Red Oblivion
Red Oblivion
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781974991471 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2019 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Product dimensions: | 6.04(w) x 5.04(h) x 1.13(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The last time I saw my father, he seemed all right — really, he did. He was his old self: a tiny, quail-like man with the gleaming eyes of a guy half his age. We were headed to the bank, the sky white and misty, the tropical air touched by a slight chill that people on this side of the world consider freezing; Ba was walking even faster than usual. The sole of his shoe came loose and slapped against the sidewalk like an old flip-flop, while he just continued on, navigating his way through the crowd of pinstripes.
"Ba, let's get you some new shoes." I tried to pull him into Marks & Spencer, but he shucked off my hand with a fidgety shake of the shoulder.
I followed him beneath the billboards of enigmatically shaped handbags, past the shops on Queen's Road, a sea of diamonds and metallic objects glinting and floating by on the edge of our vision. A watery reflection came into focus and I barely had time to recognize myself before the crowd jostled me forward. The sidewalk seemed to be shuddering, everyone elbowing past, barking into phones. But my wily father had no trouble weaving his way through it all as I struggled to catch up.
After cutting across Grand Millennium Plaza — space opening up enough to breathe, around the ornate fountain — we made our way along Des Voeux into Sheung Wan. Although the neighbourhood had gentrified in patches, it still had the old money exchanges and remittance shops with faded red signs and tarnished gold currency symbols. Dry goods stores here and there, big bins of dehydrated mushrooms, scallops, and shark fins before the open windows.
"Where are you going, Ba?" Grabbing his arm, I gestured at a storefront with rows of bright runners and plastic sandals awash in fluorescent light.
Ignoring me, he kept right on walking. We wended our way into the narrow side streets, past the herbal medicine shops.
Once when I was a kid and had a bad cough that wouldn't go away, even after antibiotics, Ba had taken me to one of these places. We sat at the time-worn redwood counter, the walls decorated with bright paper fans and posters of ox bones and folk legends. After taking my pulse, an old man, who looked like a gravedigger, served me a cup of tea the colour of sewer water and not much better tasting. But my cough had cleared up.
"C'mon, Ba, let's just get you some shoes. I don't have all day here."
His hand slipped into his pocket, fingering the wad of cash always there. Not because he was on the verge of buying anything, not because he was afraid of being pickpocketed. Ba has simply always liked the tactility of money. It's like satin to his fingertips.
We weren't far from his old office, so he ought to have known the area well, yet he seemed puzzled, disoriented.
"It's right around here — I know it is."
Probably, the store was long gone. It was a different, older city he was always seeking, remembering.
Finally, we ended up at Wing On department store, where I encouraged him to try on a pair of black Rockports, but they were too expensive, in his view. He picked up a pair of electric-blue sneakers with three gold stripes along each side, similar to the ones my high school boyfriend used to wear, twenty years back.
They were on sale — hallelujah — this being the real reason they'd caught Ba's eye. And they were comfortable, he claimed. Not that he's ever put much stock in comfort. His own or others'.
I remember thinking that at least in sneakers, he'd be unlikely to slip.
Or maybe it's just easier for me to remember things that way. Me, the sweet, caring daughter, patiently cajoling the old guy, impossible as ever, yet strangely endearing in his stubbornness. Electric-blue sneakers and all.
In reality, on that day, I probably saw him as nothing close to endearing. The self-entitled frugality, the insistence on his way or the highway, the past he's always seeking to resurrect and wear like a badge of honour — all these things would have driven me crazy, his small, inescapable presence casting shadows over my mood.
But in seeing us in a soft, forgiving light, in telling myself these tales that make us seem more like a normal family, I'm doing what my sister's long accused me of doing. I'm like a child seeking enchantment in repeated stories that take on the weight of truth only through an act of imagination.
The tiny cup of green tea on the tray quivers, along with my stomach. It's overwhelmingly strong and bitter, the teabag immersed in barely two sips of hot water. The seatbelt sign chimes on. Mine's already buckled, but I tighten it until it cuts into my hip bones. Not that it'll do much good if we plunge into the ocean.
I glance over at my sister, across the aisle, fast asleep. The man beside her is flipping through Harvard Business Review, the reading light casting a warm beam on his mottled complexion. At the beginning of the flight, he was getting chatty — dangerously chatty. I overheard him telling Celeste that he's an economics prof, headed to Hong Kong for a conference. His fingertips gleamed with the grease of chips, shiny as his bald head, as he leaned closer. From a certain angle, my sister's quite pretty. The guy asked her about restaurants and museums; he told her that he's especially interested in having a proper English high tea. Would she recommend the Four Seasons or The Peninsula?
