Where they slept

Hong Kong has a certain odor before a typhoon. Its very own brand of perfume. A mild eau de toilette of subtle sewage stench and air pollution, with hints of air conditioning condensation, gasoline, human sweat, and, depending on where you were and what time of day, the saltiness of an ocean breeze. It is not a pleasant time to be outside and for safety’s sake most people scurry home, businesses close early and insure their windows with bold outstretched X’s of masking tape, the well-oiled machine that is Hong Kong’s public transport system slowly shuts itself down, and the city collectively hides under its sheets to wait for the storm to pass.

Aaron Cheung, however, was not hiding under his sheets at the moment at all. He was cooped up in his cubicle, a little beige jail cell, fingers rapidly typing away, shuffling between Excel spreadsheets, research packs, and his inbox, trying desperately to finish a model he had been trying to balance since the afternoon. Cathy had left early to work from home and pick up her little kindergartner, since the typhoon signal had been raised from T1 in the morning to T3 in the early afternoon – her driver wanted to beat the traffic. Oh, what he would give to be an associate. To simply dump off work to the lowly analysts and go home at the drop of a hat. He stared at the wall of clocks across from him. HONG KONG 12:40 AM. NEW YORK 12:40 PM. LONDON 05:40 PM. It was ten minutes past his deadline and lunch break in New York was almost over. The model was as close as it would get, and his pitch decks were usually immaculate so he figured he would send it anyway. Forgoing the usual formalities, – “sorry this is so late”, “hope you’re doing well” – he quickly drafted up an email to Cathy.

Hi Cathy,

Attached are the documents for the 1 AM with New York. The model’s almost there, I couldn’t quite balance it, but I’m sure you get the idea. I am going home soon, let me know if there’s anything else you need from the office.

Best,
Aaron

He clicked send without a second thought and collapsed on his desk with an exasperated groan. His eyes ached from staring at meaningless numbers all day, and his back echoed the pain. It was a ruthless grind, and it was all the same everywhere. HSBC, ICBC, Citi, Deutsche, Goldman. But the tradeoff seemed fair to him; at the age of 26, he took home a generous salary, far more than what most people in the city made. He couldn’t wait for the weekend so he could hit up Lan Kwai Fong with his analyst buddies to moan about their jobs, get hammered, and forget about it all. Aaron picked himself up off the desk and got up to stretch and, in response, his stomach gurgled angrily in demand of food. He glanced at the clocks again. It had been over six hours since he had eaten or drank anything other than coffee or Red Bull. The spots that all the analysts usually ordered from were closed at this hour, so Aaron figured the local McDonald’s was the only option left. He slipped on his jacket, brushed off his trousers, and made his way down.

Outside, the wind picked up the scattered litter off the ground like invisible vacuum cleaners, sucking them up through tumultuous tubes of air and momentarily discarding them in distant alleyways, only to be found by a different gust and for the cycle to repeat itself. Disparate blankets of sprinkling rain added to the oppressive humidity and their little droplets whipped around erratically in fluid, mercurial waves. A Gaussian blur of mist obfuscated the city’s iconic myriad of lights till it looked more like a cocktail of confused water colours.

Aaron pushed open the glass door of his lobby and was instantly assaulted by the sheer force of the wind, before it swiftly changed direction, leaving him with a brief respite. He peered down the street. The McDonald’s was barely a block away; he could make it there and back, with enough time to cab it home, he thought. He checked his phone. Hong Kong Observatory T3. It was a spectacle to see the usually crowded streets of Hong Kong island this empty, even in the middle of the night. A few passersby were half jogging their way into buildings and some were crouched under shelter, presumably waiting for cabs. Hong Kong’s sheer height as a city meant that there were always places to hide during a typhoon. Aaron flipped his collar up and folded his jacket tight up against himself with his arms crossed – the makeshift winter straitjacket of businessmen worldwide – and began his trek down the street towards the glowing 24/7 McDonald’s sign. He joined the half joggers and before long had made his way to the little glass door entrance, squeezed between a 7/11 and a bakery. Aaron had always disliked the underground fast-food restaurants. Musty stairwells led down to brightly lit caverns of impatient yelling and fry oil. The grey tiles were always slightly sticky underfoot and rarely was it at all orderly. Luckily right now, most people had headed home, and this McDonald’s seemed empty, and thus tolerable to him. His dress shoes clicked and clacked down the steps as he descended into the restaurant. The lights were as harsh as he remembered. They illuminated every stain and spill on the tiles and strained his already exhausted eyes. Weary brown leather booths lined the lavender and mustard walls, leading straight to an open space reserved for the queue in front of the counter. There was a separate entrance leading to an underground mall to the right of the counter, and so seating looped back round from that entrance back to the stairwell entrance, forming an odd donut shape. He looked up at the menu briefly and walked up to the cashier.

