There is a game I like to play when I am riding alone on a train, as I am now, where I imagine the details of other people’s lives without them knowing who they are becoming in my mind. Like the woman sitting across from me. She is South Asian, Bangladeshi maybe, with a tuft of white along the parting of her hair. From what I can see, she is crocheting the beginnings of something like a baby’s hat or sweater, evident only from the frail rim around which her hands are moving slowly but dexterously, one grasping the knotted thread while the other makes small revolutions with a thin, blue-metal stick. Over and over. Like the way the woman might recite a recipe in the aisles of her local Tesco while shopping for her first attempt at an English-style Christmas dinner. It would be the first of such occasions for her newborn granddaughter, British on her father’s side, Bangladeshi where their bloodline met. Only after this experimental feast would the little girl receive the crocheted object that had begun on a Northern line train headed into Zone 1 early on a Sunday morning, as witnessed by a stranger with mascara smudged around her eyes and snakes embroidered across her chest.
I cannot recall the last time I spent Christmas at home with Ma. 媽, I want to cry out now, Ma, but the impulse to bury myself in her comfort falls short of my shame. I check my phone: it is seven-thirty, there are some hours until Sam will begin to wonder why I have left. When I look up across the carriage at the older woman, our eyes meet; hastily I look away, thinking of my mother in her purple Uniqlo parka zipped to where her chin meets her throat.
Ma, I would tell her, I didn’t mean to sleep with someone I don’t love.
She would squint her eyes while translating my confession. When the verbs would begin to resonate, her eyelids would fly up in surprise, her nostrils quivering. 到底發生咩事! Ma would yell, her local variation of what-the-hell-on-earth.
Who was it?
I would put my face in my hands and answer, A boy from school.
My answer would be vague, but true. Sam and I had met at a house party hosted by an old secondary school classmate, Rachel. The apartment was a glittering, floor-to-ceiling mass of well-invested wealth in central London. It was there that sixteen of us — most of whom I hadn’t seen since graduation — chased vodka with Vitasoy and lay on top of each other on the decadently long sofa, our faces vermillion and bursting, saying: I missed you, or, it’s been too long, how have you been? or, are you still dating so-and-so? The questions were too large or too empty, some answers obvious from what we had witnessed of each other’s lives on the internet, others left intentionally opaque. But greater than all that was our implicit understanding that whatever the truths were beneath the trite answers, we would rather not expose them in a moment where everything, for one illusory moment, became a home we missed.
We spoke of Hong Kong as if it were still the same. Our tales were concocted from memory and nostalgia, fueled by the drinks Rachel served throughout the night in sixteen neon yellow plastic shot glasses she had bought off the internet. Baijiu, she explained before the first round, and some of us laughed because there we were, sitting in an apartment in London after a long week at consultancies and banks and tech offices instead of by the harbor or in a darkened playground after cramming for exams. To Hong Kong! someone yelled, and the rest of us followed, tipping the liquid into our mouths and hissing between our teeth as the rancid alcohol ran down our throats. Rachel began singing a song in broken Chinese, and a few others chimed in. Later, with her hands pressed against the counter above the bathroom sink, she admitted to me that she hadn’t spoken the language much since she’d left. I held back her long, black hair in my hands as she tried not to vomit. The entire scene, so utterly ridiculous, reminded me of something Ma used to say, that there is a quality to being uprooted that attracts the unmoored towards one another. Like driftwood floating down a stream. The current feels good until the water ends at a ditch somewhere and we topple, but no matter. No matter, no matter, Rachel kept saying when I asked if she was okay, and then she was crying, asking me if I’d been well, if I was enjoying her party, and wasn’t everything here and in Hong Kong just the same?
But so many of us have left, I said. She acted as if she hadn’t heard me. Her face was expressionless as she quickly washed her face before she tottered away, leaving me looking at my own reflection in a spotless mirror flushed in the golden overhead lights of her bathroom. I wiped a smudge of eyeliner from under my left eye and adjusted my sheer top, making sure that the snakes embroidered on them — with scales made of alternately blue and pink sequins that flashed whenever I moved — wouldn’t hang so low over my chest. When I made my way out of the bathroom, I walked right into Sam, who stopped himself from falling backwards by grabbing onto my elbows. As we hit the back wall we laughed over the clumsiness of our encounter, and the intimacy of the motion made me forget for a fleeting moment my interaction with Rachel and the fact that Sam and I had hardly spoken in school.
