When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  The only thing of significance left was the old blue quilt her birth mother had left for her. It had been fluffed out, neatly folded and left in the window seat. She sat down there. She tugged at the even folds and pulled the quilt around her, letting the smell of mothballs waft into her lungs. For the first time the pungent odour was comforting.

  “Saint. She’s gone. Do you know where she is?”

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “It’s so empty here.”

  “Do you want me to come by?”

  She let him lie down beside her. She let him touch her because the same hands had touched Diane, carried a part of her with him now. Buttons and zippers slowly came undone. A heap of clothing built gradually on the floor. They held each other in unfocussed arms, rocked back and forth like a wooden horse with stunned eyes. On the verge of sleep, she came, her mind fixed on the image of an old sleeping bag on a sagging futon, preserving a curved indentation, the curling question mark of the spine.

  “The Garden of Eden. Adam speaking.”

  “Very funny. Is Eden there?”

  “He’s sick. He ate a rotten apple.”

  “Ha, ha. Will you put him on, please? It’s important.”

  “As long as you’re nice to him. He really isn’t well.”

  “Hello.”

  “You sound terrible.”

  “It’s just a hangover.”

  “I called to say you were right.”

  “About what?” “About one of us leaving. It’s going to be me. I’m going to Hong Kong next week for the rest of the summer. My father got me a job in his friend’s import/export business.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because – because so much is happening right now.”

  “Yeah, and I need to get away from it.”

  “Come and see me before you go.”

  “I don’t know if there will be time. I’m giving up my apartment and putting everything into storage. I have to pack.”

  “Will you write me?”

  On a return trip to China via Hong Kong, I spot Artemis in the market, and realize for the first time that her gait is measured and cautious the way the Poetess’s was nine hundred years ago, when she stepped outside her aging father’s gate for the last time.

  The ones who are born overseas are always obvious. She thinks that as long as she doesn’t speak, releasing a poor accent or wordless openmouthed silence, she is safe, invisible. But her eyes betray her terror of being spoken to. In the mornings she is already on the bus when I get on. I feel her eyes snare me as I drop my coins into the fare box, so I purposely take a seat directly across the aisle from her. Now she will have to look at me. Her eyes go down, and she does not look up again until I ring for my stop, get up from my seat, and leave through the rear doors. She gets off at the stop right after mine and trudges up to her office.

  It’s not so much that she is small as that she walks as though she were. Having lived so long in the land of giants, perhaps it’s hard to adjust. In fact, she’s of average height compared to the citizens of this city of tall buildings and high finance. At least, that’s what kind of city it is to them. To her, the tall buildings and shiny cars are mere overgrowth, a disguise concealing the past. This she glimpses when she peers into the backs of shops, or steals up certain side streets where the cobblestones have not yet been paved over. Her eyes are like mine, quick and dark. She has learned how to conceal in their depths anything they take in: a woman with a prominent dowager’s hump hobbling up the street in an old-style suit; the brown, calloused hands of a vegetable peddlar. She knows these are the things that a Western tourist would see. This disturbs her. Is she trying to prove to herself how quaint and archaic these people are, even the ones who have managed to disguise themselves in three-piece suits and well-cut dresses? Or is she merely looking for shadows of herself, glimpses of a truth beyond the dull surface mirage of twentieth-century life in any city? She does not know that beneath every mirage is another mirage.

  The search for shadows makes her hungry. Always keen for a hunt.

  This makes her dangerous, at least to me, an old Fox of the once firmly established Hu family of Chang’an, the capital of old China, now living in the cold outreaches of the British colonial legacy. Especially now that I am alone and tired of my solitude.

  And here in Hong Kong, less than ten years before the colony returns to China, who is to say which of us is more out of place – she whose parents knew these streets as children, or I who have not been here for five hundred years?

  At lunchtime she comes out onto the steaming streets with other office workers and goes to the noodle shop or the Japanese bakery in the basement of the Matsuzakaya mall. This time it’s the noodle shop. She orders wonton or fish-ball noodles in a clumsy accent. Once when she went for lunch late, the restaurant was nearly empty and a group of bored waiters gathered around her and asked, “Japanese?” “Korean?” She said, “Ga la dai yun,” and they all reached out to marvel at her hair as black as theirs.

  Today she is buying mangoes in the street market from an old woman in a straw hat. She knows how to choose them, pressing the yellow skin gently testing for the right balance of firmness and tenderness. The old woman tells her she looks like her lost daughter and gives her a special price even though she doesn’t understand a word. In the street she slits the yellow skin with her pocket knife and peels it back like a banana. Oblivious to whether or not anyone is paying attention, she bites into the sweet flesh and lets the juice run past the side of her mouth.

  I get careless and let her catch a glimpse of me in the hawker’s market. Perhaps she knows I’m watching for her and is watching for me too. She’s rummaging through a cart of clothes with Liz Claiborne labels, holding a denim skirt up to her body and tugging on the elastic to see if it will go around her waist. I cross the street a block away, cutting across her field of vision. She looks up. Later, going behind the hawkers’s stalls in an alley, I hear her speaking grammatically jumbled Cantonese with a watch seller, but I stay hidden until she’s gone.