“Hi, could I please get the number 4 meal? Large size. Lemon coke, no ice. With a side of McWings please. Thank you.” Aaron still managed to switch into succinct Cantonese after a day of reading and speaking English. Years of faking an English accent never seemed to take away his mother tongue from him. Aaron’s parents had sent him to a boarding school in England for high school. He quickly unlearned even the slightest trace of a Cantonese accent and worked hard at school, to his parents wishes, eventually earning him admission to London School of Economics, despite his earnest Oxbridge attempts.

“$52.36. Eating here or for take away?” the cashier asked blankly.

“Eh, I’ll eat here.” Aaron replied, glancing at his watch and inhaling deeply. He paid with his corporate card quickly, tucking his receipt into his breast pocket. The scent of McDonald’s fries had a way of drawing people in. Some people say they designed the smell specifically to do that, but Aaron never really believed it, despite falling victim to it more often than not. And sure enough as he stood there waiting for his meal, his stomach grumbled once more, as if it were complaining directly to the McDonald’s workers. His meal arrived fairly promptly and with that, he claimed one of the empty booths near the stairwell entrance and started wolfing down his meal like a hungry schoolboy after football training. Halfway through his wings, his phone buzzed. He wiped his right hand down haphazardly with the flimsy napkins provided and fished through his pocket for his phone. He looked at the notifications on his lock screen. Hong Kong Observatory T8. He picked up some chatter behind the counter between the two employees. “Should we head home?” “Text the manager.” “Shit people are saying it might be a T9, I’m getting out of here”. If it had just changed to T8, it wouldn’t get unbearable till about half an hour later anyway, Aaron thought. Typhoons were temperamental and the typhoon signals could be misleading depending on location sometimes. He left his phone on the table and continued eating. Aaron figured he’d be done eating soon, and even if the McDonald’s was indeed going to close early, there would probably still be plenty of cabs roaming around Hong Kong island that he could call, or so he assumed. His phone buzzed again. He glanced down at it once more. Hong Kong Observatory T9. The employees behind the counter groaned almost in unison. “Fuck we’re stuck here tonight”, “This is bullshit”, “We better get paid extra for this”, “Fuck management”. Aaron wiped down both his hands angrily and climbed up the stairs to see for himself. He reached the top and looked around the taped-up X on the door.

In a matter of minutes, the rain had graduated from volatile sprinkles at most to bonafide torrential chaos. The wind had started tossing around bigger pieces of debris – milk crates, tree branches, wooden pallets, broken umbrellas – like an overenthusiastic father and son playing catch, up and down the street. The glass door rattled gently, not enough for serious concern but enough for him to be mildly perturbed. A belligerent, screeching howl seeped through the cracks of the door and with it, soft gusts of cold air.

“Fuck me,” Aaron swore loudly in English, as he stomped down the stairs. As he sat back down, slumped in his booth, picking at his fries, he heard a slight commotion.

“Yes, fuck you, be quiet,” a voice retorted from the other side of the seating area in shrill broken English. “People are sleeping, ok?”

“Look, sorry mate, I just don’t want to sleep in a bloody McDonald’s, ok?” Aaron yelled back, as he got up to confront his newfound opposition. He spotted her as he rounded the corner. She was a meek looking woman dressed in black track pants, a raggedy purple sweater and an oversized caramel suede jacket stained with burn marks and grease. Short and skinny, the clothes seemed to slump over her frame like melting wax. A plump red-white-blue nylon bag sat next to her, a lone companion. Her eyes were beady and black like a crow’s, magnified by a pair of delicate, thin framed glasses sat atop a stumpy nose. Frail white hair crawled clumsily down her head; the vestiges of a perm remained, adding what little volume it could. Her wrinkled tan skin looked like a crumpled brown lunch bag, intensifying with every frown or smile. She sat up as Aaron came around the corner to address her.

