked and double-bolted.
When I closed my own eyes at night, I had the curious sensation of being at sea. The mattress transformed into a raft that bobbed on dark currents. The few times I did manage to drift into sleep, I woke gasping for breath.
“What’s wrong with you?” Andrea hissed. “You’re so twitchy.”
“Nothing,” I said. My sister had grown out of nightmares, or at least out of sharing them with me. But just then my stomach gave a lurch, as our mattress roiled underneath me. I moaned. “I think I’m seasick.”
Andrea tugged at the covers. “Stop moving so much. I was just falling asleep.”
But I wasn’t moving—it was everything around me that was in flux. I tossed back and forth, until Andrea gave me a violent push that sent me sprawling onto the floor. I lunged back at her with a roar, and the two of us kicked and rolled like the raccoons that plagued our street during the summer, when the heat turned the trash pungent. Relieved to again have something tangible to sink our teeth into, twisting and writhing around each other. But it was too hot to be wrestling for long, and when she finally smacked me down, I saw stars.
“Look what you made me do,” Andrea spat, as she wiped a dribble of blood from her nose—though in fact, she was prone to violent nosebleeds. She couldn’t stop picking her nose when she got nervous or upset; she’d been doing it all week. Then she glanced nervously at the door. “Don’t cry,” she warned. “Promise you won’t tell. Keep your mouth shut. You’re such a tattle-tale.”
“I am not!” I protested, even as mortified tears sprang to my eyes. “I’m not I’m not I’m not.”
“Shh! Don’t wake Ma. You’re such a haam bao. Baby. Bi-bi.”
“Bi-bi!” Ma’s cry from the doorway startled us both. But even though Andrea tensed, our mother didn’t look angry. Just tired. Her own eyes rimmed red, as she surveyed my tears, Andrea’s blood, and the blankets strewn on the floor. The crescent bite marks on my chubby arms. “Oh, Baby Girl.” She sat down on the mattress with us, and I winced as Andrea smirked. “My Zhu-Zhu.[3] What am I going to do with you two now?”
“I can’t sleep,” I mumbled.
“She had a nightmare,” Andrea said. “Bi-bi.”
I shivered convulsively. “I was drowning. Water everywhere.”
“You’ve only seen the sea once.” Andrea sneered. “The closest you get to water everywhere is when you wet the bed.” This was true, but when I closed my eyes, I could still taste the salt on my tongue. Then again, it was also true that I could smell the tang of my father’s sweat clinging to the walls of the apartment, and it had been two weeks since he vanished.
Something strange was happening: putting me in places I didn’t belong, taking my parents away from the places they did belong.
Here was another fact: Ba had taken us to Coney Island for my birthday last month, and it was the first time we had seen the ocean. I had so loved the beach that he promised to take us again after his promotion, which he anticipated getting in July. My eyes welled up again.
“Hnnh.” Ma’s eyes narrowed at me like a bird of prey, the way she did when she was concentrating on her English or trying to catch us out. “What was it like?”
I frowned, drifting back to the moments before waking. Flailing against the bottom of the ocean floor, a thousand gallons of black water grinding me into the sand. Salt flooded my nostrils, lacerated my throat. “The water stung. Like when I skinned my knee. Only in my throat.”
Ma shuddered, her body a sympathetic mirror. “I used to dream of the sea, too,” she said. “When I was a little girl like you. It was always close to us, in Hong Kong.”
Andrea and I stared at her. Ma had never talked about her childhood before, and she rarely spoke of Hong Kong. It had never even occurred to me that she was once a little girl like me.
“I was so scared of it—the way the waves could suck you in, spit you back out.” She clasped her knees, rocking back and forth on the bed like the tide. “But you know, water is one of the most ancient symbols. A sign of chaos, but also change. It doesn’t have to be scary; water can also be healing. There are many ways to translate the runes. That’s what my grandmother used to tell me, when I couldn’t sleep. I used to call her Ma-Ma, when I was a Baby Girl like you, because my own mother was rarely around; she was the one who raised me.” For the first time since my father disappeared, a smile brimmed at her eyes. The locked doors opened just a crack. “But then, she broke her promise. Just like your father. Even now, I can hear their voices—all the voices of those who left me. Ma-Ma. Your Ba. They keep me awake, torturing me. Baby, Baby, I’ll never leave you.”
