Quarantining in Her Late Husband’s Apartment Is Making Her Horny

“Before” by Xu Xi

Things were still fine, despite the dreams, until she forgot her grandson’s name. It happened on their weekly Zoom, when he was being his usual adorably talkative self. She was half listening to his digressively long tale about a kindergarten classmate, so like his Grandpa Bing, whose oral discourses were legendary among his students; “Lullaby Prof ” was a Rate My Prof quip that infuriated him, when he declared, “How silly of Kumar to say my name’s impossible to pronounce! My name’s easy to say, right, Grandma?” And she stared at him, mute, unable to recall his name for ten whole seconds until Lana, her daughter-in-law, said, “Nai-nai, are you muted again?”

After the call, she remains upset, almost drops the coffee pot as she lifts it up to pour and catches it, but not before hot liquid flows black on her right forearm. Just before they signed off, her son, Jasper, although he’s forever Song to her; she embarrasses him whenever she lets slip his baby nickname, asked if anything was wrong, and she told him she was doing fine, everything was fine, and to stop worrying about her being alone in New York because things were worse elsewhere, and at least here, the grocery store was just across the street. But she isn’t fine, almost missed the call because daylight savings ended and she’d forgotten, how is that possible, she is always so religious about time differences for all her international work conference calls, even social calls to friends; so tiresome this time change, why can’t the US drop it the way Hong Kong did forty, no, forty-one years ago. It is this noisome pandemic, this tedious lockdown, yet there is Bing again: Hey, you, no more squawking from your privileged perch. What she most wants right now is to be home, where it is twelve, no, thirteen hours ahead in the evening, having Sunday dinner with her son and his family, savoring Lana’s delicious food and playing with her grandson Sheng (or Bartleby) and his sister Yu Chun (or Monica), already two and chattering almost as much as her brother. After dinner, she’d go back to her flat next door, so lucky her neighbor was selling just when Jasper was buying, so convenient their being next door, listen to a little music and the eleven o’clock news before a restfully dreamless sleep.

No, she mustn’t squawk, she is extremely privileged; even if she is stranded in New York, it is temporary. At least this is still home, sort of. Although the apartment is old, it is centrally located, walking distance to every subway line on 14th Street, and it is all hers now, the mortgage long ago paid off, a space for her and her family. Once before, it was even a rent-free home for her son when he landed his first job in New York after his MBA at UST. As Song, no, Jasper said, “Why come back to quarantine in Hong Kong and waste money in a hotel?” Yes, it makes more sense to wait till things settle down. At least here she can prepare her own meals and have her own things in a comfortable enough space with her laptop and Wi-Fi; and besides, there is Zoom now in addition to Skype, Google Meet, FaceTime, WhatsApp, and WeChat, and she can still talk to all her old school friends and former colleagues, even if they can’t meet for yum chas or dinners. “You know how to use all those platforms,” Jasper said, “so you can accommodate those who aren’t as techy as you.” The way he stretched that, tekkkk-yyy, made her laugh.

Even her recurring dream of the past fortnight, not nightly but disturbingly recurrent, is amusing, or it was at first. There’s a man, not anyone she knows from real life, and in the dream, this man is a lover. She tries to call out to him because he is headed the wrong way, his back to her, but she cannot remember his name. We just made love yesterday, I’ve known him forever, she’d say aloud to no one in particular, and then the panic, how could she possibly forget his name? It is absurd. In her dream, she is much younger, around forty, still sexual. Each time, just as the lover turns into the street ahead when she, muted, can’t stop him from going in the wrong direction, she startles awake. The first time she woke, she was wet down there and would be subsequent times, but not always.

Two years earlier, she turned sixty, retirement age at HKU’s Business School where she taught and provided career counseling. “Come back to real life,” all her friends in the private sector said. They had been surprised when she left her successful management career five years earlier for a significant pay cut as only an associate professor. “You’re still employable, it’s silly the way universities force retirement so early, not even sixty-five when you can at least get ‘long people’ benefits.” Viola, one of her secondary schoolmates, recast the clunky “senior citizen” as “long people,” punning on 長者, and it became another bit of her Chinglish. Bing would think that funny, she told Viola the first time she said it, and Viola, puzzled, asked, “Who’s Bing?” Embarrassed, she said, Sorry, you don’t know about my late husband, do you? Because by the time she fully reconnected with all her Hong Kong schoolmates, several years after she had gone home to live and work, Bing was already dead, far too young at forty-six.