  Artemis takes an elevator to the top of one of those fancy hotels. She gets out at the revolving restaurant at the very top and is seated at a lonely table by the window by a harried waitress struggling to be polite. The man she intended to meet – an old tea merchant who had been friends with her adoptive father when he was a young man studying ancient trade routes in Asia – is dead. She will meet his daughter and his blind wife, who used to sing tragic roles when she was younger. The old woman has lost her voice now. The body has fallen out of it, leaving only a ridiculous falsetto that her old ears can barely hear. They arrive just minutes later, the daughter pushing an empty wheelchair, the old woman hobbling on a cane. She stumbles over the crack between the moving and the stationary sections of the restaurant floor.

  “She won’t use the wheelchair. She loves all the new hi-tech things, except the ones that will actually improve her life.” And then, sheepish at this blurted-out display of emotion, the daughter tries again in a more even, amiable voice. “Hi, I’m Leda.”

  The old woman says something in Chinese as the waitress helps her sit down.

  “She wants to welcome you back,” says Leda.

  “Back?”

  “She knows you’ve never been here before. But she means it as a compliment.” Like her namesake, interposing her body between the human and the divine, Leda spans the gap between cultures. “She says the West is a very strange place. She hopes you will find life here more ordinary.”

  “More ordinary by the day,” Artemis assures them.

  Leda offers to take Artemis to a resort in the New Territories. Artemis meets Leda, her cousin Shirley, and two of Shirley’s co-workers at the Star Ferry. She is happy because they all speak English. Inside the ferry terminal, they follow smooth hallways to the subway station. She likes the way the seats are built for people her size, even though she has to stand this time because the train is so crow
ded. At one station many men and women in business suits crowd onto the train. At another there’s a large group of factory workers. She finds herself thinking things she thought she would never think. “No wonder the government is so strict about border control.…” She wishes she could forget that she is Chinese too.

  She gets wedged up against the glass at the front of the car. Voices flood like water into her ears, displacing air. The steel pole she clutches is beginning to sweat. She imagines long fingers wriggling through her ribcage to grab her lungs and squeeze. A thin breath dribbles out of her and she gasps to snatch it back, but the greedy fingers squeeze tighter and all that goes in are the familiar voices she doesn’t understand. She is growing pale. The fingers snake into her belly. Grow double heads. Maybe forked tongues too. They writhe. She leans forward. A clot of vomit rushes into her mouth, but at that moment the train stops, the doors open, and the people rush out.

  They flood through the brown doors of a brown train station in the hills.

  It would have been nice, an American-style bathroom, white tile floors so well disinfected you could lick them, a claw-foot tub waiting like a porcelain womb, a wide-basin sink with hot and cold water running crystal clear as a mountain spring in the land of the immortals. And a pristine white sitting toilet that could flush away all those messy bodily unmentionables. The single bob of a handle and it all swirls away to some unknown, unthought of, and unremembered place, to be replaced by clear, lovely water.

  But this is almost China, soon to become China again, one of those nearly forgotten places in the hills. Unlike those fancy hotels for Westerners, the rich, and the overseas Chinese, there is no grey woman mopping away the parts of people that they themselves are afraid to discuss, or holding out white towels smelling of lemons. There is just a dry sink, a bare lightbulb, a wet floor, and a hole in the ground that smells unhappy.

  When Artemis comes out, Leda says, “Maybe your digestive system hasn’t adjusted to being in a foreign country yet,” laughing kindly behind an accent as perfect as American denim.

  Artemis smiles and says, “I guess not.” They have missed a bus waiting for her, but no one seems the least bit reproachful. Still, she finds herself feeling bad, and the night is hanging by a thin thread, threatening to tumble out of the sky at any moment. They stand together on the curb outside the station talking about Shirley’s new boyfriend, who has just bought a motorcycle.

  “Crazy, the way traffic is these days,” says Leda.

  Shirley laughs. “I’m not that serious about him anyway. If he dies in an accident I’ll just go find another one. There’s lots where he came from!” She looks at Artemis. “You got one?”

  She has just received a letter from Eden detailing his various summer flirtations. “Sort of,” she says, “but not really.”

  It’s cool inside the bus, air rushing through the open windows as the serviceable but hardly elegant vehicle bumps over potholes two or more at a time. By the time they reach the resort the eroded hills have drunk all but the last drops of blue from the sky.

  It’s the way she imagines a nunnery to be. She knows that it’s too plain to resemble one really, five identical buildings with undecorated high white walls and a slanted roof made of long black bamboo poles. They are led into one building by a perky young woman with short hair. There are thirty beds in the big hall, laid out in three rows of ten each. She’s glad there are still beds left by the window.

  When they get to the dining hall, it’s already packed full of office workers and their families. She recognizes a man her father’s age as a draftsman who works on the floor above her. She nods her head in his direction. “First holiday in twenty years,” he tells her later. She finds it strange to sit around a table with strangers and share a meal with them, poking chopsticks into the same dishes of rice noodles or pork and vegetables, but at least they belong to the same profession.