“Why not McDonald’s?” She stared straight at Aaron as he approached her.

“Well, no I just – like, you know – I just would prefer to go home” Aaron stuttered as he realized who exactly he had been yelling at.

“Hah! Me too la” The old woman laughed heartily and looked up at him. She switched to Cantonese. “So, what’s the deal? You spent so much time overseas you can’t speak anymore?”

“You don’t know me.” Aaron responded in English. He spoke an odd, re-colonized English.

“I know just who you are,” She jabbed. “Aren’t you one of those little rich boys, who studied abroad with mummy and daddy’s money? Went to university for a couple years, came back to Hong Kong, and now you think you’re better than everyone just because your English sounds more like the white man?” She laughed almost maniacally and slapped her knee. “Oh come on, I’m just kidding, boy,” she added after a pause. Simultaneously amused and incensed, Aaron shifted his weight from leg to leg.

“What’s your point? What do you want?” He conceded and switched to Cantonese out of pride.

“I don’t know. Hmmmm. Well, now that I know you actually are rich… Since you woke me up, how about you buy a poor old lady something to eat,” she teased. Aaron couldn’t help but smile. If he didn’t buy her anything, he’d prove her point – that he was just a spoilt overseas brat. He silently admired how brilliant a move she had pulled on him.

“Well, since it looks like we’re stuck here tonight, sure. What do you want?”

“One hash brown, a jumbo corn cup, and a hot water, please,” she replied politely. Aaron obliged and began to walk back round to the counter to look for a cashier. “Hey, hey!” she waved a little scrap of newspaper at him. “Use this coupon here.” Intrigued, Aaron plucked the little coupon from her hand and examined it. He hadn’t seen one of these since he was in middle school. He and his friends would collect coupons to use at the McDonald’s in the MTR station on the way back from school. They would buy whatever they could with the pocket money they would scrounge together, and suddenly those little grey coupons were golden tickets. He smiled.

“Thank you! Saved me a ton,” he replied sarcastically. Aaron ordered and paid again with his corporate card and returned to the booth to wait.

“Thank you, young man,” she said, as Aaron slid into the opposite side of the booth. She played with the sleeves of her jacket nonchalantly as they spoke.

“Don’t mention it.” Aaron responded. “So what do I call you? McQueen? McEmpress?”

“You can call me Lau Tse or Ah Lau is fine too. What’s your name, young man?”

“My name is Aaron. My surname is Cheung. Nice to meet you, Lau Tse.”

“Eh, I don’t care about your English name, I would rather know your Chinese name. What would your grandma call you?”

“Cheung Tsim Wai. Most people call me Ah Wai. But I prefer Aaron.” Lau Tse scoffed.

“Did you give yourself that English name, Ah Wai?” she inquired.

“Yeah. After Kwok Fu Shing. His English name is Aaron Kwok. I thought it sounded nice, so I picked it for myself.”

“Too bad none of the white people know Kwok Fu Shing. Or any of our Four Heavenly Kings of Cantopop for that matter. I prefer Cheung Hok Yau anyway.” She chuckled.

“Well, I like it and it’s easy for them to say. Easier than Cheung Tsim Wai at least. I mean, who doesn’t have an English name?”

“I don’t. I don’t need one,” she said stubbornly. “Well, they used to call me Charlotte, but I didn’t like it so I would never tell anyone.”

“That makes sense to me. Why go by a name you don’t like.”

“Sometimes there’s no choice.”

“Sir your food is ready!” shouted the cashier. Aaron got up and returned with a jumbo corn cup, a hash brown, a cup of hot water, and an apple pie and black coffee for himself.

“So, why corn and hash browns?” he asked as he set the tray down onto the table. Lau Tse reached for the hot water cup first, and from her bag produced a half empty small plastic soda bottle stripped of its packaging. She unscrewed the cap and pinched the rim of the hot water cup, making a little spout, before proceeding to refill her water bottle.

