Lucky Ghost

Flawed Diamond

I always called her Po Fu, which describes something both precious and lucky in Cantonese. Her hair whipped around her head in a dark bob, her alignment narrow beneath it like an ice cream cone, or a lollipop, one hand gripping the handle of a steel peking pan, the other smoking a long thin cigarette. When we were introduced, over the hot steam of sesame oil and lotus root, she said those two words as though they were her name. She took one look at me, my freckles scattered across pronounced nose bone, and she knew she could manipulate language, tell the gweilo, or white ghost, stories she was too afraid to say in her native tongue. She was a witch, an heiress, an angry girl-child from China who knew firsthand the benefits of long-term manipulation. She bowed her head at me and smiled a slow phony smile, revealing small gray teeth. The owner, eyeing us suspiciously, said a few words I could not understand and slunk off down the street to his apartment.

Our initial exchanges were tentative, judgmental. Po Yee launched into the required tour, chain smoking her way through the open kitchen, the basement and the storage room with an air of indifference, rolling her eyes when I thanked her formally in Cantonese, looking down often to type messages into the glowing red of her cellphone. As the tension in the air settled she divulged what items could be lifted from the restaurant and what items must remain untouched. She pointed out the locations of the four surveillance cameras and made sure I understood how to record, rewind and switch off the modules at closing time. She fingered the cuff of my navy blue blazer and sharply advised me to change into something I wouldn’t mind staining with soy sauce.

In the safety of the storage room, Po Fu flicks her lighter open and offers me a cigarette.

“They told me I was born in a bad year,” she says, discarding her stained apron and propping her elbows up on the table, her large round head hovering above bird bones, whispering smoke. She does not ask what the others have asked - where I am from, my reasons for being here, whether or not I am a student. I take in her dark almond-shaped eyes and plump circular lips. As the smoke curls out from the radius of the circle, her face softens. (I will soon learn that these thin cigarettes are what bring her life, and that an offering of a cigarette is a portal to intimate discussion, something too precious to turn down). She keeps her legs crossed at a sharp angle beneath the table.

“But for many years I have brought good fortune to my family. And now everyone agree I am lucky. How you say in English? Flawed diamond? I am like flawed diamond.”

Surrounded by wine racks, the metaphors roll from her tongue. She is rough with the English language. She leaves pronouns out completely, calling everyone “it” regardless of gender. Everything bottled up in Chinese comes exploding out of her in English.

“My family pretend I was boy. Until nine.”

She searches my face as though it were a mirror.

“You know Chinese hate woman, don’t you?”

I shift uncomfortably in my chair and take small, shallow drags from my cigarette. I am happy to have avoided the prerequisite discussion, explaining my presence in a foreign country, admitting my disorientation, but I can no longer gauge her intentions.

I shrug my shoulders, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

Glancing out at the empty restaurant I begin to worry about money. The main dining room is adorned elaborately with majestic red draperies and drooping gold chandeliers, but there has not been a single customer for over an hour. I wonder if this job will pay as much as the owner claimed.

Po Fu narrows her eyes and peers at me through thick air, “Doesn’t matter if you understand. Everyone know it is better to have flawed diamond than no diamond.”



Lucky Tangerines

Hong Kong. A decision I made in the dreamlike state that accompanied dropping out of college, severing ties with a few close friends, and signing my lease over to an older couple from Mexico. Hong Kong on a whim.

I walk around with lucky tangerines in my pockets. I am there to see if I look familiar to anyone, to see if the quarter Chinese in me feels at home. My hair is straight and dark, and I am considered small-boned back in New York, but here in Hong Kong I stand out like white rice on the black tar of the Island Eastern Corridor, my grandparent’s Chinese blood thinning with each new generation. Even my basic knowledge of Cantonese does not impress. Judgmental eyes watch from laundromats and store fronts, watch me leave for work in the morning, watch me unlock the latch to my building and climb the stairs at night, watch me until I am out of sight completely. I live off of a meager salary in an undesirable neighborhood, stealing small things from the restaurant where I work, eating star fruit and pork dumplings from the vendors on my days off. I make just enough money to live, and not quite enough to buy a plane ticket home.

In the month of February, Po Fu and I barricade ourselves in the storage room with bottles of yellow wine, our eyes transfixed on the surveillance camera, watching for anyone who might wander in by mistake. Business is slow and the owner has resorted to paying us shift wages. Tipsy from the wine, we sneak out to the kitchen only for lunch. We take turns preparing our favorite meals; taro dumplings, hot pots with boiled egg and Chinese cabbage, sautéed spinach, red bean shakes with fresh unsweetened soy milk.