She had slipped into Cantonese again. Her eyes drifted to a point beyond my shoulder. I turned around, but there was no one there. Just a few lonely cracks along the ceiling. My sister and I exchanged uneasy glances.
“You left me, but I can’t leave you…” Ma murmured.
Andrea spoke up first. “Ma, who are you talking to?”
I looked between Andrea and Ma. Ma and the wall. And when I looked again, my breath caught. There was a face on the wall. An old woman whose features were both familiar and foreign, shifting like murmuring voices on the wind. Eyes creased in laughter, or maybe pain. The proud arch of a nose. Cheeks hollowed by age. Every hair on my arm was electrified with the stranger’s presence.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
Andrea stared at me, her face livid—with fear or anger?—and slapped my hand away. “Stop pretending! There’s nothing there.”
“Is too!” I gasped, indignant, and slapped her back. We launched ourselves at each other again, and in the midst of the tumult—her nose starting to bleed, my eyes streaming, Ma shouting and pulling us apart—the spell was broken.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about what had just happened. I lay shivering on my back, staring at the ceiling. Outside the window, the full moon was bright. The entire room lit like my mind.
“Hey, you awake?” I whispered to my sister’s back.
Despite Ma’s mandate to stop fighting and go to sleep—she had to work the next day, even if we were on summer vacation—I didn’t dare shut my eyes.
My sister’s only response was to thrust her pillow over her head.
Satisfied that she was still awake, I poked her. “I can’t sleep.”
Andrea sighed loudly. “You have an overactive imagination. Stop talking so much.”
“Ma saw it, too. Ma saw it first.”
She turned to face me. “That’s what worries me.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed? Ever since Ba left. She’s been acting weird. Making stuff up,” Andrea said. “Did you see her crazy eyes? It’s like she’s not even here.”
“Ba didn’t leave,” I said. “The curse made him go away.”
Andrea shook her head. “She’s seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Remembering things, you mean,” I corrected.
My sister gave me a sharp look. “Maybe it’s the same thing for her.”
“You think Ma’s lying?” I said, aghast.
“I don’t know.” Andrea sighed. “Why not go to the police? Isn’t that what you’re s’posed to do when someone’s missing?”
I considered this. The night Ba disappeared, Ma had told us not to tell anyone—not our friends, their parents, or teachers. She had even lied to the nosy aunties at church, saying that Ba had gone to visit his elderly parents in Hong Kong, though both his parents were dead.
“Ma said it wasn’t safe,” I said, but doubt crept into my voice.
“Safe for who?” Andrea hissed. “The police are s’posed to keep us safe!”
“I dunno,” I said. “They seem pretty scary to me.” And it was true. Despite all the friendly, brightly colored cutouts in my kindergarten class of Mr. Policeman, Mr. Fireman, and Mrs. Nurse, the real-life policemen I saw on the streets always frightened me with their dark sunglasses and guns.
“Why talk about some white paper from a foreign country?” Andrea continued, pushing her point. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Maybe they’re clues,” I sat up, suddenly excited. “To break the curse. To bring back Ba!” An idea was forming in my mind: I couldn’t forget how Ba had looked that night. The anguish in his face, as he stared at those soldiers all neatly lined up on television. The rat-a-tat-tat, as they fired their salute into the sky… and then those echoing shots in the night… as though they had come straight out of the TV and into our home. “What if the TV is actually a time portal into the past?” I blurted out. “That’s why we can’t find Ba anywhere. He’s fallen into the TV!”
Andrea hesitated. Her wide eyes strangely bright in the glow from our window. Then she turned her back on me. “Wherever Ba went, it must be bad, if Ma’s scared,” she said, her voice muffled. “But either way, Ma’s hiding something. There’s no such thing as curses, or time portals. Just bad people and parents.”