“Well, because it's cheap. And corn has fiber, sugar, water. Hash browns have carbohydrates, salt, and oil. It's a well-balanced meal, and it’s enough for an old hag like me,” she explained, while pouring the boiling hot water down the small neck of the bottle perfectly. Her hands showed no sign of shaking or flinching, and as she finished pouring, she did a little flourish with her cup hand, like an Indian Chai wallah. As she began to nibble on her hash brown, Aaron opened up his apple pie and they ate together.

“So… do you sleep here every night?” Aaron asked.

“I sleep here when I can, if they’re kind enough to let me stay. Sometimes they kick me out. Which, they’re entitled to; it’s their property after all.” She spoke softly between meagre bites of her hash brown and sips of water. “And if that’s the case I just head off to the park down the road. I have a little spot. It faces the entrance so there’s usually more people coming in and out, which means it’s safer. It also faces north west so I don’t get woken up directly by the sun.” She grinned, as if proud of an accomplishment.

“What do you do in the daytime then?”

“Hah! I’m 73, boy! What is there left to do?” She laughed again. “I chat to the other old people in the park when they come for their morning exercise. Sometimes I join them.”

“Must be nice not having to go to work anymore.” Lau Tse looked up at him from her food momentarily. “Oh. I’m sorry. No, I meant, yo– it’s sort of li– you’re kind of free.” Aaron stammered awkwardly.

“I enjoy my days.” She smiled at him and continued eating. Aaron sat in silence as she slowly finished her hash brown.

“Well, uh, how about when you were young?”

“I’ve probably worked more jobs than years you’ve lived!” She cackled. “I’ve been a waitress, a call girl, a nanny, a line cook, a cleaner, a taxi driver. That’s just to name a few. But you know what I used to love?” She took a silver ring off her middle finger and plopped it into Aaron’s outstretched palm. “This used to be a spoon.” Aaron held the ring up closer to his face so he could examine it. The thick silver band was embossed with blossoming flowers and delicate curvilinear patterns around the borders. Years of grime filled in the crevices in the carvings, offering a beautiful contrast to the shiny glints of the ornaments. The edges of the ring were soft and rounded not from use, but rather from the patient tooling of an artisan. The gentle inward curve of a spoon stem was still evident in the ring but so naturally integrated in the form, it made it seem like it was what the spoon had wanted.

“You made this?” Aaron said, shocked.

“Did you not hear me the first time?” Lau Tse snapped. She let out a little chuckle and started on her corn cup, removing the cover carefully, retrieving only four or five kernels at a time with the little plastic spoon, before munching away happily on it. “I loved metalworking. I was good at it too. Could make you almost anything if you gave me a saw, some hammers, and a welding machine.” Aaron slipped the ring on his pinky finger and took a sip of his coffee.

“So what else did you make other than jewelry?”

“Well, you see, back in the 70s, right after the riots, business was booming. I was in my 20s, sharing a metal shop with my best friend. Businesses needed things like mailboxes, tables, chairs, locks, things of that sort. And China wasn’t industrialized the way it is now, so people turned to us hand craftsmen for their problems. I was really good at making mailboxes. You might be too young to really see them anymore, but they’re in stairwells of old buildings, sometimes they’d hang them outside on the walls. They’re just little flat rectangular boxes that I hammered together out of sheet metal. I’d cut out a different design on the front each time too. In fact, if you go down to To Kwa Wan, half the mailboxes down there were probably made by me. Once I even made one as a souvenir for the British governor.”

“I remember seeing those mailboxes as a kid when my mother took me to see our grandma. I think she had one. She used to run a fortune telling shop,” Aaron said, playing with the thin cardboard packaging of his finished apple pie as he talked. “Do you remember that British governor by the way? Do you remember which one it was?”

“Eh, I don’t remember. I just remember he was a very plump man and had this squeaky high voice when he spoke his fancy English. They took photos of us and we were in the newspaper and everything. Anyway, he came all the way to our little shop in Sheung Wan to accept the gift. We thought we had made it big!” Lau Tse laughed.

“Funny you say that, because my flat is actually in Sheung Wan.”

“I used to live there too. Partly because it was a cheap area for us tradesmen, but also because you got to know the other businesses in the neighbourhood. We made most of the interior structures for this one congee stall across the street from us, and in return whenever we went in for breakfast before our day started, they’d serve us each a bowl of congee with some fried dough sticks for free. Won’t find that anymore.”