Po Fu does not seem worried and continues to weave stories in her spare time. Over an afternoon dim sum, she tells me her parents pay top dollar for the best psychic in all of China. Her father flies the siblings home - one from Shanghai, one from Sydney, one from London - so they can attend a session as a family. She tells me the psychic once banished her to a small fishing village for an entire year, claiming she would bring ruin to her family if they were to glimpse her face. She asks repeatedly: “Do I play music for cow?” This, I learn, is a metaphor for explaining something to someone who will never understand. I regard Po Fu with fascination and distrust, the same way I regard the beggars as they shake their cans at me on my way to work. I ponder her good luck, or Fu, and wait patiently for it to rub off on me.

Po Fu’s friends stop by the restaurant often. There is Pearl, a wispy girl with large melancholic eyes and long hair past her waist. There is Sing and Andy, two of Po Fu’s most determined male suitors, each from different ends of the economic spectrum. There is YoYo, with ruddy cheeks and thick glasses who everyone teases for eating too many noodles. And there is the ever stylish Candy with her Parisian bowl-cut and endless knowledge of life abroad. They do not come empty handed. Each pining for the attention of my co-worker, they bring small gifts in the hopes of appealing to her expensive tastes. I wonder how it is that Po Fu has obtained so many worshippers.

One humid afternoon, Pearl and YoYo drop by the restaurant with Hello Kitty stationary and a pack of miniature Hello Kitty pens. They are old friends from Catholic school who have kept in touch. They sit stiffly in the front room speaking heavily accented English, not for the sake of inclusion, but rather to honor their friend who is changing in the back. I find myself wanting to make friends, yet wholly unable to penetrate their stoicism or even understand their whispered exchanges. Clumsily, I rise to offer them matcha toast, then sautéed root vegetables, and finally American style coffee, black. Pearl, wasting away beneath her baggy white jeans and oversized T-shirt, shrinks away from my voice, her eyes becoming even more focused on the door to the back room where Po Fu will soon emerge. YoYo, plump and eager in her British English would like to have toast, but politely declines along with her friend. I toy with the lucky tangerines in the pockets of my apron and venture conversation.

“Is it Po Fu’s birthday?”

Pearl shakes her head slowly as though she were in a drug-induced haze, but YoYo is eager to answer.

“No! These are lucky gifts! If you bring a lucky person a gift, good luck will come back to you!”

When Po Fu finally emerges from behind the closed door there is a flurried exchange of compliments and the gifts are presented. Po Fu gasps as she receives them, clasping each package to her chest as though they were lifesavers and thanking them both profusely with hugs and kisses. I stand a short distance away in my stained restaurant clothes, my sleeves rolled up to my elbows, my hair pinned back messily. Po Fu smiles at me over their shoulders.

Afterwards, we go out for drinks. I am sullen after working so many long hours, and the cafe they have chosen is not on my side of town, but I tag along out of curiosity. For most of the night I sip quietly on a bright pink concoction of lychee fruit, saki and grenadine, letting their words disintegrate into sounds.



Fish Eyes

It is the day we are to be let go. We are sitting together at a table near the window, watching the school children across the street play ping-pong during their break. It makes me nervous, chatting out in the open when the owner could walk in at any moment. I suggest folding napkins or polishing silverware to appear busy, but Po Yee shakes her head no.

“Let’s go back to storage room,” I plead, “If he comes, we’ll see him on the surveillance camera.”

“No. I want to teach you something and we need light.”

Po Fu grabs white paper and red pen and begins scratching Chinese characters with tiny arrows all around them.

“Now you do. It is time you learn to write.”

I take the pen and haphazardly try to imitate her drawings.

“No! You do not do like this. You write each line, top to bottom, left to right. Watch arrows. I thought you part Chinese.”

“Po Fu!” I exclaim quietly, “What is wrong with you?”

Her wrists flitter adroitly as her blood rises. I have never seen her so angry before. We are head-to-head at the cafe table, papers spread about us like flocking doves, arguing over whether or not I am true Chinese, when a shadow appears in the doorway. The owner popping in on a surprise visit. I curse Po Fu out as we collect our personal belongings from the storage room.

“Your friends are stupid to waste all those gifts on you.”