I stared at her, stung. My idea might have been fanciful, but her idea was just mean: I couldn’t believe that our parents would abandon or lie to us. And as she buried her head under her pillow again, the finest crack emerged between the two of us, even as we lay side by side. The gap between her version of the story and mine.
I couldn’t unsee the crone in the cracks of the wall, or the dark youths flitting in the shadows.
Where my sister saw only our parents’ absence, I was starting to see their ghosts.
iii.
The next weekend, I woke up in the dead of night. No tumultuous seasickness, no fall from a great height. The window was open, the slightest of breezes nudging through the slatted blinds. Andrea was snoring by my side, one arm flung over her face.
I climbed out of bed, still listening. For a sign of something out of place, the reason I’d been summoned from sleep. There, a slight twitch. As though there was a little string tied to my ribcage. I followed its tug towards my parents’ bedroom. At the threshold, I sensed rather than heard the presence of someone else in the room with Ma. My heart thudded with excitement: Ba?
I’d see the ocean again this summer, after all.
But when I crept to the door, I heard only the low murmur of Ma’s voice. Then it paused, and I poked my head around the frame.
My mother was awake, gazing at the ceiling on her back. To my disappointment, she was alone. I was just considering tiptoeing back to my room, worried I would get in trouble for wandering about after bedtime, when she spoke.
“Little Pearl, is that you?”
I tentatively stepped into the room. “Can’t sleep.”
“Me neither.” Her smile wan. Then she patted the mattress by her side. “It’s okay. No work tomorrow. We can stay up together.”
I perked up at the invitation, and dived onto her bed as though it were a raft. She laughed and moved over. We curled up around each other like tadpoles. My head at her feet, her head at mine.
“Like yin and yang,” she teased, as she tickled my toes.
“Like a sleepover,” I said triumphantly, though in fact I had no idea what that was like, because my mother feared all gwai lou fathers were secretly pedophiles. We were not even allowed playdates at our classmates’ homes. But there was a kind of festive static in the room, as though we were staying up for fun, and not because my father’s absence had cut us adrift.
“Ma,” I said. “Can you tell me a story?”
“Hmm. What kind of story?”
I hesitated, not wanting to spoil the mood. But she had cracked open the door, and I wanted to go through. “About Ba. Where did he go?”
My mother pressed her eyes tight. She was so still I thought her spirit had left her body; I squeezed her hand, frightened that she wouldn’t find her way back.
“I told you. He’s gone to deal with the demons of his ancestral home. His paper curse.”
I considered this, my father fighting a monster with great writhing tentacles. His hands slicing the air, feet kicking up like a Jackie Chan movie. But my father was not like Jackie Chan, whose biceps bulged like little mice; he was a doctor—or at least he was going to be, once he finished his training.
“What if he’s not strong enough?”
“Then your father will run away,” she said, and hugged me close. “Don’t worry, Little Pearl. Your father is very fast. He escaped his home once before; he can do it again.”
“But I thought we were his home?”
“Some people have many homes,” she said evasively. “Others none at all.”
I frowned. Andrea had told me that one of her classmates, a blonde girl with shiny leather boots, had two homes: one in Manhattan and one in Long Island. Even though she went to school in Manhattan, her parents preferred to stay in Long Island on weekends, because that home had a big pool and tennis court.
I considered the thin walls of our Bronx home. The glow-in-the-dark stars shining faintly on the ceiling of the bedroom I shared with Andrea, the stickers peeling at their edges. I had loved the universe above my head, but now it suddenly struck me as small and fading—something to be ashamed of. No wonder my father left.
“Tell me about his other home,” I said, to keep from crying. “Was it very nice?” I looked down and quickly swiped at my eyes. “Did it have many rooms?”
“No,” she said, and closed her eyes again. I was surprised to see a slick of moisture on her own lashes as well. “It had many walls.”