Yet here, now, in their former New York home, it’s like he has never left her. She met Bing in the summer of ’83 when she visited New York. It was her first time in America. The plan, because she always used to have a plan, was to take her two-week annual leave to sightsee after completing her executive MBA classes at Harvard, since the air ticket and US visa were already paid for by her employer, DHL International. He wooed her relentlessly, this funny man who, despite his ABC-ness, spoke passably good Cantonese thanks to his late mother, a translator who had worked with immigrants. The first time she described his mother’s work as helping those most unfortunate ones, he frowned. What do you mean, unfortunate? And they almost got into an argument because she wouldn’t back down from her position that being a Chinese migrant in any non-Chinese country marked you as lesser, making you one of the unfortunates, because no matter how hard you tried to assimilate, you’d always be different, an outsider. Just semantics, she said, trying to soothe his irritation, because he raised his voice: You have no idea, do you, what it’s like to be someone who doesn’t come from your kind of privilege! He accused her of lacking empathy, something he prided himself on, and which he said she could learn by reading more literature. He was still in grad school at the time, completing his PhD in Asian American Studies, and books by Chinese-surnamed writers she’d never heard of littered his apartment.

Some of those books are still here, lining the solid, oak floor-to-ceiling bookcases that cover their home’s entire west wall. Of course, it took her almost seven years of pestering him to replace his cheap pasteboard shelves that buckled precariously, threatening collapse so that they’d both be buried under an avalanche of words. It’s early morning as she sips her coffee and stands in the middle of the living room, staring up, thinking those top shelves probably need dusting, they must be filthy, trying to recall the last time she read any book that wasn’t a business textbook.

You should have stayed. His voice, like her tinnitus, sneaks up from behind, frightening her, and she turns her head, fully expecting to see him. She wants to shout, Stop hounding me, you’re . . . but instead she collapses on the sofa and weeps, spilling her coffee. Between her legs, the memory of that dream makes her hornier this morning than she’s been in years. As she cleans up the mess, the repetitive drone, he left me, he left me, and no matter what she does this morning, she can’t stop crying.

By noon, she is calmer. Her daily tai chi exercise routine centers her, makes her less jittery. Lana says she drinks too much caffeine, which she dismissed at first, but after cutting her morning coffee with half decaf and reducing the amount of tea she consumes daily, she does notice a difference. And the high-pressure water jet in the shower reduces the tinnitus hum, so she simply stays under the water roar a few seconds longer each morning. “Mind over hearing,” another Lana-ism, more health advice that her daughter-in-law, an exercise and health nut, constantly offers, unsolicited. Damn Lana, always so insistent, always so right. Just like Bing. She loves Lana, of course she does, the best wife for Jasper and a wonderful mother, and whose Cantonese improves noticeably every time they meet and whose Mandarin is more fluent than her son’s. She knows she is lucky, privileged, as Bing reminded her constantly, to be who she is, to have what she has, surrounded by a family who loves her.

She has a ton of emails as well as laundry. Focus on the practical, this has been her mantra for as long as she can recall. Those glorious early years with Bing here in New York, despite his precarious bookshelves, are gone. Years when nothing mattered except being madly in love. The first time they made love is still astonishingly memorable. She had buried that feeling for years after his death, trying not to recall because it was over, over, over, and there was Song to take care of, a real life in Hong Kong to live, and not the fairy tale of New York into which Bing had sucked her with his persistent love. Viola was persistent too, wanting to know more about her husband. Viola was, is a psychologist, “The life of the spirit doesn’t die,” she says, and she must admit it’s admirable how Viola donates her time to help women in prison now that she’s retired from private practice, keeping her own spirit alive. Of course, Viola never married and doesn’t have either elderly parents or children or grandchildren to think about, unlike her. Ba is so old he frightens her grandchildren, especially Yu Chun, and she’s learned to keep him away from them since he can’t remember who anyone is anyway. Sometimes, it astonishes her how hard her father clings to being alive, he’s almost ninety, despite the complete loss of memory to Alzheimer’s over the last twenty years. Luckily, she has Lily, a nurse from the Philippines, who is a wonderful caregiver, and between Lily and Beth, her other domestic helper, she is freed of much of the day-to-day of looking after her father.

