against the cart, I checked my watch, rolled the loose leather band around my wrist, and waited, waited for my mother. My heart beat faster. A memory, my stepfather’s agitated voice—the sour smell of alcohol and nicotine on his breath after a day out drinking—came back to me. “Jesus Christ. Why does it always take your mother so long to get ready?” He had planned for us to visit a friend—an old Navy beer buddy, now married with three stepdaughters—a family that didn’t nag him about his drinking. I looked at my watch, an ill-fitting Timex with a dangling, brown plastic strap Roger had just given me for my tenth birthday. When my mom finally came out from the bedroom, Roger headed toward the door. She went straight into the kitchen to towel off some dishes. We never made it to the car that night. I hid in my room, clutching a pillow to my chest in the dark as the sounds of two people in the living room, intent on destroying each other, went on and on.
Now, I rolled my watchband around my wrist a few times. I bent over, straightened, tried to knead the tension out of my neck. Another fifteen minutes passed. I surveyed the throng of people, afraid my mom had gotten lost when she broke through the mass with three men.
She spoke to a balding, middle-aged man wearing glasses. Everything about him was round, from the domed forehead caused by his receding hairline, to the puffed crescents of his smiling cheeks, to his paunch belly.
The second guy, maybe in his thirties, trailed slightly behind. About my height, he presented a thicker frame and darker complexion.
The third man, in a short-sleeved, button-down print shirt and brown slacks, appeared older than the others. Like the first man, his hair had receded. He strode in unison with the younger fellow.
They drew closer, and the one by my mother stopped talking. All three men came to a halt and studied me as if I were the last of my species in the Galapagos. They moved nearer, and my mom put her hand on the shoulder of the man she had been talking to. “Raymond, this your uncle, Chun-Kwok.”
I extended my hand and said, “Hi.”
He smiled, welcoming me with a warm grasp.
I said to my mother, “They don’t speak English?”
She shook her head and motioned toward the second guy. “This Hoy. He your big cousin.”
He gripped my hand and pumped it up and down twice. I said, “Good to meet you.”
He broke into a wide grin. How strange to encounter full-grown “relatives” for the first time. The term never meant much to me. Mom always told me stories about an aunt or uncle or nephew in San Francisco or Houston or somewhere, but I could never relate. Sure, we shared some surface kinship, but how was I supposed to care about people I didn’t know?
She pointed to the older man in the print shirt. “This your father.”
I stared at him. Slim, like me, but shorter by four or five inches. The dark eyes, the narrow face and chin, the slight, flattened nose and thin upper lip, even the glistening sheen of his skin, were mine.
He reached for my hand and held it in a light, tentative manner, as if he didn’t know how to touch me.
I realized I was staring and let go. He turned away.
The one introduced as my uncle took a suitcase from the cart. The cousin lifted another and my mother’s travel bag while I held mine.
My father offered to carry my bag. “It’s all right. I’ll take it,” I said.
He looked at me, then at the floor.
As we walked, I tried to take the suitcase from my uncle, who tightened his grip and said, “Dak, dak, dak.”
My mom said, “That mean he okay.”
I followed them out of the airport into Hong Kong.
Hong Kong 香港
Chapter 3
The climate brought to mind with remarkable clarity how a lobster would feel in a vat of bubbling water. Hong Kong’s suffocating humidity made it hard to breathe, and before long, my polo shirt and even my shorts stuck to me like moist tissue.
Thousands of narrow towers stretched skyward to prism the velvet night. The conglomeration of huddled structures made it difficult to tell where one building ended and the next began.
The air reeked of exhaust. Cars, taxis, and double-decker buses honked and hurtled in and out of the heap of confusion going down the wrong half of the street.
We jostled our way through the crowded sidewalks and came to an intersection, where Uncle Chun-Kwok took hold of my arm. The reason became apparent when cars zoomed by as if at Daytona. On these streets, vehicles clearly owned the right of way.
The signal changed, and we started across. I caught my father stealing peeks at me like a cheap private investigator.
Hard as I tried, I couldn’t recall anything about my father. As a child, did I get along with him? Did we ever talk or was he like my stepfather, who spoke to me only when he wanted something? What was my mom’s relationship with him? Did they fight? Is that why she left? And how could he willingly let her go with his son to another country, another world?
I fought the urge to look at him.
***
My uncle hailed two cabs. Before we entered, he communicated with my mom. My father came to me, placed his hand lightly on my shoulder, said something, pointed at himself and rotated his wrist, indicating somewhere else. He tapped my arm twice, turned, and disappeared into a taxi that sped off.
Without looking at me, my mother said, “He need to go work now. He working late, but he say he want to take us for dinner tomorrow.”
We climbed into the waiting cab, Hoy in front, and my mom and I in back with Uncle Chun-Kwok. A steel mesh screen separated us from the driver, and I read the attached sign: “It is unlawful to smoke in the taxi.”
My mother tested her hand on the metal barrier, and it held firm. “Wow, see how they need this?” She shook her head. “Very dangerous here.”
***
My uncle lived in Aberdeen, a harbor town on the southern tip of Hong Kong. The cab let us off at what seemed to be an old office building in a business district with rows of closed shops facing us on both sides of the street. We entered a narrow, dingy lobby with putrid green paint peeling off the walls. It smelled of a musty gym and felt like a boiler room. At the elevator, Uncle Chun-Kwok greeted a shrunken, white-haired man hunched behind a rusted metal desk by the stairs. He must’ve been the guard because he stayed while we filed into the elevator.
We got out on the fourteenth floor and came up to a sliding steel gate. My uncle unlocked it and spoke to my mom.
“He say they really lucky. He buy one house, and his wife have the one next door. They have two together; not many people have that.”
He opened the barricade and we stepped into air-conditioning. A fan attached to the wall circulated cool air. A kitchen, the size of most bathrooms in America, stood across from a closet-like toilet near the front. Two rooms together at the end of the house, with a bunk bed taking up half the space in each, could fit inside my bedroom in San Diego.
A
