The Train to Lo Wu

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  The Secrets of Bats

  The American Girl

  For You

  The Train to Lo Wu

  The Ferry

  Revolutions

  Heaven Lake

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For Sonya

  You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

  Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer . . .

  —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

  Praise for Jess Row’s THE TRAIN TO LO WU

  “From New York to Hong Kong, Jess Row’s stories take us to worlds that are both familiar and strange. It is rare to find the spirit and mind combined so deftly as in these stories. This is a magnificent collection.”

  —Charles Baxter

  “In The Train to Lo Wu Jess Row has located the very heart of modern spirituality in this most commercial of cities. This is a debut that feels like a crowning achievement.”

  —Edmund White

  “[A]n intelligent and gifted young writer . . . [these stories] have an unusual subtlety and depth of insight.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  “Jess Row writes with elegance and freshness in prose that sounds a depth of feeling. These stories are poems in themselves, haunting in their clarity and sympathies. They achieve a kind of stillness that seems appropriate for their Chinese setting. I can hardly imagine a more forceful or memorable debut.”

  —Jay Parini

  “Over and over, these beautifully crafted stories drew me in with their quietly persuasive voices, their meditative detail, and their subtly heartrending plots. An auspicious debut from a talent set to endure.”

  —Peter Ho Davies

  “In crystalline prose, Row animates intriguing characters and dramatizes subtle yet emblematic conflicts as he traces the vast cultural divides between America and Hong Kong. . . . He neatly and devastatingly contrasts dueling visions of faith, art, love, and freedom.”

  —Booklist

  “Row’s poetic sensibility lends both depth and economy to each of the stories. . . . Elegant and original, mysterious and down-to-earth, these seven tales make for an auspicious, entertaining debut.”

  —Elle

  “In sharp, lucid prose, Row molds a landscape of human error and uncertainty, territory well-aligned with eerie topography of his space-age city.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An impressive debut from an admirably protean storyteller . . . Row’s characters are a mixed bunch, but all are effortlessly convincing, and he handles gritty suspense quite as well as he does the problems of lovers. This Whiting Award–winning author has a very bright future.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Row’s stories are subtle . . . and fascinating.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The stories operate as intuitive, emotional, and, in some cases, romantic responses to one of the most unusual places on earth. . . . The Train to Lo Wu does something great: it opens our eyes to things, inside and out.”

  —Believer

  “In these seven quiet, deftly drawn stories, characters crisscross various demarcations of politics, history, race, and religion, but, agonizingly, they never seem able to locate one another, let alone themselves.”

  —Ploughshares

  “The Train to Lo Wu . . . puts Row into a league above the many Western authors trying to capture the spirit of a culture that is not their own.”

  —South China Morning Post

  “The Train to Lo Wu gives, with admirable breadth and depth, a believable and fluidly portrayed assortment of people, Western and Chinese, who are finding their ways in [Hong Kong]. . . . Row is a clever and subtle writer; like real people, his characters surprise, annoy, and demand empathy from the reader.”

  —Shanghai City Weekend

  “Many writers have managed to describe Hong Kong, but few have as deft a touch with the Hong Kong people, real people. . . . Read these stories, re-read them, and then remember. You will be richer for it.”

  —Asian Review of Books

  “These seven stories about Hong Kong people by a young American writer are not only subtle, skillful, and above all exceptionally thoughtful: they could well be the finest fiction ever to have appeared in English about the city. It’s no exaggeration to say that The Train to Lo Wu is comparable in many ways with James Joyce’s Dubliners.”

  —Taipei Times

  “The stories in The Train to Lo Wu . . . are sensitive in exactly the right way. In a brave new transnational world they explore the intersection of loneliness and responsibility, where human contact may have to be fleeting in order to be genuine. Futuristic yet leading to a sense of lasting knowledge, these stories make a wonderful collection.”

  —Kate Wheeler, author of Not Where I Started From and When Mountains Walked

  “These are not outsider’s tales, taking their pleasure by making fun of a strange and foreign culture. This is a book about insiders of all kinds, smothered in their own heads, searching for a way out. It’s an impressive debut collection, one that establishes Row as a promising young voice, with a voice spare and penetrating and, it must be said, entertaining.”

  —New Haven Advocate

  The Secrets of Bats

  Alice Leung has discovered the secrets of bats: how they see without seeing, how they own darkness, as we own light. She walks the halls with a black headband across her eyes, keening a high C—cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat cheat— never once veering off course, as if drawn by an invisible thread. Echolocation, she tells me; it’s not as difficult as you might think. Now she sees a light around objects when she looks at them, like halos on her retinas from staring at the sun. In her journal she writes, I had a dream that was all in blackness. Tell me how to describe.

  It is January: my fifth month in Hong Kong.

  In the margin I write, I wish I knew.

  After six, when the custodians leave, the school becomes a perfect acoustic chamber; she wanders from the basement laboratories to the basketball courts like a trapped bird looking for a window. She finds my door completely blind, she says, not counting flights or paces. Twisting her head from side to side like Stevie Wonder, she announces her progress: another room mapped, a door, a desk, a globe, detected and identified by its aura.

