Planet Lolita (5 page)

She unclipped her SARS mask. “St. Mark’s, eleven o’clock,” she
said. “I see you there sometime.” She was hoping he’d turn as well, and flirt. Usually he did.

“You don’t go to the nine o’clock?” I asked about the service in Tagalog.

“Six days a week I must be up early. Sundays, I lie in bed.”

“Our helper goes to that Mass. Her name is Gloria Bella. She’s from Luzon.”

“Cebu,” the woman said.

Different island, different Philippines, Gloria always said.

“I grew up in Stanley,” I said. “From the window of the amah’s room you could almost see the ocean.”

“You are beautiful child. Maybe thirteen years old?”

“Now we live at the Peak,” I replied. “There’s an ancient guy with a rickshaw waiting outside the Peak Tower all day. Tourists get their picture taken sitting in it.”

“Mid-Levels is as high as we’ve climbed, honey,” Dad finally said, staring straight ahead. “Not the Peak. And that old man quit, or more likely died, a while back.” He didn’t want to talk to anyone, even a pretty girl.

Ten minutes, max, was all it took Cool Kwok to shift his mood from black to blue to the hue of sunlight through tinted glass—his natural colour. I checked my watch.

“Is it weird that I grew up here?” I said to him.

“No. Why?”

“The other day Rachel said she loves Toronto, and doesn’t miss Hong Kong. She says she never thought of it as home. Like Mom, I think.”

“But you do?”

“I don’t know much about Toronto.”

“Then this is it—for you.”

“Home?”

“Where else?”

“You must be the same. We must be the same.”

“You bet,” he said, squeezing my hand.

The squeeze wasn’t good. “Because this is where
nai nai
and
ye ye
come from,” I said of my grandparents, who probably rode in real rickshaws when they were my age but now lived in a house in Richmond Hill, Ontario, with stone lions guarding the front steps and no furniture in half the rooms. “This is home for the Kwoks?”

“Sort of.”

“What’s our family village called?” I asked, not for the first time.

“Tai-something-or-other. It’s up in the delta.”

“I’d love to see it.”

“There’s nothing left there, except a dumpy little temple.”

“I’d see the dumpy little temple.”

The bus stopped.

“Please don’t go all Leah MacInnes on me,” Dad said, sliding a tumour between his lips, ready to fire up the instant we were on the sidewalk. “Or whoever says I should be Confucian or Daoist. And naturally abstemious and disciplined, and good at math.”

“Remember how I barely passed algebra last semester? And I like being Catholic.” I’d Google “abstemious” later.

“Amen,” the amah said. She was in no hurry to break into the queue of ladies at the top of the stairs. Not when she could show Jacob Kwok her silky black hair—washed, rinsed, and brushed a hundred strokes, a job that sprang her from her bed at sunrise, I bet—and soft bare shoulders, a perky backside.

“St. Mark’s, eleven o’clock,” he said to her. “We’ll just make it.”

She nearly wept in gratitude.

Inside the church, Father Romesh was also getting a head start on SARS panic, mostly by sweating through his purple cassock and shaved skull. At the beginning of every November St. Mark’s switched off its air conditioning, no matter if the weather was still hot and muggy. Windows and doors were flung open and four wooden propellers, motionless for the previous six months, resumed shuddering overhead.
Gweilos
especially were soggy, fanning themselves with bulletins and pinching dress hems and pant crotches. Of the sixty-three worshippers today, forty-four were adding to their discomfort with N-95 particle masks, bestsellers once again.

The church was tall and narrow, with side walls of glass. Thrilled by the high ceiling, swallows lived inside it year-round. They darted and dipped, the air their dance floor, the music the
swish-swish
of the fans they cruised safely above. Not once had I seen a swallow clipped by a blade. Not a single feather had seesawed to earth. People said it happened, but I didn’t believe them. Humans fell from grace because we did bad things to each other. Birds glided near whirling propellers because they were innocent.

Father Romesh was delivering his sermon. “This morning’s reading from Isaiah is one that I cherish,” he said in his posh accent, “and go back to often, especially in challenging times. As such times are upon us, it is good to be reminded of God’s love.” He patted the top of his skull when he talked, as if saying
Nice doggie.
“‘Do not fear,’ the scripture provides, ‘for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you. Because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you.’”