* * *
Your father, Chun-Wai, grew up in a place the British called the Walled City because of a bad translation.
But we locals called it Hak Nam: City of Darkness.
It was a strange place, dark even in the daytime. Dark in more ways than one. My parents, your grandparents, forbade me from going there when I was little. Your grandma, Poh-Poh, said it was a place that could swallow good girls whole.
Walk in, and you might never walk out again.
We learned about it in our history classes, too. It was there from the beginning, even before the British. A Chinese military fort, dating back to the Sung Dynasty. Back then, it was used by the Emperor’s soldiers to protect the salt trade. Five hundred years later, it was expanded into a garrison to guard against the British during the Opium Wars.
Of course, when China lost the wars, they were forced to give Hong Kong, and then Kowloon, to the British, which included everything surrounding Hak Nam.
But not, and this is important, Hak Nam itself.
Why? Well, that is something of a mystery. Contested history. Perhaps China, like a shrewd landlord, sought to keep one room locked, even as she gave over the keys to her new tenant—to remind everyone of who really owned the house.
Yet I believe it was all fate. What is one century, five centuries, to the eternal eye?
He sees everything. Even the Darkness is as Light to Him.
For all the conspiracies of nations, I believe God had his own plan. That he foresaw what the place would become, one century later, and set that place aside for a special purpose: among them, a certain ambitious boy, an unconventional missionary… But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Where was I?
Ah, yes, the City of Darkness. Yes, it always was easy to lose your place there.
Through a strange quirk of colonial history, Hak Nam became a kind of no-man’s land, an urban island surrounded by British territory. Some say both Chinese and British governments had claims to it—or neither of them did. In the end, it was the same. Neither country wanted to start another fight, but both prevented the other from acting in the region. For the most part, it was left alone: to rot or rise, to grow or die. Seven acres of unregulated, independent territory that were literally off the grid: no water or electricity supply, no taxes or business regulation, no health and safety protocols. And this, too, is important: no policing.
And so, Hak Nam grew, and evolved, and sprawled. It became a secret city within the larger city of Hong Kong. Despite its small size, it teemed with over three hundred buildings and thirty-thousand people. Apartments, extensions, and lofts tumbled off each other; hasty constructions towered up to ten or fourteen stories. The neighborhood grew up and sideways, expanding and contracting and expanding again—whatever was necessary, whatever was possible for survival.
If you lived there, you either had to run up and down every morning just to draw water from a nearby well, or you had to be very… inventive.
Your father was both of those things: good at running, and very inventive.
Who would choose to live like that? It’s a good question.
You are too young to understand, Little Pearl, but choice has little to do with it. Hak Nam attracted a strange group of people from the margins of society. Its dark alleyways attracted entrepreneurs and gangsters alike. Those who could start up noodle shops and dental clinics, or hide brothels and gambling dens. But it also sheltered waves of Chinese refugees, or, as the British authorities regarded them back then, “illegal immigrants.” The Great Exodus. First during the Civil War; then the Great Famine; wave after wave of fleeing migrants. Those who had lost their homes. Those who wanted to live outside the law. Drug lords, stowaways, desperate women.
The result was an unruly, spreading neighborhood that was as much organism as architecture: colorful, caged balconies streamed with laundry; electrical wires and cables strung across rooftops; and narrow gaps between buildings led into the city’s dim, dripping labyrinth. A place swarming with life, where children played atop teetering roofscapes, and their dreams drained away along open sewage gutters.
And all that desperation and poverty attracted still other kinds of people. Missionaries and teachers, any number of do-gooders from the East and West. My teacher Miss Wai Bo always said it was a good place for God and gangs, converts and recruits. The kind of place where you could come to lose your old life or start a new one.
In other words, it was the perfect place to disappear.
* * *
From that night on, when I could not sleep, I no longer jostled with my sister in bed. I simply rose and padded over to my mother’s room, leaving Andrea to starfish her limbs across the whole mattress. I would find my mother awake, usually gazing at the ceiling on her back, but sometimes sitting up against her pillows, as though waiting—though whether it was for me or my father, I could not be sure.
