DEEP WATER BAY, HONG KONG

          

           A certain length of time spent working in the place where one grew up makes one feel like an amnesiac patient... ever so slowly a small ray of light would come through the thick layers of life experiences and the acquired meanings over the years.  

           Those small and sudden rays of recognition, of memory.

            Now I would like to ask our kind and patient driver/swimming-coach to take me back up the hill across from the Bay and have a well-deserved nap before embarking on a night writing session by the light of the silvery moon reflecting on the piece of glass that Chinese households put on their desks. 

            
             (At 15, before we left in the émigration rush of 1968 Hong Kong, we spent a year pretty much alone in the large luxury home overlooking the Bay, 19 Repulse Bay Road.  Mother had decided to stay in Montreal to apply for us to leave; now that i think of it, what would have been the reason stated?  Family reunification?  Fearing for our safety?  Father was busy going off to our company's office every morning at 8 am.  Little Sister and myself would be left on our own with the two servants: the cook and the maid, both from mainland China, illiterate but kind.  The only salvation: our chauffeur who was a swimming coach but apparently driving some rich family's family car yielded better and more steady income than swimming around in a pool.  He rescued me and Little Sister, poor little rich girls of Repulse Bay Road, to afternoons at the sea, taught us to swim, had pity on us but didn't say so, looked after us.  From time to time he'd come up to the flat, chitchat with the servants, while I wrote out the cook's letter for her that she was sending back to her village with some of the muscle-relief sticky patches that she bought from the pharmacy.  The driver would take her letter to post.  At night, the moon travelled across the sky in front of our balcony, I'd stay up through all hours of the night just to watch the spectacle.  And to write.  I had a small heavy-metal office desk, with a piece of glass on trop, under which I slipped in my clippings of Nureyev and other idols, while on top of my bedpost, George Chakiris smiled down at me from his West Side Story pose.)

             The last time I sat here overlooking the same Bay, two floors down from where the wooden plank of the Thai-canteen-restaurant-terrace where I am now, was with my godfather forty-five years ago.  Away from the gaze of my parents, he ordered a "lotus seed tea with egg" (are those still around?) and I, after some hesitation, ordered a coffee, waiting for him to say "no no you're too young to drink coffee".  Surprised that no such disapproval was coming , the Deep Water Bay fast food joint was the first Crossing-The-Line of this youngster allowed to taste the until-then-forbidden fruit : at that very instant, Coffee takes on all its significance in making me feel "grown up".

(February 16, 2013, Hong Kong)