So, why are you still so busy?

There is Bing again, haunting her, refusing to shut up, insisting on his presence in this apartment, his home. She can silence him in Hong Kong because he only made it there a couple of times, the first to ask Ba for her hand, and only because she had insisted. He had wanted to elope, expecting her to just stay on in New York with him, leaving behind her entire life in Hong Kong. To just be his love, and we will all the pleasures prove. He recited Marlowe to her, adding, I’ll be . . . but she cut him off: My passionate shepherd? How delighted he was that she knew the poem, one she had studied in secondary school. Her teacher, Miss Lu, a romantic, had made her class recite that poem, one she was clearly enamored of.

Who was her teacher’s passionate shepherd, she had wondered, especially as Miss Lu was not married, this attractive and stylish woman who taught at her school until she dropped dead suddenly, one day right in the middle of class. Miss Lu had only been thirty, and she remembers how she and her schoolmates all grieved en masse because everyone had liked their sweet and elegant teacher. Luckily, she was no longer in Miss Lu’s class when she died, as she told Bing when explaining why she knew this one poem. He hoped she knew other poems, but she had to admit, no, she didn’t and had really never liked studying literature, though this one poem had stuck.

You have, he said, a most American sense of humor, which puzzled her then.

She searches for it now, and there it is, on Poetry Foundation’s page. She made Bing laugh because she had also asked, What does that make me, your sheep? You have, he said, a most American sense of humor, which puzzled her then. Now, having worked for Americans and American companies long enough, she thinks maybe she knows what he meant.

Mind over hearing.

Doing laundry calms her, as does cleaning the apartment. Living here with him was constant housework-in-progress, Bing being rather lax about things. It took him days to go through his mail until one day, when she could stand it no longer, she gathered the pile, by then weeks old, and dumped it all in the trash. He was horrified, but I haven’t gone through the mail yet, and she stared him down calmly, saying, And now you never will. After that, he was better about attending to his mail sooner.

But all this is long ago and so far away; why must she recall it now? Ancient history. As Sheng said about her father, “Grandma, you’re ancient, but Great Grandpa, he’s fossilized.” Lana tried to shush him, but she laughed, said, Well, everyone gets fossilized sooner or later, which made Sheng laugh. Everything was fine until this stupid . . . you can’t blame COVID, you can’t bury the truth. You should have stayed, we would have been okay, why didn’t you trust me?

And what about Song?

He would have been okay too, he would have adjusted. Just boys being boys.

They were cruel. Stupid, ignorant, savage brats.

All that anger from before surges through her again. She is furious. Time heals nothing; all it does is pass by, unstoppably. Her poor boy, too slight and bookish at eleven to fend off the bullies. Suffering daily humiliation at the fancy, private New York school Ba had insisted on paying for because he knew she and Bing could not afford it on what they made, what with high American taxes and their mortgage. Bing had been against private school, saying Song would do fine in public school the way he had and would become tougher, but she had gone to see the state of things and had been horrified at the run-down, decrepit condition of the facilities and the unruly student mobs. It shamed her to have to ask for help from Ba, but her father was so kind, saying, “You married a dreamer, he’ll never be rich, but never mind, he’s a good man.” How angry Bing was when he found out what she’d done, but she ignored his wrath because she knew she was right, and that ended the argument as far as she was concerned.

An email pings. From Viola. We missed you last night, hope you’re okay.

She completely forgot about this morning’s Zoom with her former schoolmates!

Sorry, she lies, was tied up. Next time. But then she wonders, What the hell, it’s only four in the morning over there.

Why are you up?

Why sleep when there’s so little time left, comes the reply.

It’s only then that she recalls that Viola lost her mother when she was still in school, hit by a bus or truck, something like that, as she was crossing the road to the market, and then her father died when she was in university, a blood clot in the brain, leaving her alone in their flat, the one she still lives in now, alone. Viola has no siblings, no other relatives in Hong Kong because her parents escaped from China by themselves as refugees who never looked back.