She shrugs, but not with indifference. She shrugs as though she were happy. On our way out she pockets a tiny silver cake tester and laughs in the owner’s face. Outside the restaurant she promises to make it up to me.

“You don’t have to worry,” she says, planting a kiss on my cheek.

I look into her eyes and they are dark and cloudy, like the eyes of a fish.

The day before my rent is due Po Fu pulls up in front of my apartment building in a black towncar. She brings her sister, the driver and the family maid to help carry my belongings. On the ride back to her house I nervously pick at my nails, peeling off layers of calcium, scratching at the skin around my cuticles until it breaks and bleeds. My luggage is in the back like an unwanted carcass, all that I own piled up in a trash heap. This is not how I imagined my life in Hong Kong to be. I try and tell myself that things could be worse, that I should at least be grateful to Po Fu for providing me a place to stay with her family.

As we pull onto the highway, Po Fu becomes angry because the maid is riding with us in the back seat, and with my suitcase and boxes, it is a tight fit. Even so, she offers me one of her long, thin cigarettes and orders the driver to crack the windows. As we smoke, she looks out past the highway at the multiplying high-rises. She tells me her father is part owner of a tobacco company in Shanghai, and with the profit from the tobacco, he buys empty lots and buildings and leases them out to companies. As China scrambles to build, Po Fu’s father makes millions. It is her inherent good luck that has made him a success, she explains.

She smiles sheepishly as she smokes, “I just tried that dumb job for experience.”



Ghost

Po Fu tells me there is a ghost that haunts her floor, the 88th floor of the tallest apartment building I have ever been in, and that she is the only one who sees it. I live with Po Fu’s family and this ghost, high above Hong Kong in a glass castle. Small slippers appear in my doorway each morning (it is rude to walk around barefoot or in regular shoes), meals are made and delivered in silence. There is a kitchen that I am not allowed to enter. If I sneak in to get something at night, the maid will run from her quarters to wait on me, her mouth straining to smile as she, speaking neither Chinese nor English, tries to prepare me what I want. There is a contraption in the hallway that sterilizes large amounts of water. At the push of a button it dispenses it into tiny plastic cups. Since I am allowed to operate this machine on my own, I slip out of my bedroom many times in the night, sipping hot water by the large glass windows, looking for the ghost.

I do not look for work. Instead I stalk the city with Po Fu, watching February turn into April, learning her moods and triggers, molding my personality to fit hers, apologizing for everything regardless of fault. I follow her like a dog, waiting outside the dressing room while she tries on clothes, sitting quietly beside her at expensive dinners. She invites me everywhere; I am her American accessory. When I find myself amongst white tourists, I am shocked by their grotesqueness, their strong jutting Anglo features, sharp noses, their height - usually a head above the swarming crowds of Causeway Bay. I am also struck by their mass. Chinese girls are thin like paper. They pick at steamed cabbage and shrimp. They avoid rice, noodles and fruit. Their clothes dwarf their bodies, swallow their sexuality, are symbols of black holes; alive and yet absent. I want to blend in with them. I am Po Fu’s shadow, disappearing into my clothes, hunching my shoulders to appear more Asian, less white, smoking, smoking, smoking.

On a night out with Po Fu, I get lost in a labyrinth of hallways while my new Chinese friends sing karaoke. These mazes are called karaoke boxes, but they remind me of abandoned hotels, with royal red carpet, golden banisters, mirrored hallways. There are rows and rows of tiny blinking Christmas lights, their reflection in the mirrors distorting my path. I pass a group of teenage girls toddling through the hallway on three inch heals. I ask for the bathroom and they look right through me, disappearing into a karaoke room. I call an old friend from New York, crying, as though it were a dream she could wake me from. A twelve hour time difference means she is at the grocery store with her mother, shopping for a ham.

“I don’t understand,” she says, “You just disappeared.”

I look into my cellphone, a tiny glowing gadget, one of many gifts from Po Fu and her family. I feel like I am disappearing. I stare at the tiny speaker until the voice coming out of it goes silent.

Over cold coffee in a cafe called Paris, I watch as Po Fu unwraps my gift. It is a small silver cell phone charm in the shape of a horse shoe. An American symbol of good luck, I tell her.

“This means you are leaving?” she asks.

I nod and watch as she withdraws into herself, keeping her body impossibly still, not even bringing the cigarette to her mouth to smoke. We sit like this until the cigarette burns down to her fingertips and the log of ash falls onto the floor.

Under the table, my fingers are crossed.