Are you okay? he asked. I nodded and told him that Rachel had disappeared somewhere, that I hoped she wouldn’t be sick. He suggested we refill our drinks. Back in the living room, we opened the balcony doors and slipped outside, where the madness of London rushed on below us in glittering lights and the hazy, shapeless mirages that the headlights on the roads created.
I was taken aback by how American Sam sounded. I still can’t believe how many of us ended up here, he said, as if it were surprising, and the r in his here was thickly curved from the years he had spent in New York. It was a common phenomenon for our international school accents to differ depending on the places to which we emigrated; some of us sounded British, others American, most of us somewhere awkwardly in between.
I suppose you could blame colonialism, I said in response, half in jest. Sam laughed. He told me he was spending the year at UCL, living with a childhood friend out north in Colindale. He paid half the normal rent because his friend’s family owned the apartment. The neighboring street reminded him of Harlem, where he’d lived in America, while the interior of the apartment closely resembled his family home in Repulse Bay.
Repulse Bay, I said. The words rippled out of my mouth, uncontrollable, like water. I haven’t heard those words in a while. He laughed again. When he laughed, he tended to lift his face towards the sky, revealing a large, brown birthmark on the underside of his chin. It was one thing about him I’d noticed at school: whenever he looked up at the ceiling fan during history class, I used to feel an inexplicable urge to reach across the classroom and touch him right there, at the very spot. The recollection made me think about how several girls in our year had found him very attractive, a claim to which one classmate, Cherry, liked to remark that girls only found him cute because he was half-white. It’s actually kind of racist you know, she had explained to me over lunch one afternoon. We were watching Sam from across the refectory, and I was noticing how the sunlight brought out the streaks of gold in his dark brown hair. I can’t remember what I had made of it then, but recalling it there, on Rachel’s balcony, I understood that there was something to be said about how a familiar foreignness could evoke desire, the way it was both attainable and unattainable at once. When I asked Sam about his time in America, he explained that in New York, the world just feels bigger and more possible, you know. No-one ever wants to leave. There was a brief pause as we watched a helicopter roar through the sky on the opposite side of the Thames. The city pushes you to be a better person. The best. Americans are all about the best. Sam turned to me and grinned. You would’ve made a great American because you’re so smart. You were always the best at school.
For a long time, Ma had wanted me to go to America. Hong Kong people who went to America returned to the city, while Hong Kong people who went to the United Kingdom found more reasons to never come back. Something to do with our history, Ma used to say, some loyalties never leave the blood. Once, while we were shopping for dinner at a wet market, we had stood before a two-meter-long fish tank holding a writhing mass of sea bass and mackerel. It was grotesque, the way their eyes bulged and shifted in thick, bulbous orbs, not knowing where to look. I had just heard back from Cambridge that day: I’d received an offer to study English for three years, fully funded. Despite the visions she had had for me about America, Ma encouraged me to go.
I want you to leave Hong Kong, she said, I’ve heard that fish that live in oceans grow larger than fish that live in rivers.
We watched as the fishmonger grabbed a sea bass from the tank and hauled it onto the chopping board, where it thrashed wildly under his pink-gloved hand.
I want you to be a big fish, Ma said. But I also want you to come back. Like the salmon that return to where they were born so they can lay their eggs.
The fishmonger brought down his knife and I closed my eyes.
Now I have been in England for three years and haven’t returned home, not even during the vacations. When Ma asks why, I tell her I am busy, though the truth is that I rarely am. In the interstitial periods between terms, I end up cycling through friends’ houses or going on short solo trips, finding any reason not to go back. I explain that I have revision to do and essays to write; what if I need something from the library, or the VPN stops working? I tell Ma on the phone. But the truth is, I am afraid of what I will find when I return, that what people have said about Hong Kong becoming unrecognizable may be true. Or that I will be the unrecognizable one to not just the city but Ma, who raised me alone, putting me through international schools so that I could master a language she still struggled with. Now I am stuck in this language, reading books in a tongue made impersonal to me by a world of people I aspire to be, in a country that is not mine in the most important ways.
Let’s go to your place, I said to Sam after a while, and he obliged. We quietly left the party and took the Northern Line back to his apartment, where, once we arrived, he remarked how late it was, and asked if I was hungry. There’s siu mai in the freezer, he said. I told him I was okay, but really what I wanted to do was to wrap my arms around his waist and weep. I hadn’t eaten siu mai in years. The last time I’d had siu mai was in Causeway Bay, with Ma, who liked to fill her Styrofoam cup with lots of soy sauce, chili oil, and chili flakes. This way, you can get your money’s worth, she liked to say. A cup of this used to cost $5, you know. And now it costs $20! The last time she complained, she had accidentally squeezed the chili oil bottle too hard, and a small splash of thick, translucent red had landed on her wrist. Aiya! she’d yelled. Silly me. Get me some napkins, quick. 快啲啦, fai-di laa, fai di!
