instructed them at a cocktail party, on her third glass of chardonnay, forget this
international city
claptrap. Hong Kong is one hundred and ten percent Chinese. They may be the richest Chinese in the world, but they still throw their garbage out the window and kill chickens in the bathroom. And you have to accommodate them because, after all, it’s their home, isn’t it? It belongs to them now.
We’re not like her, Melinda said to him, in the taxi, heading back to their hotel. Are we? It’s different if you come here because you
want
to. We can explore—we’ll make Chinese friends, won’t we? And you’ll study Cantonese.
Right. Of course.
And you can do amazing work. She rested her head against the window and stared up at the Bank of China passing above them, silhouetted against the night sky like the blade of a giant X-Acto knife. I mean, my god, this is the most photogenic city in the world, isn’t it?
I shot fifty rolls yesterday, he said. You should have seen it.
He had wandered the backstreets of Kowloon for hours, a side of the city he’d never imagined: streets like narrow crevasses, the signs stacked one over another overhead, blotting out the sun. Old women bent almost double with age, wearing black pajamas, their fingers dripping with gold. This was what he loved about her, he thought, her absolute certainly about these things, the way she moved instinctively, always knowing that logic would follow.
Now he thinks,
I was young. I was so, so young.
The pain is always with him: prickling in his ankles, needles in his knees, a fiery throbbing in the muscles around the groin. In every forty-minute session he waits for the moment when sweat beads on his forehead and his teeth begin to chatter, and then rises and stands behind his cushion until the clapper strikes. Walking, climbing the stairs, squatting on the Korean toilet—a dull ache in his knees registers every effort. He sleeps in its afterglow. Make friends with pain, Hae Wol advised him, then you’ll never be lonely. And he realizes now that he feels a kind of gratitude for it, late in the evening sitting, when it is the only thing that keeps him awake.
Whole days pass in reverie, in waking dreams. A camping trip when he was twelve, along the banks of the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. Clay and sand underfoot. Campfire smoke. The rancid smell of clothes soaked in river water and dried stiff in the sun. His best friend, Will Peterson, who insisted on stopping to hunt for some kind of fossil wherever the bank crumbled away. Again he feels the heat of annoyance: the sweat stinging in his eyes, the clouds of mosquitoes that surround them whenever they stop moving.
I haven’t changed at all,
he thinks,
I haven’t
grown: it’s all an illusion. Twelve or thirty, it doesn’t make any difference. So what hope is there for me now?
Filling his mug with weak barley tea, he turns to the window, and his eyes become reflecting pools; the blank, paper-white sky, the warm porcelain cradled in his hands.
Twice a week, during afternoon sitting, he descends the stairs and joins a line of students kneeling on mats outside the teacher’s room, waiting for interviews. The hallway is not heated; he draws his robe tightly about him and tries to focus on his breathing, ignoring the murmur of voices through the wall, the slap of an open palm against the floor.
When the bell rings Lewis opens the door, bows three times, and arranges himself on a cushion in front of the teacher, trying not to wince as he twists his knees into the proper position. The teacher watches him silently, sipping from a cup of tea. He is an American monk, a New Yorker, dark-skinned, with watery green eyes and a boxer’s nose, twisted slightly to one side. According to Hae Wol he’s lived in Korea for twenty years, longer than any other foreigner in the monastery, but he still speaks with traces of a Bronx accent.
Do you have any questions? he asks.
Not exactly.
But there’s something
international city
claptrap. Hong Kong is one hundred and ten percent Chinese. They may be the richest Chinese in the world, but they still throw their garbage out the window and kill chickens in the bathroom. And you have to accommodate them because, after all, it’s their home, isn’t it? It belongs to them now.
We’re not like her, Melinda said to him, in the taxi, heading back to their hotel. Are we? It’s different if you come here because you
want
to. We can explore—we’ll make Chinese friends, won’t we? And you’ll study Cantonese.
Right. Of course.
And you can do amazing work. She rested her head against the window and stared up at the Bank of China passing above them, silhouetted against the night sky like the blade of a giant X-Acto knife. I mean, my god, this is the most photogenic city in the world, isn’t it?
I shot fifty rolls yesterday, he said. You should have seen it.
He had wandered the backstreets of Kowloon for hours, a side of the city he’d never imagined: streets like narrow crevasses, the signs stacked one over another overhead, blotting out the sun. Old women bent almost double with age, wearing black pajamas, their fingers dripping with gold. This was what he loved about her, he thought, her absolute certainly about these things, the way she moved instinctively, always knowing that logic would follow.
Now he thinks,
I was young. I was so, so young.
The pain is always with him: prickling in his ankles, needles in his knees, a fiery throbbing in the muscles around the groin. In every forty-minute session he waits for the moment when sweat beads on his forehead and his teeth begin to chatter, and then rises and stands behind his cushion until the clapper strikes. Walking, climbing the stairs, squatting on the Korean toilet—a dull ache in his knees registers every effort. He sleeps in its afterglow. Make friends with pain, Hae Wol advised him, then you’ll never be lonely. And he realizes now that he feels a kind of gratitude for it, late in the evening sitting, when it is the only thing that keeps him awake.
Whole days pass in reverie, in waking dreams. A camping trip when he was twelve, along the banks of the Pee Dee River in South Carolina. Clay and sand underfoot. Campfire smoke. The rancid smell of clothes soaked in river water and dried stiff in the sun. His best friend, Will Peterson, who insisted on stopping to hunt for some kind of fossil wherever the bank crumbled away. Again he feels the heat of annoyance: the sweat stinging in his eyes, the clouds of mosquitoes that surround them whenever they stop moving.
I haven’t changed at all,
he thinks,
I haven’t
grown: it’s all an illusion. Twelve or thirty, it doesn’t make any difference. So what hope is there for me now?
Filling his mug with weak barley tea, he turns to the window, and his eyes become reflecting pools; the blank, paper-white sky, the warm porcelain cradled in his hands.
Twice a week, during afternoon sitting, he descends the stairs and joins a line of students kneeling on mats outside the teacher’s room, waiting for interviews. The hallway is not heated; he draws his robe tightly about him and tries to focus on his breathing, ignoring the murmur of voices through the wall, the slap of an open palm against the floor.
When the bell rings Lewis opens the door, bows three times, and arranges himself on a cushion in front of the teacher, trying not to wince as he twists his knees into the proper position. The teacher watches him silently, sipping from a cup of tea. He is an American monk, a New Yorker, dark-skinned, with watery green eyes and a boxer’s nose, twisted slightly to one side. According to Hae Wol he’s lived in Korea for twenty years, longer than any other foreigner in the monastery, but he still speaks with traces of a Bronx accent.
Do you have any questions? he asks.
Not exactly.
But there’s something
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