  You’ll hurt yourself, I tell her. I’ve had nightmares: her foot missing the edge of a step, the dry crack of a leg breaking. Try it without the blindfold, I say. That way you can check yourself.

  Her mouth wrinkles. This not important, she says. This only practice.

  Practice for what, I want to ask. All the more reason you have to be careful.

  You keep saying, she says, grabbing a piece of chalk. E-x-p-e-r-i-m-e-n-t, she writes on the blackboard, digging it in until it squeals.

  That’s right. Sometimes experiments fail.

  Sometimes, she repeats. She eyes me suspiciously, as if I invented the word.

  Go home, I tell her. She turns her pager off and leaves it in her locker; sometimes police appear at the school gate, shouting her name. Somebody, it seems, wants her back.

  In the doorway she whirls, flipping her hair out of her eyes. Ten days more, she says. You listen. Maybe then you see why.

  The name of the school is Po Sing Uk: a five-story concrete block, cracked and eroded by dirty rain, shoulder-to-shoulder with the tenements and garment factories of Cheung Sha Wan. No air-conditioning and no heat; in September I shouted to be heard over a giant fan, and now, in January, I teach in a w
inter jacket. When it rains, mildew spiderwebs across the ceiling of my classroom. Schoolgirls in white jumpers crowd into the room forty at a time, falling asleep over their textbooks, making furtive calls on mobile phones, scribbling notes to each other on pink Hello Kitty paper. If I call on one who hasn’t raised her hand, she folds her arms across her chest and stares at the floor, and the room falls silent, as if by a secret signal. There is nothing more terrifying, I’ve found, than the echo of your own voice: who are you? It answers: what are you doing here?

  I’ve come to see my life as a radiating circle of improbabilities that grow from each other, like ripples in water around a dropped stone. That I became a high school English teacher, that I work in another country, that I live in Hong Kong. That a city can be a mirage, hovering above the ground: skyscrapers built on mountainsides, islands swallowed in fog for days. That a language can have no tenses or articles, with seven different ways of saying the same syllable. That my best student stares at the blackboard only when I erase it.

  She stayed behind on the first day of class: a tall girl with a narrow face, pinched around the mouth, her cheeks pitted with acne scars. Like most of my sixteen-year-olds she looked twelve, in a baggy uniform that hung to her knees like a sack. The others streamed past her without looking up, as if she were a boulder in the current; she stared down at my desk with a fierce vacancy, as if looking itself was an act of will.

  How do you think about bats?

  Bats?

  She joined her hands at the wrist and fluttered them at me.

  People are afraid of them, I said. I think they’re very interesting.

  Why? she said. Why very interesting?

  Because they live in the dark, I said. We think of them as being blind, but they aren’t blind. They have a way of seeing, with sound waves—just like we see with light.

  Yes, she said. I know this. Her body swayed slightly, in an imaginary breeze.

  Are you interested in bats?

  I am interest, she said. I want to know how— She made a face I’d already come to recognize: I know how to say it in Chinese— when one bat sees the other. The feeling.

  You mean how one bat recognizes another?

  Yes—recognize.

  That’s a good idea, I said. You can keep a journal about what you find. Write something in it every day.

  She nodded vehemently, as if she’d already thought of that.

  There are books on bat behavior that will tell you—

  Not in books. She covered her eyes with one hand and walked forward until her hip brushed the side of my desk, then turned away, at a right angle. Like this, she said. There is a sound. I want to find the sound.

  18 September

  First hit tuning fork. Sing one octave higher: A B C. This is best way.

  Drink water or lips get dry.

  I must have eyes totally closed. No light!!! So some kind of black—like cloth—is good.

  Start singing. First to the closest wall—sing and listen. Practice ten times, 20 times. IMPORTANT: can not move until I HEAR the wall. Take step back, one time, two time. Listen again. I have to hear DIFFERENCE first, then move.

  Then take turn, ninety degrees left.

  Then turn, one hundred eighty degrees left. Feel position with feet. Feet very important—they are wings!!!

  I don’t know what this is, I told her the next day, opening the journal and pushing it across the desk. Can you help me?

  I tell you already, she said. She hunched her shoulders so that her head seemed to rest on them, spreading her elbows to either side. It is like a test.

  A test?

  In the courtyard rain crackled against the asphalt; a warm wind lifted scraps of paper from the desk, somersaulting them through the air.

  The sound, she said impatiently. I told you this.

  I covered my mouth to hide a smile.

  Alice, I said, humans can’t do that. It isn’t a learned behavior. It’s something you study.

  She pushed up the cover of the composition book and let it fall.

  I think I can help you, I said. Can you tell me why you want to write this?

  Why I want? She stared at me wide-eyed.

  Why do you want to do this? What is the test for?

  Her eyes lifted from my face to the blackboard behind me, moved to the right, then the left, as if measuring the dimensions of the room.