Like Bing.

The dryer tumbles to a stop. Shit. The mixed load has leaked red onto her favorite white T-shirt. Separate, separate, separate, you’re always so impatient. Oh, shut up, you can’t tell me what to do anymore. Oh, really? So, why are you still back here? Don’t be difficult. But she is smiling. See, you’re still my silly goose, aren’t you?

When she tried to defend her decision to go back to Hong Kong and take their son with her, one argument she used was that she missed roast goose. In Manhattan’s Chinatown, there was really only duck. That made Bing furious. You’d leave your husband and home for goose?! What’s wrong with you? Try as she might, she could not find the words for everything she felt. Homesickness, Song’s well-being away from the bullies, air-conditioning in the summer (she hated Manhattan’s stifling summers), and higher salaries for senior line management positions, unlike in the US where she would remain forever relegated to backroom support, but all her reasons masked the real problem until finally, after their worst argument, the words tumbled out: I am sick and tired of being a second-class citizen! It’s different for you, this is your country. It isn’t mine and never really will be, no matter how long I live here. He went silent, stared at her for an eternity. Saw her for real, perhaps for the first time. Okay, I get it, and after that, there was no further argument.

It’s already getting dark. She loves these autumn dusks, just as she used to love winters in New York. Soon, snowfall. Bing hated snow because, when he was a kid, he had to shovel the sidewalk along his alley. Why can’t the city do our street too, he’d demand, and his father would yell at him to “collect his mouth,” to shut up, saying that when he made his own money, he could move to one of those ghost people streets the city cleaned because no one gave a fuck about Chinatown and yellow faces. By then, his mother was already dead, he had lost her when he was seven, but, as he often said, he could always hear her singing, saying sweet things to him whenever his Ba yelled.

For her, snow means silence. The city relaxes, breathes quietly until the thaw. Not like Hong Kong, which is noisy all year long, the buses and taxis droned through all the nights and days of her childhood; and in the mornings, the clanging trams groaned past her flat, rattling the windows.

But it’s still too early for snow and that silence she once longed for. The thing about dusk now is this tinnitus roar, which amplifies later in the day. Not always, but often enough, and here in an emptied-out New York where the city has gone silent and she is always alone, it’s deafening. Back home, the perpetual noise of the city masks it, she realizes, and the prospect of spending the winter alone in New York is troubling. This evening, panic sets in, and she is not reassured when she reads about older people dying alone in homes their families cannot visit. Stop, you’re not that old yet, and your last checkup was fine. Stop worrying. She streams TV on her laptop, and it’s not till halfway through the evening news that she wonders why Bing has gone silent.

There are no ordinary days anymore. It’s been almost five weeks since Daylight Savings, no, Eastern Daylight now, ended, and still no return to normalcy. Outdoor dining as the weather gets colder is absurd. Besides, there’s no one here left to call, no one to meet for lunch or dinner. She thinks about a couple of her former colleagues, but the two women with whom she was friendliest no longer live in Manhattan. One is in Seattle, and the other is home caring for her elderly mother in Western Massachusetts.

This morning, she is in the middle of answering an email when Wi-Fi vanishes. Just like that. She goes through the routine, unplug, wait, re-plug, reboot, but nothing. It’s only Spectrum Wi-Fi in this apartment, no cable TV, so she can’t even check if it’s a system-wide breakdown. She calls the customer service line but is cycled through a series of auto responses that loop her right back to where she started until she finally gives up, hoping service will simply reappear, miraculously, now that AI rules life 天下 “under heaven” with an invisible wizard as emperor. The first time she watched The Wizard of Oz with Bing, a movie he religiously watched once a year and badgered her to join him to watch what she called “this children’s story,” until she finally gave in, she was startled by how compelling it was, and how it made her think about China’s dynastic history, emperors as the “sons of heaven” who ruled under the skies of the world. All of which had supposedly ended once Mao freed the country through communism. For the longest time, she did not understand why a children’s story would have such resonance, especially one so foreign to her own upbringing.

