Kwan had been hiding with the Tan family for almost two months
now, more than enough time to fall in love with their beautiful daughter,
explore with her the petals of romance, and grow bored. He couldn’t simply tell her the affair was over, lest her
family kick him out on the unfriendly streets, but why couldn’t she see it for
herself? Did she want to conceal him under her skirt forever?
Oh, well. Knowing her concern for
his safety was real—and the dangers were real—he sobered and said, “It isn’t a
holiday. There aren’t any holidays any more. It is an interview with a reporter
for a very important American newsmagazine.” He smiled, to reassure her. “Don’t
worry, I’ll bring back the bicycle.”
“The bicycled she cried, outraged, and stormed into the house. Which was
just as well.
The first time Li Kwan had seen Hong Kong , from the forbidden city of Shenzhen on the
Chinese mainland, it had seemed to him like a city in a fairy tale, risen out
of the sea just long enough to tease him with its possibility. That had been
the occasion of his first failed effort to get out of China and across that narrow strait to the free
world, as exemplified by Hong Kong .
Traveling south away from Beijing through the vastness of his homeland, a
fugitive from the ancient murderers’ injustice, he had been helped along the
way by friends of friends, by parents of schoolmates, by people with whom he
was barely linked, and of course by women (women had always been very helpful
to Li Kwan), and along the way he had learned that the iron grip of the ancient
murderers grew increasingly slack the farther one traveled from the center of
their web.
In the farthest south, in Guangdong Province , and particularly in the coastal city of Shenzhen , central government authority counted for
very litde at all. Here, most power centered on the rich traders and the
Triads, the criminal gangs whose strength came from gambling and smuggling and
prostitution and a variety of protection rackets.
Shenzhen, established as a special
economic zone in the late seventies in imitation of Hong Kong, before the
ancient murderers learned they would be getting the original back, had become
almost a parody, a distorting mirror image of that bubbling cauldron of
capitalism. A wide-open city in the sense that everything was for sale there,
from Western clothing to forged identity papers, it was a closed and forbidden
city in the sense that no Chinese national was permitted inside the perimeter
without a special certificate from the central government. Hong Kong businessmen in search of cheap labor had
moved many of their small factories and assembly plants across the border, and
by the early nineties two million mainland Chinese worked for Hong Kong employers in the city of Shenzhen .
It had seemed to Kwan that in such a
boiling cauldron of greed and political ambiguity and fevered ambition it
should be easy to slip through Shenzhen and into Hong Kong , but in fact at that cliff-edge of China ’s influence the guards were everywhere.
Kwan’s forged special certificate, allowing him into Shenzhen, was a poor
imitation not meant for close study. Chinese police and soldiers were
everywhere along the razor margin between the two realities. Kwan was hailed,
challenged; he ducked away, lost pursuit in the crowd of shoppers in the
free-port streets, blended into a shuffling throng of homebound factory
workers, and made his way out of the forbidden city, frustrated, frightened,
not knowing what to do.
The family he was staying with,
twenty miles northeast along the coast from Shenzhen, were distant relatives of
a student who had died in the square. Kwan had not known that student, but it
didn’t matter. Nevertheless, after his first failed escape those people became
increasingly nervous,
now, more than enough time to fall in love with their beautiful daughter,
explore with her the petals of romance, and grow bored. He couldn’t simply tell her the affair was over, lest her
family kick him out on the unfriendly streets, but why couldn’t she see it for
herself? Did she want to conceal him under her skirt forever?
Oh, well. Knowing her concern for
his safety was real—and the dangers were real—he sobered and said, “It isn’t a
holiday. There aren’t any holidays any more. It is an interview with a reporter
for a very important American newsmagazine.” He smiled, to reassure her. “Don’t
worry, I’ll bring back the bicycle.”
“The bicycled she cried, outraged, and stormed into the house. Which was
just as well.
The first time Li Kwan had seen Hong Kong , from the forbidden city of Shenzhen on the
Chinese mainland, it had seemed to him like a city in a fairy tale, risen out
of the sea just long enough to tease him with its possibility. That had been
the occasion of his first failed effort to get out of China and across that narrow strait to the free
world, as exemplified by Hong Kong .
Traveling south away from Beijing through the vastness of his homeland, a
fugitive from the ancient murderers’ injustice, he had been helped along the
way by friends of friends, by parents of schoolmates, by people with whom he
was barely linked, and of course by women (women had always been very helpful
to Li Kwan), and along the way he had learned that the iron grip of the ancient
murderers grew increasingly slack the farther one traveled from the center of
their web.
In the farthest south, in Guangdong Province , and particularly in the coastal city of Shenzhen , central government authority counted for
very litde at all. Here, most power centered on the rich traders and the
Triads, the criminal gangs whose strength came from gambling and smuggling and
prostitution and a variety of protection rackets.
Shenzhen, established as a special
economic zone in the late seventies in imitation of Hong Kong, before the
ancient murderers learned they would be getting the original back, had become
almost a parody, a distorting mirror image of that bubbling cauldron of
capitalism. A wide-open city in the sense that everything was for sale there,
from Western clothing to forged identity papers, it was a closed and forbidden
city in the sense that no Chinese national was permitted inside the perimeter
without a special certificate from the central government. Hong Kong businessmen in search of cheap labor had
moved many of their small factories and assembly plants across the border, and
by the early nineties two million mainland Chinese worked for Hong Kong employers in the city of Shenzhen .
It had seemed to Kwan that in such a
boiling cauldron of greed and political ambiguity and fevered ambition it
should be easy to slip through Shenzhen and into Hong Kong , but in fact at that cliff-edge of China ’s influence the guards were everywhere.
Kwan’s forged special certificate, allowing him into Shenzhen, was a poor
imitation not meant for close study. Chinese police and soldiers were
everywhere along the razor margin between the two realities. Kwan was hailed,
challenged; he ducked away, lost pursuit in the crowd of shoppers in the
free-port streets, blended into a shuffling throng of homebound factory
workers, and made his way out of the forbidden city, frustrated, frightened,
not knowing what to do.
The family he was staying with,
twenty miles northeast along the coast from Shenzhen, were distant relatives of
a student who had died in the square. Kwan had not known that student, but it
didn’t matter. Nevertheless, after his first failed escape those people became
increasingly nervous,
Similar Books