“He’s a Mini-Me Prince Charles,” Dad whispered, “with a
sprayed-on tan.” Every week he commented on Father Romesh’s height, and accent, and how he patted his own head. The comment about his Sri Lankan skin was new.

Four rows towards the front, the Cebu amah kept twisting around and smiling for her life. I returned her first smile but not her second or third. He ignored all of them. But he enjoyed studying her, I could tell, especially during the standing-up parts of the Mass—her hundred-brushes hair to her waist, her pillow butt.

“‘Called you by name.’ ‘Precious in my sight.’ ‘Honoured,’” the priest said. “All these assurances by God may come to matter more during the waters we must traverse in the weeks and possibly months ahead.” He paused for another
nice doggie
, this time with a hankie, to sop up the sweat. “God is minding us, esteeming us, and so must we mind and esteem one another. His knowing our names obliges our knowing the names of not only family and friends but neighbours and strangers whose fates intersect our own. His shared love must be our shared love as well. Love and concern, kindness and compassion. These are his promises. These must be my promises to you, and you to me. ‘You are mine,’ the Lord says, not to declare us his property but to assert that there is but one family, the family of humankind. And that all this, friends, comes through him, with him, and in him. In the name of the Father,” he concluded, making the sign of the cross, “and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.”

Standing on the front steps with Dad, I said hi to the Stanley
gweilos
, who’d known me since I was five, called me Sarah, and asked about my mother and sister, and to a couple of Stanley amahs, who’d also known me since I was little but who called me Xixi and asked after Gloria. Father Romesh stood there as well, offering clammy handshakes and muffled God-blesses.

“
Et tu
, Father?” Dad said to him.

“The virus is airborne, Jacob,” the priest answered from behind his mask. “No home is safe, including the house of God.”

“For Christ’s sake, Romesh.”

“Christ will carry the burden of this sin for us all. Lovely Sarah knows this, doesn’t she?” he said, stretching a finger towards the cross around my neck.

“I need a drink,” Dad said.

“I need a hat,” I said.

We agreed to meet in an hour on the patio of his usual bar on the promenade. Finding a replacement for the straw bowler would be easy, but replicating the pins, bought during a family holiday in Tokyo, might be tough. I settled on a new hat and then wandered the lanes, offering Cantonese greetings to the same merchants who’d been selling the same stuff for years and definitely remembered the half-half girl who used to live in the village, and nodding to others, who kind of recalled that girl but couldn’t figure out if it was really me, four inches taller and less of a green bean. I even trailed a cat down to the breakwater, for old times.

From behind the breakwater I could see Cool Kwok at his table, reading the paper and sipping beer. His gaze drifted upwards every so often to watch women stroll past—alerted by their high heels, or their chattering—and his phone rang twice, one call causing him to laugh too happily for it to be Mom. No Filipino soap opera star slid into the chair across the table or paraded up and down the promenade, pretending not to notice him while silently begging
Pick me! Pick me!
My handsome father sat by himself, content to wait for his daughter, the only girl he had eyes for.

That evening I posted the sweetest of the three photos on my Facebook wall. Like I did with the file I sent to Rachel, I captioned
the image “Mary, Tai Long Wan.” But my brain wasn’t misfiring, and I knew where I was and what I was doing. Father Romesh said that since God was minding us, we needed to mind others. Because he knew our names, we had to know the names of those we encountered. Mary was her name and I intended to use it. I intended to esteem and honour her. I intended to help.

November 17, 20—
*Human H10N8
*103 infected, none dead

Dr. Wilson wanted me to share my feelings about having absence seizure epilepsy. I wanted him to stop glancing at my mom like a dog waiting to be called by its master. She wanted to be back in the Landmark Building, floors 22–23–24, helping companies pay no taxes in any sovereign nation, instead of dealing with her furtive daughter. Outside the window, Hong Kong poured down rain, slanting and warm, the air cancer-smoke-grey from perpetual China pollution.

“The episode on the minibus,” he said. “Your mother reported that it was different from the others?”

I shrugged.

“Take off the hat,” Mom said.

“Will it cure my disorder?”