Yet she recalls it now and suddenly wants to see it again, to bring Bing back. He has gone silent for days, more than a week, and she is confused, distraught, unsettled. Sometimes, she wonders if she’s going mad in this isolation. But she’s not alone! She speaks to someone almost daily, at least five or so times a week. Song calls frequently, even Lana does, and there are the weekly Zooms with her family, as well as the fortnightly one with her old schoolfriends in Hong Kong. And former colleagues and people reach out to see if she’ll do some consulting or give a talk via Zoom. She is remembered, she isn’t forgotten, even so far from home. Everyone assumes she’ll be back eventually, and all will be as it used to be.

She’s mired now in the before time, in that long-long-ago time, the way her Ba is all the time, his memory unreliably reliable. She even misses sitting with him, listening to him talk about people long dead, people from his and Ma’s youth whom she never knew. He will be ninety soon, and she wants to go home to plan the celebratory dinner with all the family, his former business associates, and the few surviving friends of his generation. Watching her father’s memory deteriorate is a perpetual, existential shock, even though she should be used to it by now. Yet here, now, what she experiences is the shock of sexual desire, long stuffed away since Bing’s death, along with years of entreaties by friends that she should consider dating again, perhaps even to remarry, which she always politely ignored. There were always excuses: Song was only sixteen when Bing died; she worked long hours because she was a senior manager; there were the mortgages on the apartment in New York and the one in Hong Kong to pay, plus the New York one had to be rented out which ate up time; her Ba needed more assistance after he turned seventy and his mind wandered down that path of no return. Besides, when she looked around her world, none of her professional girlfriends who were either divorced or single were dating. As the only widow in her Hong Kong circle, she felt old, even at forty-three. Plus, she had begun menopause early. Her gynecologist suggested that the shock of Bing’s death might have contributed, but she was never sure what to think and simply chose to believe that menopause signaled the end of her sexual life.

She recalls how she felt upon awakening, exhausted, after multiple orgasms had shot through her in the clutches of a dream.

But back here in New York, her body in isolation is undergoing an involuntary transformation. Last night, another dream, or rather, the next episode of her previous one sucked her into its pleasure tornado. She catches up with the lover, and when he turns around, it is Bing, masked. She begins to undress him, and he resists at first, but the dream cuts to the next scene, and they are both naked, having sex right there in the street in the multitude of ways Bing wanted, to which she willingly used to succumb, and when she awoke, she was reaching for his torso to pull him back inside her again. The sheets were soaked with secretions and sweat, and she was shocked by the musty assault. With Wi-Fi dead, there is nothing to distract her, and she recalls how she felt upon awakening, exhausted, after what must have been multiple orgasms that had shot through her while in the clutches of a dream.

Surely this can’t be normal. Perhaps she needs to consult Viola professionally or ask for a referral to another psychologist. In the last few years, she and Viola have become closer, occasionally meeting by themselves for lunches, walks, concerts, or museum and gallery visits. They had not been close in school; her friends back then have all become the bankers, financiers, tech entrepreneurs, and management executives. None will leave Hong Kong, even those with foreign passports, although these days, their children might, and all are married to Chinese spouses, except one, but that husband is an Italian who runs a successful business on the mainland, speaks better Mandarin than most locals, and has declared he will apply for a Chinese passport. She doesn’t know if he’ll really go through with it. His wife has no intention of giving up her Italian one, or so she declared at dinner the last time they got together, and their four children and their families are all in either the UK or Europe.

She brews a strong pot of coffee, no decaf, just the real thing. It was all she and Bing drank back when she was not yet forty, when her body was supple and strong enough to orgasm away all those emotions she couldn’t fathom. Like her campaign to get him to apply for a university job in Hong Kong, something he resisted until after she went home. “It was so easy at the millennium, foreign talent was welcome, especially overseas Chinese. What was wrong with you, why couldn’t you leave New York, even temporarily? We would have been okay there, Ba liked you, and then we could have moved back here together, but . . .” She stops, realizing she’s spoken aloud. What is wrong with her? Why is everything so difficult? The pandemic will end. Besides, it hasn’t really hurt her or her family all that much; they are the lucky ones, cocooned. Clothed, fed, sheltered, vaccinated, and properly masked, and who needs transport when there’s nowhere to go? Late spring and early summer were the worst of this year, but things are better now that it’s fall, and New York is ahead of the curve with fewer cases every day. She might even be able to go back for Christmas, or at the very latest by the Chinese New Year, when this damnable rat year will finally be over and the ox will enter the skies. By their calendar, Ba will be ninety. “Ba liked you,” she repeats, but Bing is silent and does not say, the way he did on the eve of her departure back in ’98, that her Ba is a water monkey who will extinguish his own fire monkey flames.

