At the end of my funeral speech, I sat back down. My heart was thumping as I turned my back toward Kwok. I was almost certain something terrible was bound to happen soon. But as I waited and waited, nothing happened. I listened to two more people say kind words about Kai before I dared to turn around and look at the entrance where Kwok was standing.
Except he wasn’t there anymore. He had left. I felt a chill roll up my spine, and turned back, trying to relax and pay attention to the rest of the service.
After the service, we sat on the temple steps and ate the dumplings my mother and I had prepared. It wasn’t a banquet, but it seemed as though not many people had brought their appetites. Jolie sat alongside me. “Do you want to have tea at my place after this?” she said, her voice soft. Her hair had been done up special for the occasion with several braids looping about her head.
I took her up on the offer. I didn’t mention the fight we had all had a week ago. It seemed so long ago now. Lin passed on the tea, so it was just the two of us. Jolie and I walked part of the way, and then when she complained about her knees, I carried her.
When we got to her place, I made the tea, as always.
“This might be the last time we get to do this,” Jolie remarked.
“What do you mean?”
“My parents are looking at other places to live. They’re going to try to move elsewhere in Kowloon. They say the city isn’t safe anymore.”
“Just because of Kai?” I asked.
“Well, no,” Jolie said, looking uncomfortable. “Because of you.”
I accidentally poured too much into a cup and burned myself. “Because of me?”
She nodded. “Crime might be down all over the city. But if Kai was a Triad target, then I could be too. Plus, my parents had plans to move out as soon as they moved in, and now they’re rethinking everything.”
“And what do you think of this?”
Jolie accepted her tea from me but wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“You support this? You think you’ll have a better chance to marry yourself off to someone?”
“I have skills now, Siu-Ling, I can take care of myself!”
I sipped at my tea and burned my tongue.
“Getting married isn’t the only thing I think about anymore, you know.”
“But you do think about it.”
“Yes, I do! Don’t you?”
“No!”
“You don’t ever think about the future?”
I blew on my tea and thought about it. I only thought about the future when I was worried about the present. Could I see a future with Mars? I tried to picture it but it all seemed so abstract and pessimistic. Would we get married? I didn’t know. Would we have a kid? Were either of us able to afford having a kid? Did I even deserve one?
I shook my head and sipped at my tea again, which had cooled as I was daydreaming. I didn’t want to think about the things I did or didn’t deserve. I thought about Kai in the ground and my stomach flipped over.
Jolie was crying silently. “I’m sorry.” she said. “I just miss him.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“I just saw him a few days ago. It keeps hitting me.”
I was silent. It didn’t matter how long he and I had been friends. My most vivid memory of Kai would always be one of him pointing a gun at me.
“I do support my parents’ decision, you know. You’re my best friend, but I want to put all this behind me.”
“I’ll be all alone,” I said quietly. Now I felt like crying, but I held it in. Jolie pretended not to hear me and I forgave her for it. We all did what we had to do to pretend we were still kind people.
#
I didn’t go back home that night. I took the ferry to Hong Kong again, listening to Leslie Cheung the whole way. I had never taken the ferry this late in the evening before, but I didn’t want to go home and face my mother. Not after Jolie said she was moving away too. It was wrong to put it off, but every time I thought about it, my body would start trembling from the anxiety.
My mother would be in her room lighting incense tonight. She had been doing it more frequently, even though I was working now. I didn’t know what it meant, but I took it to mean that she was unhappy.
I stepped off the ferry and walked up part of the way to the nearest restaurant.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked one of the waitresses. She nodded yes and pointed to a skinny hallway in the back.
The number on my hand was smudged even further after rolling all the dumplings for the funeral. But I had already memorized it after having written over it so many times.
“Hello?” His voice came clear over the phone.
“Hey, it’s Siu-Ling.”
I could almost feel the warmth of his voice. “I was wondering if you would ever call! It’s been a while.”
“Yeah.”
“How goes it?”
I didn’t know how to answer. I wanted more than anything to confide in someone about how I was feeling, about what I did. But to tell the truth would mean paying an awful price.
“You there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Can we see a movie?”
He laughed. “By the time we meet, we’ll have missed the last show.”
“That’s okay,” I sputtered. “I meant, could we watch a movie at your place.” I winced a little bit and looked around to see if any of the other patrons at the restaurant had overheard me.
