Chapter One

My husband told me a story about buildings before we came here. In the central district the old Hong Kong Shanghai Bank looms proudly above the other buildings, full of British bankers and rich Americans. When the People’s Bank of China built their rival headquarters several blocks away they designed the top of the tower to look like a knife’s edge thrusting towards the British bank. It was no accident, Joseph laughed. In Hong Kong nothing was left to simmer under the surface.

It must have been during those first December days that he told me the story, before he got caught up in the suspended time of the interior. Perhaps on one of the days we walked together up a mountain path and saw the vista of islands rising up from the China Sea, curving smoothly out of the green glassiness like the contours of a body, the mist of early morning a canopy against the blue of the sky. We looked at one another, each about to say something, our double gasp of awe fading in the air.

It was these luminous moments, rescued from days of waiting and silence, that I was trying to hold on to.

I had never seen real flamingoes until I came to the Kowloon Gardens in Hong Kong. On the lake there is an island pink with them. You can sit on the benches and watch them standing still and straight in the reeds. There are green tortoises too, which tip the surface of the water, and great orange coi. Businessmen in suits mill around the edge of the lake, smoking sweet clove cigarettes and squinting into the sun. Beyond the lake there is an aviary where murmured conversations are held under the squalling of white cockatoos and galahs.

 Walk out of the gardens past the White Mosque and the Mirimar Shopping Arcade and you come to Kowloon Square where fountains send drifts of spray onto grimy tables. There are noodlehouses and fruit shops selling bruised mangosteens, and jackfruit that smell rancid when you break them open. Grey apartment towers lean over the square and sometimes you can see laundry flapping from bamboo poles on the balconies.

 On the south side of the square, next to the Go-Go Club, is the Sun Hing Lung Medicine Company. Here you can buy cream made from crushed black pearls to smooth away wrinkles, and Japan Wonderful Oil to improve the constitution. In summer they sell Pa Po Tang Seal pills and Red Flower Oil to stop heat rash and in winter there are Golden Gun capsules to warm up the blood. In a room behind a blue curtain old Mr Lung mixes cures and potions and sells sex tonics and prophylactics to girls and businessmen.

We live at the university. The flat comes with Joseph’s position. There are a dozen of us in the residents’ apartments, all living in spaces carved out of what must once have been a grand old house. Inches behind the head of our bed is someone else’s shower and at night I can hear the water dripping slowly, drop by drop. The halls smell of ginseng and dried fish. I hear cooking noises and washing noises so I know there must be other people living here, but I never see them. I saw a hand once, reaching out of a window to catch a dust fairy.

After Joseph leaves in the mornings I wander through the apartment, staring out the windows. The glass is old and disillusioned, it warps the surfaces of things. It’s not a home, this place. Some of our things are still in the boxes they were shipped in. The Mexican plates are carefully wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of a crate. There is a formica table littered with Joseph’s books and papers, all of them written in the strange box-like characters of his second language. I stare at them, the shapes and lines that I know are letters, but the eye skips uneasily. They defend their secrets, geometrically.

 I lean against the counter as I wait for the kettle to boil, for the hot cloud of steam from a glazed cup. Joseph brings me packets of tea leaves from oasis towns in the desert. The same brews, he says, the desert people have been drinking for thousands of years. The tribes of the Taklamakan Desert and the salt flats of Lop Nor, a vast shimmering mirage of the lake that was once there. He tells me about their abandoned villages. The slender trunks of desiccated fruit trees and the corner posts of dwellings. There are lintels and doorways and beams falling across each other, with the mark of the carpenter’s adze still clearly on them. Shards of pottery, scraps of leather.

I walk down the stairs and into the sunlight. At noon the courtyard is deserted, the students gone to the cafeteria or the street food stalls. There’s a stone bench by a small pond. I like to sit against the coolness of stone with the smell of damp, dark air rising up from the pond, my bare feet tucked up under my skirt. Everything is still. Joseph has told me about the famous water gardens of China, the canals and fountains carved out of men’s imaginations, this desire for stillness at the hearts of cities.

There are things I could do here in Hong Kong. I could teach English at one of the private language schools. I could befriend some of the other expatriate wives and we could meet for lunch at the Hong Kong Club and shop for Chinese silk at the markets in Repulse Bay. I could learn to play mahjong.

 The women in the square play mahjong. They call it swimming without water. The sweeping movements of the arms across the table look like the movement of flesh through water.

Joseph is always tired when he comes home in the evenings. I see him in the doorway, a tall man in a pale coat running his hands through his hair. In my dreams I find a way to make his arms remember their desire, but when I wake he is the same silhouette of a man, sighing as he turns in his sleep.

He sits there in silence, balancing a glass of gin on the arm of the chair. He is a man who has never become accustomed to the slow, quiet ways of domestic life, never wanted the smell of soap and pine needles and stew bubbling on the stove in winter and the bother of possessions. China, and the lost cultures of its deserts, was always among us. He is a man who slips away on expeditions into the desert and returns suntanned and exhausted, unused to the ways of cities.

I sit at the table with my new pen and a clean page before me. My head aches, the light shines through the glass.