“You have a condition, not a—”

“I have a mal-brain. A hat might be smart.”

“It’s rude.”

“I don’t mind,” Dr. Wilson said.

“Well, I do.”

“Can I keep my dress on?” I said.

Her lips, already unpursed by my using the word “disorder,” parted in shock.

“Let’s start over,” he said. Then, “It’s fine, Leah.”

“If you say so,” she said, like it was all about her.

“Can you explain what happened a week ago Saturday?” he said to me.

“Mary got taken away in a speedboat by bad people,” I replied. “We didn’t even try to help.”

Now Mom widened her already popped eyes until they fired out of her head and rolled across the floor. Alexander Wilson, MD, Dartmouth Medical School, and PhD, Neuroscience, Boston University, wanted to expel the rude daughter from the examining room and retrieve the yummy mummy’s eyeballs on his hands and knees, then watch from below as she reinserted them. He was lanky and silvery, the best, most expensive neurologist in Hong Kong, but all he desired was to lose himself in the after-storm blue of Leah MacInnes’s gaze. Told that the next available appointment wasn’t for five months, she’d shown up at his office and insisted on speaking with the doctor. “Call me Alex,” he’d said to her, not me, a few minutes into my first examination—the following day.

“We’re talking about the episode,” he said.

“The seizure?” I said, because he “preferred” the other term, as though petit mal were a reality TV show.

“Sure.”

“I went away. I came back.”

“Was there any warning?” Dr. Wilson asked. “Remember I mentioned the term ‘aura’ when we first started talking?”

“Things turned weird,” I admitted, “like wearing 3-D glasses to watch a stupid robot movie.”

“And then …?”

“I’m taking the pills. I’m abstemious. They give me headaches and make me dizzy.”

Mom repursed her lips at “abstemious.” Probably I wasn’t using that word correctly either.

“We can always adjust the dosage. And the side effects may go away. Or,” he said with a silvery smile, “you’ll get used to them.”

She sighed. “We all get used to things. Even when we shouldn’t.”

I checked the plant on the windowsill to see if it felt sad for her. Dr. Alex Wilson sure did. But then she did something I didn’t expect, and neither, I sensed, did she—she wept. One plump tear only, welling in a corner of her right eye and sliding down her snowy cheek. I was mesmerized. He was in love.

“Sit up, please,” she said to me.

“It’s going to be fine,” he repeated. “There’s no telling how the condition will develop as she continues to grow. It could simply disappear. Or if it doesn’t, we can get the epilepsy under such control it will be a virtual non-factor in her adult life. And here’s the best part …”

Reading the pause, she granted him a brave flickering smile. Alexander Wilson, MD, Dartmouth Medical School, and PhD, Neuroscience, Boston University, was basically an idiot.

“I’m the best,” he said. “I just am. Sophie couldn’t be in better medical hands.”

Sophie?

Don’t
, she pleaded with her gaze.

“I have to pee,” I said.

“Sarah Kwok!”

“Sarah, sorry,” he said, almost glancing at me in apology. “Of course.”

Actually, I had the worst tummy ache since I’d eaten street meat in Phuket two Christmases ago, and spent a night gazing at the yellow and blue tiles covering the hotel bathroom floor. This morning I had woken up bloated and now had a cramp in my belly, like I got after being forced to participate in a cross-country race at school, or else get a zero in gym class. I first walked, and then cross-country ran, to the Ladies. But I didn’t urinate. I stained the bowl with blood the way grape concentrate stains fizzy water. The insides of my thighs were sticky.

A sound—no words, for once—escaped my lips.

I heard the bathroom door open.

“What’s going on in there?” Mom said, her lawyer shoes peeking beneath the stall door.

I told her.

“My baby,” she said.

“But I’m just a kid!”

“Your sister was a year younger when she had her first. You had to be expecting it?”

I had been expecting it, at least for the last twelve months. “It’s so disgusting.”

“Open the door.”

“I can’t.”

“My baby girl,” she said again.

Someone else entered the Ladies. For a second I worried it might be a man. If it was, I’d die.

“Sorry,” I heard a voice say. It sounded like Dr. Wilson’s secretary, the Australian who had tried blocking Mom from meeting the doctor, and who now called me “possum.”