  Why you want come to Hong Kong?

  Many reasons, I said. After college I wanted to go to another country, and there was a special fellowship available here. And maybe someday I will be a teacher.

  You are teacher.

  I’m just learning, I said. I am trying to be one.

  Then why you have to leave America?

  I didn’t, I said. The two things— I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. All at once I was exhausted; the effort seemed useless, a pointless evasion. When I looked up she was nodding slowly, as if I’d just said something profound.

  I think I will find the reason for being here only after some time, I said. Do you know what I mean? There could be a purpose I don’t know about.

  So you don’t know for good. Not sure.

  You could say that.

  Hai yat yeung, she said. This same. Maybe if you read you can tell me why.

  This is what’s so strange about her, I thought, studying her red-rimmed eyes, the tiny veins standing out like wires on a circuitboard. She doesn’t look down. I am fascinated by her, I thought. Is that fair?

  You’re different from the others, I said. You’re not afraid of me. Why is that?

  Maybe I have other things be afraid of.

  At first the fifth-floor bathroom was her echo chamber; she sat in one corner, on a stool taken from the physics room, and placed an object directly opposite her: a basketball, a glass, a feather. Sound waves triangulate, she told me, corners are best. Passing by, at the end of the day, I stopped, closing my eyes, and listened for the difference. She sang without stopping for five minutes, hardly taking a breath: almost a mechanical sound, as if someone had forgotten their mobile phone. Other teachers walked by in groups, talking loudly. If they noticed me, or the sound, I was never aware of it, but always, instinctively, I looked at my watch and followed them down the stairs. As if I too had to rush home to cook for hungry children, or boil medicine for my mother-in-law. I never stayed long enough to see if anything changed.

  Document everything, I told her, and she did; now I have two binders of entries, forty-one in all. Hallway. Chair. Notebook. As if we were scientists writing a grant proposal, as if there were something actual to show at the end of it.

  I don’t keep a journal, or take photographs, and my letters home are factual and sparse. No one in Larchmont would believe me—not even my parents—if I told them the truth. It sounds like quite an experience you’re having! Don’t get run over by a rickshaw. And yet if I died tomorrow—why should I ever think this way?—these binders would be the record of my days. These and Alice herself, who looks out her window and with her eyes closed sees ships passing in the harbor, men walking silently in the streets.

  26 January

  Sound of lightbulb—low like bees hum. So hard to listen!

  A week ago I dreamed of bodies breaking apart, arms and legs and torsos, fragments of bone, bits of tissue. I woke up flailing in the sheets, and remembered her immediately; there was too long a moment before I believed I was awake. It has to stop, I thought. You have to say something. Though I know I can’t.

  Perhaps there was a time when I might have told her, this is ridiculous, or, You’re sixteen, find some friends. What will people think? But this is Hong Kong, of course, and I have no friends, no basis to judge. I leave the door open, always, and no one ever comes to check; we walk out through the gates together, late in the afternoon, past the watchman sleeping in his chair. For me she has a kind of professional courtesy, ignoring my whiteness politely, as if I had horns growing from my head. And she returns, at the end of each day, as a bat fl
ies back to its cave at daybreak. All I have is time; who am I to pack my briefcase and turn away?

  There was only once when I slipped up.

  Pretend I’ve forgotten, I told her, one Monday in early October. The journal was open in front of us, the pages covered in red; she squinted down at it, as if instead of corrections I’d written hieroglyphics. I’m an English teacher, I thought, this is what I’m here for. We should start again at the beginning, I said. Tell me what it is that you want to do here. You don’t have to tell me about the project—just about the writing. Who are you writing these for? Who do you want to read them?

  She stretched, catlike, curling her fingers like claws.

  Because I don’t think I understand, I said. I think you might want to find another teacher to help you. There could be something you have in mind in Chinese that doesn’t come across.

  Not in Chinese, she said, as if I should have known that already. In Chinese cannot say like this.

  But it isn’t really English either.

  I know this. It is like both.

  I can’t teach that way, I said. You have to learn the rules before you can—

  You are not teaching me.

  Then what’s the point?

  She strode across the room to the window and leaned out, placing her hands on the sill and bending at the waist. Come here, she said; look. I stood up and walked over to her. She ducked her head down, like a gymnast on a bar, and tilted forward, her feet lifting off the floor.

  Alice!

  I grabbed her shoulder and jerked her upright. She stumbled, falling back; I caught her wrist and she pulled it away, steadying herself. We stood there a moment staring at each other, breathing in short huffs that echoed in the hallway.

  Maybe I hear something and forget, she said. You catch me then. OK?

  28 January

  It is like photo negative, all the colors are the opposite. Black sky, white trees, this way. But they are still shapes—I can see them.

  I read standing at the window, in a last sliver of sunlight. Alice stands on my desk, already well in shadow, turning around slowly as if trying to dizzy herself for a party game. Her winter uniform cardigan is three sizes too large; unbuttoned, it falls behind her like a cape.