  There will be a thunderstorm tonight, and I will pay the first of many visits. The dark is heavy as she walks back towards the building. Although it’s cooler than in the daytime, the air is viscous as honey and the night is as dark and smooth as hair. She has no choice but to take it into her lungs and let it flood through her bloodstream. With each inward breath her blood grows thicker, until it is as rich and dense as the dark. The night deepens. The first drops of water descend just as they reach the door of their building.

  By the time she has washed and climbed into bed, it is raining steadily. Thunder muttering in the distance. In the sleeping hall the air is still tight. It is hot, and mosquitoes buzz incessantly except when they stop to insert a tiny pin into her skin, take a single drop of blood, and leave her feeling hot and itchy and irritated. She tries to seal her entire body, heavy with night air, inside the sheet, except for a tiny hole to the side where she puts her nose. Sleep is just passing a gentle hand over her face when the first flash comes. The room is startled blue for an instant. Thunder doesn’t come until perhaps ten seconds later, trembling over the hills and smashing into her ears. How could everyone else be sleeping? A whole room full of women and no one stirs.

  The next bolt bites closer. I feel more confident now, strong enough to nudge sleep aside and lean gently against her back, careful not to conjure up memories of the train ride, as she tries to curl away from the storm.

  Either she doesn’t notice me or she pretends not to. A torrent of rain passes over like a wide-winged angel and moves on to the next hill, black blades pounding. The air is thicker than ever. If she doesn’t come out from under the sheet, she will choke on it. The next bolt of electricity explodes right over her head, banging in her ears like the Mongol army galloping into China’s ancient capital. I put my hand on her shoulder and gently pass it over her body in a gesture of comfort. The sky is descending in liquid torrents.

  A memory rushes at her, arcing through the dark. It comes from when she must have been two or three years old. Lying on a white camping cot in an empty house, lightning came to her for the first time. It struck the gigantic oak right outside her window, setting it ablaze for a moment, until the rain came and the flames were lost in a hissing fizzle of steam and smoke. She lay still the whole time, fingering the satin border of a pink blanket, which would eventually fray from an excess of touch.

  Outside the wide-open windows, the rain washes her memory away. I put my hand on her belly and she rolls over and looks at me. There is no surprise in her eyes. It is as though she expected me to be here, and is pleased. Or perhaps she knew the whole time that I was there, and was stringing me along, the way some humans can, in spite of their naïve appearance. I stroke the soft skin on her belly, feel the sharp bones of her hips, move my hand up the centre of her ribcage and let it rest between her breasts. She reaches her hand up behind my head and pulls me towards her. If she is surprised that my body has weight the way a woman’s body does, she doesn’t say anything. Her mouth opens, revealing the first hollow of her body. Her tongue is small and pointed. Her breath comes from a warm place inside the earth. We fly close to the ground and let the thunder come back.

  PART 3

  Degrees of Recognition

  Have I already mentioned that we foxes are generally predisposed towards intellectual types? It is both our curse and our blessing. Artemis is not so much a woman of action as a woman of reason. She always sticks her head into a book for answers, eschewing the problematic world of experience. This is a fact that brings on the contempt of more than a few – people who have big hopes for the world. But who am I to make excuses for her? I am drawn to the magnetic coils of her mind, wound neatly as a headful of snakes. I haven’t decided if my predisposition is genetic or merely practical. In my tradition we’ve generally gone for scholars and priests on account of their vivid imaginations and propensities for solitude. Priests or other holy people – in my case nuns, which is slightly unusual, but hardly unheard of.

  You wouldn’t, for instance, catch me haunting a welder. All those bright toxic lights and foul-smelling gases would
entirely obfuscate the more subtle kinds of ambience I like to generate. You wouldn’t catch me following dancers or acrobats around either. People who don’t keep still are hard to surprise. Some foxes would say they are hard to seduce, but me, I’m a creature of poetry. I stay away from such loaded terms. You wouldn’t catch me trailing political activists or arts administrators either. They’d be too preoccupied and bleary-eyed to notice.

  Unlike the Poetess, who suspected my motives long before I myself was aware of them, this one denies my existence altogether. Oh, it is fine when I come through the window at night in a fine green velvet riding jacket or when I fall through the late-night television screen – a trick I’ve found quite effective since she started subscribing to the Chinese cable channel, with its plethora of martial arts movies and serials about ghosts, foxes, and other spirits. In the state between sleep and waking, she’s as receptive and suggestive as a lake in a hurricane, as soft as night sifting down through the clouds.

  The Poetess, who had already become a Taoist nun by the time I began visiting, accepted me simply. I appeared on her doorstep in the rain perhaps a year after her companion Lu Ch’iao ran away with an acrobat.

  “I have been expecting spirits for some time now,” she said to me the first time, “so you may as well come in.”

  I stepped through the stone arch into the main room of the temple. My gauzy white dress, the conventional habit for hauntings at the time, was drenched and clung to my body like a shroud. She passed me an old silk robe from which the embroidered phoenixes were unravelling.