"No idea." Celeste jumped up and rummaged through the overhead bin and slammed it shut. She raked her long hair up into a ponytail, exposing the intricate tattoo of a spider behind her ear. The pretty Celeste vanished in a heartbeat. "You think I'm fresh off the boat?"
The guy got the hint that she wasn't feeling chatty.
Celeste isn't thrilled about going home. It's been quite a few years since she's set foot on home soil. But who's counting, right?
Now I watch my sister begin to wake, a yawn overtaking her face like a tsunami in slow motion. She rubs a knuckle into her eye.
"Ba ...? Ba ...?" she murmurs.
"What about Ba?"
She's still in the process of awakening, dream world and real world overlapping. "He's ... dead, right?" Something contracts in her eyes, leaving behind a glassy film.
"We don't know that yet. We'll have to see how he is when we get there."
"Oh." A confused look. The tear comes to a head and dribbles down her cheek.
"It's okay." Reaching across the aisle, I put a hand on her arm, hot moisture suddenly stinging and bursting in my own eyes. "It's going to be okay. He's going to be okay. After all, he's tougher than he looks, right?"
I can't help but see our father as strong as an ox, despite his bad back. Even if he hasn't lifted a finger in decades, he still gives the impression — through sheer force of personality — of someone who could haul a boulder if he had to. Once, years ago, as a teenager, I had the privilege of working for him. My glamorous job was to carry boxes from a warehouse to the trunk of his car. "Bend at the knees when you lift," Ba shouted over his shoulder from the driver's seat, not bothering to get out. "That way you'll save your back. I learned that lesson all too late! Bend at the knees — didn't you hear me? Save your back!"
His wretched childhood, his years as a beast of burden. My father's very skilled at using guilt as a tool, a weapon.
"I must've dreamed it. That Ba died," Celeste says.
I forage in my purse for a tissue and blow my nose, then pass one over to her.
"It's not that I'm hoping he's dead, you know," she says a moment later.
"Of course not."
"I really am hoping he's going to be okay —"
"And he will be." Now I just want her to stop talking and take another one of those little pink pills that have been keeping her somewhat tranquilized.
The phone call came very early this morning. In the darkness, I stared at the incandescent numbers on my phone; there was something accusatory about their brightness. The caller gave a sputter of gasps and sobs and a garbled explanation in broken English, punctuated with ma'am this, ma'am that. My father is dead, or very nearly dead, Rina was trying to tell me. I rubbed my eyes, but the blurriness wouldn't clear; her words sounded tinny and unreal, like in a dream. And yet I wasn't dreaming, and Rina was saying to me: He collapsed at the fish market while haggling over a bass. I sat up in bed, slid on my glasses, and flipped on the light, the sudden clarity of the room — its sharp angles and bone-white sheets — blotting out the last, merciful vestiges of sleep.
Rina could be overreacting. That was the first thing that went through my mind. She's been calling a lot lately over little things: Ba's failing memory, his achy bones, his poor appetite. A letter that seemed to confuse and upset him. I told her not to worry. What can you expect? My father's ninety-four. And the letter was probably just from one of his tenants, complaining about the facilities or giving notice. These things get to him more than they used to. Rina insisted it was more than that and went off on a rambling explanation I couldn't begin to follow.
The plane's engine makes a noise that's vaguely menacing, like the roar of a waterfall or a photocopier that's overheated and about to break down. The sound reminds me of my love for my father: vaguely frightening, formless, persistent, annoying, inescapably there. The more I listen, the more I can feel the clouds quivering beneath the soles of my shoeless feet.
I get up to use the washroom, standing in line in the darkness. Every so often, the illusion of night is punctured by a guy in a window seat pulling up his blind, a beam of sun cutting through the cabin like a flashlight across a theatre. For a second, I see a narrow wedge of slumbering faces twitch and cringe and curl deeper into themselves, curl back into the quickly restored shadows.
The skinny woman in line in front of me has her arms crossed tightly, like she's trying to prevent a great many things from escaping her rib cage. Her weight shifts from left foot to right foot and then back again, faster and faster. And then I realize that I've assumed the same posture, the same repetitive, manic jiggle.
My eyes migrate to the emergency exit right beside me, its oversize steel handle beckoning with a strange allure. It's so close. I want to touch it, just to see what it feels like. Just because it's something I'm not supposed to do. But I don't dare, because there's a flight attendant lurking nearby. PUSH DOOR OPEN, SLIDE INFLATES AUTOMATICALLY. In the dim, watery light, that's what the instructions above the big handle are telling me to do. A giant red arrow arcs like a rainbow across the width of the door and points downward. How amazing it would feel to rotate the handle in one continuous motion and push outward and slide down that magically inflating slide into the boundless white-blue ether. Freefall. Skydiving with no parachute. The sheer relief of knowing that after a few harrowing seconds, this will all be over.