Her laptop belches, and the Wi-Fi pops and whirrs again. Some upgrade needs to be downloaded, Microsoft, of course. It infuriates her how often their software must be upgraded. Song showed her how to turn off the auto update when she complained about the inconvenience, grumbling that programmers were so clueless about what customers needed until her grandson shut her up, “But, Grandma, programmers make the world.”

Both my husband and father are monkeys, she told Viola over lunch, two days before she flew out of Hong Kong in late February after the new year festivities had ended. It was to be an easy turnaround trip, three weeks, four, max. She had been thinking to sell the apartment and planned to meet with realtors and pack personal effects to send home. Lana had even found her a moving company that handled small international shipments. Song was not attached to this apartment or New York, despite his time there, and Lana’s family were all in Oregon or Russia or China.

Viola, who was serious about horoscopes and visited fortune tellers regularly, said, “How interesting, but what are you?” She smiled. Earth dog, the grounded one. And they both contemplated the exquisite symmetry of her life.

The quarantine rules in Hong Kong are ridiculous! she exclaims when Song tells her about the latest iteration. It’s early December, and by now Lana is making noises about moving the family to Oregon because the ­government’s latest machinations are becoming too much, even for her, this modern Chinese historian and daughter of American communists who became more Chinese than most Chinese and who framed plausible arguments for Marxism and Maoism beyond the Cultural Revolution. Her daughter-in-law’s wish to leave Hong Kong is the cause of much ­friction between the couple, she knows, even though they both put on smiling faces for her on Zoom. Song is, like her, apolitical. All he wants is to bring up his children where he feels most at home and where he can make a good life. After Song outlines all her travel and quarantine alternatives, he surprises her by asking, “How did you decide, Ma, to leave New York?” He’s never asked, never wanted to talk about it. She assumed it was because he had been so grateful to get out of that school and had fit easily and well into his new school in Hong Kong, an international one, where nerds were admired and did not need to contemplate revenge.

Before she can respond, he adds, “But you’ll stay, won’t you, Ma? For Grandpa?”

Afterward, she wonders if she’s made the right decision to hold on to the New York apartment, even though the COVID situation will likely progress to the point where she’ll no longer need it as a place to stay. Song didn’t react when she told him this. Many of her friends back home say the politics are ignorable, not unlike the way it was under the British. “What democracy did we have then?” demands Melinda, the wealthy entrepreneur who made her fortune in Chinese utilities; her husband is a Beijing man. Melinda is the only one of their cohort who, as Viola says, married correctly into our future. Viola is much more ambivalent and privately tells her she holds a British National (Overseas) passport, which she elected to get years ago even though everyone said it was a pointless colonial compromise. It was such a neutral decision before, like a multiple-choice exam where you might as well try to guess the right answer if you really don’t know. The Hong Kong government has declared that the BN(O) will eventually not be recognized, and she will be forced to exchange it for the Special Administrative Region (SAR) one, assuming, of course, that Beijing continues to allow this exception for Hong Kong. Right now, if she wants, Viola can register with her BN(O) to migrate to Britain under the UK’s special arrangement that so infuriates Beijing. She did attend a UK university and has some friends and professional contacts there, but her real life has been all about Hong Kong, and Viola can’t imagine growing old and dying abroad.

Tonight, she has episode four of the dream, number three was so pornographic she refuses to replay it, and just like two and three, she wakes up knowing that the orgasms have made her sleep more soundly than she’s slept in years. The way sleep used to be with Bing.