Recalling that refrain was like existing within a collage, performing in the present to a soundtrack from my past. Sitting beside each other on the sofa, Sam and I swapped the rare mutual stories we shared from our time in high school: how Rachel would sometimes show up in her father’s Maserati and cause a nuisance on the thin, winding road leading back to the city, how we missed the cheung fun with peanut sauce they served in the refectory, and how the students revolted when the cost of Vitasoy went up by three dollars. With each story, I felt the contours of him fall less into relief than a blurriness that piqued me; in my exhaustion, I felt as if any part of me that touched him would dissolve into a wave of pure memory, and I desired very much, in that moment, to be washed away to a place that was not England, or Colindale, or a place that was not my home. By the time Sam began telling one anecdote or another about the boys’ basketball team, I stopped listening to him and instead leaned in — first slowly, then quickly as per Ma’s refrain, and I realized that Sam was not surprised when I did. He took my right cheek in his palm, and we kissed.
Afterwards, when we were done, Sam asked me when I was last in Hong Kong. By then we were lying together in his bed, most of our clothes on the floor, and his arm encircled around me as if we had shared small intimacies like these all our lives.
Three years ago, I said.
I reached out and put my hand in Sam’s hair, which, backlit by the living room lamp, showed those short, gleaming embers of gold I remembered from the refectory. For a moment, it was like we were there again, except the distance between the past and present had collapsed and taken with it the literal, physical spaces we had once shared. What about you?
Most of us go back every break and see each other in the usual spots, he said. Going back is kind of like being at Rachel’s place. Like nothing really changed. He began to describe what Repulse Bay had been like over the summer. How crowded the corridor of Stanley Market had been, where, in the stifling air of July, a man in a black t-shirt still sold the jelly hand-warmers that solidified into heat when you cracked the metal circles inside them.
In my mind played a reel of my conversation with Rachel in the bathroom, but instead of Rachel it was Sam leaning over the sink, his shoulders shaking as he coughed. Then I pictured him tottering into Tsui Wah after a night of clubbing in Hong Kong, slurping down prawn noodles and exclaiming how drunk he was, how lovely it was to be home. Lying in Sam’s arms, I visualized myself walking away, further and faster, from the comfort of Ma’s crowded veranda on Braemar Hill; I saw those ivy plants with leaves that spilled off the precipice of our ninth-floor flat onto the ceiling of another person’s home, where a neighbor used to live, but no longer, because she had emigrated to the UK with her newly issued BNO passport. It had taken a while to get the visa, but once it arrived, the neighbor had barely hesitated, according to Ma. She had left behind her plants outside our door with a note reading:加油.I wondered what would happen if I told this story to Sam, if he would understand what my neighbor had meant to tell us.
◆
The train lurches. There is a long, hard wailing that fills the tube, and the older woman grimaces as her fingers dance along the yarn, weaving, rolling, tightening. I look up at the screen flashing the station name. We are nearing Camden Town, it tells me, where the train is noisiest.
In the Hong Kong MTR, at the point where a disembodied woman’s voice announces each approaching station in three different tongues —
下一站天后。左邊的車門將會打開。
下一站，天后。左边的车门将会打开。
Next station, Tin Hau. Doors will open on the left.
— there is always someone murmuring along,
counting the number of beeps the train makes before its doors shut. There must be a crowd of people doing the same, I always thought, in cities where they feel the safest and most permanent.
The next station is Camden Town, the voice in the tube says. Doors will open on the right-hand side.
It was close to five in the morning by the time Sam and I went to sleep. He dozed off quickly, his face and back turned away from me. For a while I lay face-up, my arms crossed, thinking about Sam and the last time he’d returned to Hong Kong. Remembering Hong Kong, I could not forget Ma’s face, round like a moon and just as cold, asking why I hadn’t done the same. I climbed out of bed and into the living room, where I followed the cool, blue light emanating from the kitchen. I couldn’t remember if anyone had turned on that light. I wondered if Sam kept it on overnight, like a candle burning in the dark.