By the time we land, my body's as sluggish as my brain, everything deprived of circulation. Before the pilot's turned off the seatbelt sign, several folks have jumped up to grab their briefcases and that old feeling of dread and inertia grabs at my insides.
We pass through customs and pick up our suitcases, which are already going around on the conveyor belt, unlike in Toronto, where you're lucky to wait less than twenty minutes. Hong Kong being twelve hours ahead, every cell of my body's behind schedule. My digestive system's in a state of shock. My circadian rhythm's way off, light and colours hitting my retinas all too vividly. As people in boxy suits rush past, eager to get to their meetings and start the day, Celeste and I just look at each other.
It startles me how exhausted she appears. Mauve-grey shadows fall under her large, melancholy eyes, new strands of white weaving up around her temples into her sloppy bun. We're only one year apart — she's thirty-seven and I'm thirty-eight — and when we were kids, people often mistook us for twins. I wonder if I look just as weary. I wonder what else has been going on in her life lately. She rarely calls me and vice versa. I live and work downtown, while Celeste's out in Markham, and I don't have a car. Sure, sometimes I'll email her ("here's an awesome recipe for lentil soup — perfect for this freezing-ass weather") or she'll text me ("ever try meditation?? bc u cud use it") and we make plans to get together for dim sum, but it always falls apart at the last minute because her cat needs to go to the vet. Or her stomach hurts. Or the tiles in her shower have grown so mouldy they need to be re-grouted immediately, she insists, or else a cloud of germs could envelop her and give her some mysterious illness. Sometimes it feels as though I'm the cloud of germs she's so desperately trying to avoid. But at least she never fails to "Like" and write comments with lots of exclamation marks beneath my photos on Facebook. It's easier this way to feel connected without ever having to actually hear about each other's problems, I guess. On this side of the world, our attitude would be shameful, unthinkable, but in Toronto it's somehow okay for everyone to do their own thing.
"So ...?" Celeste says, dazed. Buffeted by the crowd, we've begun walking toward the express train, which will take us into Central.
"So ...?"
"Do we go to the hospital or the condo first?"
My skin's sticky, covered in a film of its own oils, having been basted in them for the past twenty-four hours. A shower sure would be nice. "When I spoke to Second Aunt yesterday, she implied it's only fifty-fifty that Ba'll make it through surgery."
An unspeakable sentiment hangs in the silence that follows. I recall our conversation on the plane, Celeste's claim that she's not hoping he'll die. Of course we're not. And yet — is this too awful to admit? — the prospect of dealing with this man alive is what terrifies us at the moment.
Celeste nods. "Straight to the hospital, then?"
After twenty minutes of sitting side by side, not saying much of anything, we get off the busy train. Glass doors slide open to an underground parking area, where a line of red and white taxis awaits. When I tell the driver the name of the hospital, he asks about the route I'd like to take. It's strange speaking Cantonese all of a sudden; the words and tonalities, with all their complex undulations, feel at once cumbersome and all too familiar on my tongue. Just speaking the language, with its harsh, guttural quality, is making me anxious, turning me into a demanding person.
Glaring sunlight hits my vision as the car takes us up to street level: a dense conglomeration of concrete and blinding, reflective surfaces — banks, hotels, Cartier — interspersed with islands of palm trees and occasional historic buildings, like the old Government House, decked out with neoclassical columns. Pedestrian bridges cut through the air, lifting people across the multi-lane traffic. Soon, we're on the elevated expressway that winds curvaceously toward Causeway Bay, and since rush hour's over, we're getting to our destination with frightening speed. I find myself wishing for a traffic jam.
"The city looks different," Celeste says. "More built up."
Although she's probably right, my eyes detect very little change. Hong Kong's always seemed like this: the new trying to overtake the old, the old never quite disappearing. The luxurious facades of some of these hotels — pink marble and gold curlicue lettering and massive chandeliers right out front — have a blatantly outdated appearance. Memories wash over me. Idealized childhood fantasies of some other bygone era. Scones generously spread with the rose-petal jam our mother adored, her jade droplet earrings skimming the high collar of her dress, the way men used to turn and gaze at her whenever we'd enter the Mandarin Oriental hotel.
Our beautiful mother.
She died suddenly of lung cancer, twelve years back. At least, the whole thing seemed sudden to me, because she didn't tell me that anything was wrong. One evening, on the phone, her voice became weak and incoherent and I demanded to speak to my father — I demanded to know what was wrong. By the time I'd flown over, my mother couldn't speak at all. She placed her cool palms on my cheeks, as I leaned down at her bedside, and she peered in at me as if looking in the mirror, trying to discern her own foggy reflection.
"When were you last here, Celeste?" I ask now.
"Five, six years ago. We stopped for a few days on our way back from our honeymoon. You?"
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Red Oblivion"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Leslie Shimotakahara.
Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
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