“Yeah.” Aaron didn’t quite know how to respond. He lived in Sheung Wan because it was where most people his age with money lived. A nicely decorated studio with a decent view of the city on the seventeenth floor. A cute café downstairs and some cool bars nearby. It was as good a deal as any as far as he was concerned. “If you don’t mind me asking, Lau Tse, how did you get into metal working? I thought all metalworkers were grumpy old men” Aaron asked.

“My family was a lonely one. Just me and my mother. As a waitress, she barely made enough to support us let alone to send me to a good school. I went to school for six years, but at some point we couldn’t afford it anymore, so I decided to start working. The old Kowloon Walled City was a dangerous place but my mother and I eventually managed to save enough money from odd jobs to get out of there. That’s when we decided to move up to Sheung Wan, since it was so cheap. I hung around the tradesmen there and always bothered them for odd jobs I could do, and eventually they introduced me to the metal shop. Maybe it was something about the darkness that reminded me of the Walled City, or maybe it was how precise, yet rough the work was. I fell in love with it the day I made something for the first time.” She smiled, looking down at the table, towards Aaron, from her corn cup. “I made enough money doing it too. Enough to start a family. Enough to marry my best friend and start a family of my own even.”

“Well where are they now? Surely no kid would let their mother live out in the streets like this.”

“He never lived past four years old. We tried the best we could. Emptied our bank accounts to try and treat it. It was some disease that the doctors hadn’t figured out yet. He was always sick, always coughing and crying. We couldn’t even take him to school because he was so sick. And eventually we gave up.” Lau Tse finished her corn cup and put the lid back on, placing the spoon neatly beside it on the tray.

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“We were tired from the grief. With the competition from the new Chinese factories opening up and the toll it everything had taken on our bodies, we closed down our metal shop. We sold everything and went into early retirement. My husband ended up dying early from lung cancer and left everything to me. But rent just kept going up and up, and some of the blocks around us even ended up being demolished, if they weren’t gut renovated. Food became more and more expensive in the area. And so, eventually I packed up my things and left.” She took a long sip from her water bottle, her two hands grasping the sides almost like a child’s. He stared at her withered stubby hands. He wondered what those hands had done, the hands they’d held, the meals they’d cooked, the tools they’d used, the work they’d done – if his own life would ever be as lived as hers.

“Um. Thank you for sharing that. I don’t know what to say.” Aaron laughed awkwardly.

“You know, Ah Wai, every single person on this earth has a limited lifespan. Nobody lives forever. Nobody knows when they’re going to leave this earth. Who knows, maybe I’ll die tomorrow, maybe you’ll die tomorrow. It’s out of my control, so I don’t worry about it too much anymore.”

“Well, that’s one way to look at it. I guess.” They sat in silence.

“We should get some sleep. Wouldn’t want you to be late for work tomorrow,” Lau Tse said mockingly. Perking up suddenly, she unzipped her bag and plunged her hand into it, producing a lightly stained travel neck pillow. Fluffy and pink, it looked like it belonged in a children’s toy store. “Here boy, take this. I don’t need it tonight. You’re not used to sleeping without a pillow.”

“Oh, thanks,” Aaron mumbled as he accepted the pillow. He kicked off his shoes and took off his jacket, using it as a blanket, as he lay down on the booth, slipping the pillow underneath his head. He looked across the underside of the table at Lau Tse like they were kids in a blanket fort. She had placed her bag on the ground and looped one of the handles around her shoulder. “Oh, Lau Tse, I forgot to give this back, apologies,” Aaron said as he slipped the ring off and reached out to return it to her.

“Keep it, boy. Maybe you can give it to a pretty girl.” She let out another cackle. Aaron chuckled in appreciation. Lau Tse clasped her hands together on her stomach and stared up at the ceiling. “You know, Ah Wai, these typhoons always scared me as a kid. They’re violent and unpredictable. They tear down trees and bust through windows, just as easily as they blow away dust and litter on the street. And then people come back outside afterwards and fix their stores and clean up the streets and go about their lives like normal. Every year we have at least one, don’t we? A year without one would be weird. Can’t imagine Hong Kong without them.”

“Goodnight Lau Tse.”

“Goodnight Ah Wai.”

And together, they slept.