“Little Pearl,” she greeted me. Sometimes that was all she said. Often, she said nothing at all. But every once in a while, she would let something else slip: a name, a place, a story. I collected them all as clues to my father’s whereabouts, how I might someday save him when I grew up.
In this way, she trained me to read for symbols that could organize the past, signs that could warn against future danger. Anchors within a world constantly shifting underfoot. A piece of paper revealed an ancestral curse. The rocking of the sea became a spell for the sleepless. A burst of sparrows prophesied their flight from China. When my father vanished without warning, these stories were the talismans that flickered with light to guide us through the darkness.
In the Sailor Moon comics that my sister and I read, there was a character, Rei Hino, who flung strips of paper with words written upon them as weapons. We had always been puzzled by such a flimsy form of attack; surely, the lamest superpower of all. None of us wanted to be Rei when we played Sailor Scouts. And yet the tools of her rage were powerful; her words fluttered on a wind of their own, labels slapped onto the foreheads of demons. An experiment in categorizing, then mastering, pandemonium.
For what else are the words on paper—the stories we tell—but signs and symbols thrown against an absence, an abyss? Every story is an act of alchemy, translating chaos through creativity. The transcription of meaning onto the blank page.
Time and again, she inscribed our monsters.
My mother’s words drifted into my dreams, where I ran barefoot alongside my father as a child. Glimpses of places I had never been, people who had passed away before my birth. Other nights, I climbed the twisted branches of an old banyan tree, chased by villagers clamoring far below. Her stories seeped into my skin, until I could no longer distinguish where she began and I ended.
As my mother leaked memories, her words became a life raft on which we weathered my father’s disappearance. Without knowing exactly why, I never mentioned those nights with Ma to anyone: they became a space outside of time as secret and private as the wound that had triggered it.
[1] Ceong (窗): window. When we first heard Ma shout, we thought she was warning us away from the window. It wasn’t until years later, when we heard the word in a news report about a downtown shoot-out and the arrest of gang leader Frankie Chin, that we learned another meaning: ceong (槍) as gun.
In Cantonese, window and gun sound identical. Other times, a tilt of tone renders two words distinct. As kids growing up in America, we struggled to parse such subtleties. We were constantly slipping between sounds, losing our way in the lilt of language. Inflections had to be spelled out for us on the page, where the strokes of characters could finally render the difference visible. Still, peering back through the window of our own family’s flight, I can’t help but wonder if our confusion captured something true: the boundary line between a window and a weapon can be sliver-thin, breakable as glass. The pursuit of happiness leads to its own dangers. Fall through, and you could break your neck.
[2] Fei zai (飛仔): literally, flying sons. Hooligans, vagabonds, gangsters, juvenile delinquents: swift-footed youths who wandered the earth, rootless, searching for something to steal and to lay claim to as their own. Those who, with a slight twist of tone, either flew through windows, or carried guns.
[3] Zhu-Zhu (豬豬): Piggie; Porkling; Piglet. A term that at first puzzled and offended me. “I’m not a pig!” I squealed at my parents. There was a boy who my classmates called Piggie in English, and even as a kid I could tell it wasn’t a good thing, a dig at his porky size and smell. But my own parents insisted the Cantonese version was a term of endearment—and besides, it was a pun. Zhu-zhu could also mean “Little Pearl” (珠珠), a precious treasure. I grudgingly accepted the nickname, and it stuck.
Born in New York, Stephanie Y. Tam is a writer, journalist and radio/podcast producer now based in England. She’s worked for Freakonomics Radio, WNYC Studios, and BBC World Service. Her writing has been published in The Believer, Behavioral Scientist, and Slate, among others; she’s won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition, been shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions/Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize, longlisted for the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize, and nominated for the Puschcart Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of East Anglia. Before writing, she researched mental health predictors for refugee children as a Daniel M. Sachs Scholar at the University of Oxford.