“Of course. You have a pen? I can give you my address.”
“I don’t have a pen,” I said. “Just tell it to me, I’ll remember it.”
“Okay, ready? 22 Chai Wan Road, Apartment 8B, got it?” I repeated the address back to him, and when both parties were satisfied, he said, “Good, I have twenty minutes to shower and clean my whole apartment! Wish me luck!”
I caught the 3D bus just like we had done to the theater. The route felt familiar. I passed the market and knew then that I was two stops away. I counted the blocks. The bus stopped in a neighborhood lined entirely with tall apartment buildings. About half of the street lights were burned out, and a few others were on their way. Outside 22, there two men smoking. I passed them on the steps and they turned to me as a unit.
“Where you headed?”
“Haven’t seen your face before!”
I looked at them, about to say something, and then thought better of it.
“Ooh, she had to look at you before deciding she don’t want you,” said one to the other.
I walked up and down the hall looking for 8B, and when I got there, I stopped to put my ear against the door, trying to listen in.
All I could hear was the roar of a vacuum. I knocked. When I didn’t hear anything I knocked harder. The vacuum noise stopped. Then whatever had been playing on the speakers inside stopped.
The door opened. Mars was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, the most casual I had ever seen him. He had a thin layer of sweat on his forehead, which I guessed was from vigorous cleaning.
“You’re one time!” he said. “I was hoping you’d get lost.”
“Hey!”
“Just a little!” he said, stepping aside to let me in. I walked past him and into the apartment. It was a studio. A bathroom on my right, a small kitchen to my left, and a bed and sofa sitting side by side, both facing a TV that was showing some sort of variety show.
On the floor in front of the sofa was a stack of videos. I sat down to look at them and noticed a pile of clothing had been shoved under the bed.
“Nice place,” I said.
“Thanks!”
I looked through the videos.
“Oh, something I forgot to mention about my movie collection,” Mars said, looking embarrassed. “Most of the movies I have are kung-fu movies.”
“I’ll read the cases and pick one, maybe?”
He nodded. “I’m gonna get changed. Let me know if you have any questions about them.”
I started to go through the stack of movies, starting with the top, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye, Mars was changing out of his shirt. He threw the old one onto the floor and picked up a new one from the bathroom counter. I couldn’t stop staring. When his head popped through the shirt, he had caught me looking.
I looked back down at the two movies I had in my hand and one of them down. I had just started reading the second one, when Mars sat down next to me. He smelled like aftershave and laundry.
“Uh, this one looks good,” I said, turning the case over.
“The Big Boss. Good choice, that’s a classic!”
He reached over to open it, and before I knew it, we were on the sofa, sitting awkwardly upright while the movie started.
The Big Boss was about Bruce Lee, who made a vow to never get in a fight again. But his family and friends start disappearing, and it turns out his entire job is a secret drug smuggling operation instead of an ice factory. The gangsters freeze the drugs in large blocks of ice, and he finds out when one of them breaks open.
“They don’t do it like that anymore, do they?” Mars said. I noticed he would get incredibly excited every time a fight scene came on. And for a man who promised to never fight, Bruce Lee seemed to get in a lot of them. I would feel the cushion flinch every time Bruce threw a punch or kick, as though Mars were suppressing a punch or kick of his own.
I began watching him instead of the movie, and soon I couldn’t stop laughing.
“What is it?” he said.
He hadn’t noticed. This only made me laugh harder.
“What!”
I started flinching and kicking like him to show him what he had been doing.
“Why you–” Mars pulled me toward him, but I lost balance and rolled off the couch, taking him with me. Soon we were scuffling on the carpet, laughing and kicking the videocassettes everywhere. He had me pinned on my back, saying, “Oh no, you win the fight! I can’t get up!”
I writhed underneath him, trying to get out. That was when he took my chin in his hand and kissed me. I wasn’t worried about getting caught this time. I wasn’t worried about anything. I had never felt so safe.
We kissed for a long time, and eventually my hands found their way to Mars’ back, and then under the hem of his shirt. I wanted to see underneath again.
His back tensed as he picked me up from the floor and put me on the bed. I wrapped my arms around him and pressed myself into his chest. Clothes came off in seconds. Onscreen, there was another fight scene. Bruce Lee was throwing kicks and punches, and making his signature fighting sounds. We rolled around on the bed, awash in the television’s blue and white light.
KOWLOON 