All through October and November, she tried to record her nocturnal episodes. She began thinking of them as journeys through the city because each dream started with her following the lover. The street corners changed, sometimes their own neighborhood, sometimes Midtown or Wall Street, sometimes around the UN or even Brooklyn Heights, and often the Meatpacking District (when there still were markets), the Village, and the Upper West Side. All the spaces she and Bing haunted. She has a log of all the episodes she can recall, hoping to make sense of this nonsense. What information she finds online about involuntary or sleep orgasms is sketchy. Regardless, what she is certain of is that Bing is no longer here. It’s baffling. She is still too embarrassed to say anything to Viola, holding back because, for as long as she’s known Viola, she’s never heard mention of a lover, either male or female. In fact, one of her former classmates, the one married to the Italian and who speaks openly about sex, once wondered aloud if Viola was simply asexual. It dawns on her now, the way so much, too much dawns on her during this enforced solitude and silence, that she’s rarely had a conversation about her sex life with any of her Hong Kong women friends, that the only such conversations were with Americans, the women friends she made when she lived and worked here, or the odd European or British expat in her Hong Kong hiking group, and how liberating that used to make her feel. When these women envied her excellent sex life with Bing, she smiled, gratified at her privilege. Viola once mentioned that most of her clients, when she still had a private practice, were foreigners or hyphenated Chinese, the alphabet BCs from around the world, alienated in Hong Kong and China, where everyone looked, and even sounded, like them but shuttered them out of their worlds.

This afternoon, the super stops by to adjust her heating system. A new boiler for the building was installed this summer, which is supposed to be quieter and more energy efficient. From the time she moved into Bing’s apartment, Alberto has been the super. He’s from Colombia and is “getting too old for this work,” he says, as they exchange friendly words. His son will take over his job soon. She’s forgotten about his son, the boy who was about Song’s age and who used to play together with him until she realized Song was swearing in Spanish and put a stop to that. They’re just boys, Bing said at the time, upset that she had cut off their friendship, but she disagreed, saying Song needed a better class of friends. But now, as she chats with Alberto, this man she’s relied on for years, she recognizes how horribly elitist that was, which was what Bing had accused her of, and she is ashamed of the way she used to be.

In fact, as she prepares dinner that evening and tries to construct a conversation with Viola about perhaps entering therapy (although the idea still frightens her), she says to Bing, You were right, Hong Kong misshaped me. An echo from a hideous argument. It was the year after she had left New York and Bing had come to visit, having reluctantly agreed to meet with the interview committee at one of the local government universities. They were hiring for a full professor position, with tenure, and paid more than he’d ever made at the university in New York where he’d taught for decades. When the job was offered to him, he turned it down, much to her annoyance, because she had arranged the whole thing through a highly influential friend. You embarrassed me, she told him, made me lose face. Face, he retorted, means shit without morality. How he harangued her about the inequities of what he called a “lopsided postcolonial legacy” and the elitism it bred, to which she argued back, And is academia in New York so great, where highly qualified, dedicated professionals are either adjuncts or on contracts like yours for shit pay? His position had to be renewed every two years. Was that system any better than theirs in Hong Kong?

“I’m sorry,” she says aloud to the skies. “I was wrong, and you were right, so right. Look at the mess we’re in now.”

It’s too late to make amends, which she tried to do after the Umbrella Revolution, a democracy movement that rattled and unnerved her, by leaving her business career for an academic one, hoping to be of some use to the next disillusioned generation. Bing would have approved, Bing who had preached ending capitalism in favor of socialism for the twenty-first century. Silly goose, silly goose. She had been happy before, why hadn’t she simply rolled with that? Even Ba said, many times, “My daughter, he’s a good man, your mother would have been proud of you,” although she knew how it pleased Ba to have her home in Hong Kong, a good, filial daughter. Has she harmed her son with her brand of parenting? But Song seems so balanced and sensible and, well, okay. Besides, Bing would have loved Lana; they’re rather alike, and that’s worth something, knowing this with such certainty. Things have simply turned out the way they have, and there’s nothing she can do about it now, not about her son and his family who must make their own decisions, or the way Hong Kong is becoming, will become. There is no right answer to the choices presented by fate. Besides, there’s Ba, and she will remain by his side in Hong Kong until he dies, which will not happen for another dozen years, when he makes it to over a hundred.

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