In the fridge there was milk, a Tupperware of cooked pasta, a six-pack of IPA, and a half-used block of butter that hadn’t been wrapped properly. There were little black breadcrumb specks dotting the loose, sagging ridges where knife had met the spread. Aiya! Ma would likely have said. Men. Then she would’ve wrapped the butter again, this time doing it the right way.
I opened the freezer and found a resealable bag of frozen siu mai nestled on the top shelf. Slowly, I peeled open the plastic zip and saw, where I would have seen the yellow mounds of my favorite childhood snack, a terrain of ice, glistening like small teeth. The sight made me nauseous. I wanted to throw it away and scream. Ma, I wanted to say, do something. I wanted her to take the bag from me and tell me I would be okay. And I wanted to return to the moment she had seen me off at the airport, her black fanny pack slung across her widening hipline and an old jade bracelet dangling furiously around her wrist as she waved goodbye. What else could I have said besides see you soon, which turned out to be a lie? What would have been the truth? That I was ashamed to be leaving her, but more ashamed still to believe that she was the architect of my departure? That my future self would one day forgive her for believing life in Hong Kong would always be too good to give up? Her world was simple: waking up to water the plants on our small veranda before her office job, and going for long walks by the promenade on the weekends. Boiling several Tupperware’s worth of choi sum to later douse in oyster sauce. Small dreams in a city that was becoming smaller and smaller, more crushable in a palm. Had she made me fear that smallness so much that I would eventually leave her behind?
Ma. Will you forgive me?
We are approaching my stop. The older woman is stuffing her needle and yarn into a big orange Sainsbury’s bag, which she carries in the same hand as a worn, overused pitch-black tote with an unidentifiable logo. I am only noticing these details because she is getting up too, and we are both standing in front of the train doors, an odd pair triumphant after a long journey.
The doors heave open and a warm rush of air flushes my face. It is hot in the station. I take off my jacket as I look for where I need to go.
Ma. Ma, can you hear me?
In the long tunnel leading towards the main body of the station, a man in a grey tweed coat and a beanie passes me, hurried. I step closer to the left, towards the advertisements glowing eerily in the early-morning labyrinth of underground London.
Ma, there is something I want to say.
◆
When I left the kitchen and returned to bed, Sam was lying on his chest, his face resting sideways on his pillow in such a way that his birthmark — the big, brown birthmark — was right there, in front of me, like a token from the past asking to be claimed. In the faint lamplight, the birthmark looked almost translucent, a dark stain where normal skin should have been. I put my finger on it and felt Sam’s hot breath, and the motion filled the blood and bones and muscle in my body with an immense, electric sensation that had me pull back as quickly as I’d placed my finger on his throat.
I picked up my snake-embroidered blouse and skirt from the floor and put them back on. Then, without waking him, I left Sam’s room, walked past the kitchen and through the front door into the cold London morning. It was a fresh day, a Sunday, in which Sam didn’t have to go out of his way to say goodbye. He would learn soon enough that I was gone. I imagined it wouldn’t bother him, the way he saw no qualms with how things could come and go — the version of me that had followed him home would always be the version he knew best.
◆
A young woman with long, red hair rushes ahead of me on the stairs. I grab onto the railing and turn around to see if anyone else needs to run ahead, and there is no-one aside from the older woman from the train, climbing the steps in slow and measured movements, one foot at a time. When we briefly make eye contact, I try to smile.
Ma, I’m sorry.
Now we are at the top of the staircase, and the South Asian woman is a short step behind me. We look at one another. I can trace her eyes as they subtly explore me: my tired, swollen eyes, my unwashed hair, the alternately blue and pink snake scales, some sequined, others sewn, across my chest. Instinctively, I hug my jacket to my chest and look towards the turnstiles, where a lone station worker stands watching a video on his phone.
“Are you cold?” the woman suddenly asks.
“Sorry?”
“You must be cold.” The woman gestures a shiver before pointing towards her chest then mine. “Be careful on your way home, my dear. And zip up that jacket tight.” From inside her tote bag, she pulls out a lacquered red wallet just bigger than her palm. “Remember to let your mother know you are home,” she adds, as she places the wallet against the card reader. When it beeps, she pushes her way through the rods of the turnstile, pressing her bags to her sides so she will fit through.
From behind her, I can see the sun rising from the tops of the grey bricked buildings. London goes on, as it has every day and always will, and I think about how Ma will never know what it is like to emerge into this morning. I am afraid in my bones to know that I may be stuck entering new and lonely mornings forever, just to go through the motions of pretending I belong to this country to the extent my Ma believes — and maybe this is how it will always end, with me feeling foolish for playing games with no-one else in them but me.