as she’d gone to work. Two bare-bottom urchins were playing
chai-mui
, the children’s guessing game, played with the fingers opened or held up. How often she had played like that!
“No cat walked in today,” she sighed, “so no luck.” A cat straying into your home brought luck. If only.
Wearily she replaced her shoes with the worn sandals that she’d left carefully by the god at her door, the red cord tied to the god’s base to prevent theft. She suspected Ah Fee, a woman who worked in the Chinese Legation houses on Mount Davis, very grand dwellings so old that they were made by the first English who’d come on their warships before anybody could remember . Ah Fee was a thief, despite having three sons who worked in the godowns and imported opium. So why was their mother a scivvy and a thief, dwelling in a squatter shack on a hillside? A family thing, she thought with sorrow, something she would never know.
KwayFay got her can and carried it to the stand pipe, a hundred yards down the path she’d just climbed. Luckily the queue was only fifteen people, mostly ancient grandfathers and little children, each with a tin or a plastic bucket, waiting in turn to get water from theone tap. People hardly talked, except mentioning the likelihood of a
dai-fung
, a typhoon from the Philippines. She found her laptop burdensome, slung forever over her shoulder. And her plastic shopping bag of clothes she had to carry as well, because in the dusk any one could steal and be away up among the shacks or down to Kennedy Town before she even saw him go, or maybe reach Heung-Gong-Jai, that “Little Hong Kong” the world’s tourists knew as Aberdeen Harbour.
She struggled back up the slope, lifted aside the tin sheet and went inside. She took out her radio and set it there, struck a match and lit her oil lamp, almost in tears at its suspiciously light weight. Sly fingers had leeched out half her paraffin while she’d been at work. Third time in four days. She wondered whether to see Safe Oil Man, who came past Victoria Road. They said he was Hakka really, though he spoke like a native Hong Kong Cantonese. He supplied oil to save you having to carry it home from Kennedy Town. It cost extra but his oil never got stolen, because he paid squeeze to Triad knives. They knew who stole what, and took revenge.
It was a question of payment, as in life. Could she afford extra to Safe Oil Man? If she didn’t pay, it would mean forever hauling heavy cans of paraffin oil up from Kennedy Town. They didn’t like people carrying great tins on the buses. The 5B drivers wouldn’t allow her, especially the ones marked Felix Villas. Another dilemma, when she already had too many to cope with.
She got her pan from its twisted wire just above the house god. The god’s battery was failing, depending for reflected red light upon a crumpled piece of tinsel. She wanted a real red lamp with its electric light showingtrue devotion, so rendering all her belongings sacrosanct , but who could afford that? Ah Fee could, for one, KwayFay thought bitterly. She dropped enough two-day rice in the pan for her evening meal.
The way you cooked it, as everybody except non-Chinese knew, was to pour out the rice. Wash it four times until the white stopped coming out, then give it a quick final rinse. Put in just enough new water to reach the second joint of your finger. Heat it on your dismally slow lamp’s tepid flame. Taste the rice grains between your incisors. When soft, it is cooked. Simple! Yet even in Hong Kong people got it wrong and served hard rice. Unbelievable. Ghost Grandmother was always on about it.
She took down her chopsticks from their string on the shack roof, and brought out a twist of green cabbage and a sliver of fish (one Hong Kong dollar extra on the price) and placed it on a level stone above the rice pan in a piece of foil the fish man had thrown in free, though tomorrow he would charge for both. He did this day and day about.
The
chai-mui
, the children’s guessing game, played with the fingers opened or held up. How often she had played like that!
“No cat walked in today,” she sighed, “so no luck.” A cat straying into your home brought luck. If only.
Wearily she replaced her shoes with the worn sandals that she’d left carefully by the god at her door, the red cord tied to the god’s base to prevent theft. She suspected Ah Fee, a woman who worked in the Chinese Legation houses on Mount Davis, very grand dwellings so old that they were made by the first English who’d come on their warships before anybody could remember . Ah Fee was a thief, despite having three sons who worked in the godowns and imported opium. So why was their mother a scivvy and a thief, dwelling in a squatter shack on a hillside? A family thing, she thought with sorrow, something she would never know.
KwayFay got her can and carried it to the stand pipe, a hundred yards down the path she’d just climbed. Luckily the queue was only fifteen people, mostly ancient grandfathers and little children, each with a tin or a plastic bucket, waiting in turn to get water from theone tap. People hardly talked, except mentioning the likelihood of a
dai-fung
, a typhoon from the Philippines. She found her laptop burdensome, slung forever over her shoulder. And her plastic shopping bag of clothes she had to carry as well, because in the dusk any one could steal and be away up among the shacks or down to Kennedy Town before she even saw him go, or maybe reach Heung-Gong-Jai, that “Little Hong Kong” the world’s tourists knew as Aberdeen Harbour.
She struggled back up the slope, lifted aside the tin sheet and went inside. She took out her radio and set it there, struck a match and lit her oil lamp, almost in tears at its suspiciously light weight. Sly fingers had leeched out half her paraffin while she’d been at work. Third time in four days. She wondered whether to see Safe Oil Man, who came past Victoria Road. They said he was Hakka really, though he spoke like a native Hong Kong Cantonese. He supplied oil to save you having to carry it home from Kennedy Town. It cost extra but his oil never got stolen, because he paid squeeze to Triad knives. They knew who stole what, and took revenge.
It was a question of payment, as in life. Could she afford extra to Safe Oil Man? If she didn’t pay, it would mean forever hauling heavy cans of paraffin oil up from Kennedy Town. They didn’t like people carrying great tins on the buses. The 5B drivers wouldn’t allow her, especially the ones marked Felix Villas. Another dilemma, when she already had too many to cope with.
She got her pan from its twisted wire just above the house god. The god’s battery was failing, depending for reflected red light upon a crumpled piece of tinsel. She wanted a real red lamp with its electric light showingtrue devotion, so rendering all her belongings sacrosanct , but who could afford that? Ah Fee could, for one, KwayFay thought bitterly. She dropped enough two-day rice in the pan for her evening meal.
The way you cooked it, as everybody except non-Chinese knew, was to pour out the rice. Wash it four times until the white stopped coming out, then give it a quick final rinse. Put in just enough new water to reach the second joint of your finger. Heat it on your dismally slow lamp’s tepid flame. Taste the rice grains between your incisors. When soft, it is cooked. Simple! Yet even in Hong Kong people got it wrong and served hard rice. Unbelievable. Ghost Grandmother was always on about it.
She took down her chopsticks from their string on the shack roof, and brought out a twist of green cabbage and a sliver of fish (one Hong Kong dollar extra on the price) and placed it on a level stone above the rice pan in a piece of foil the fish man had thrown in free, though tomorrow he would charge for both. He did this day and day about.
The
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