PART II

 

My mother told me that grandma was still beautiful even in her middle age. She suffered from her unhappy marriage because she never knew how to please her husband with sweet words, and her heart broke the day he took a concubine. Though she was saved at last, the beautiful patterns disappeared from her life forever, leaving the black wool-like fabric of waiting— wait for her children to grow up, wait for them to reconstruct her concept of family in another age. Grandfather and grandma were affectionate couple when they were young, but as grandfather became successful in his business, the image of grandma seemed to be hatefully rough. Every time I thought of it, I could not help feeling sad. I tried to dress her up in a long gown made of the most beautiful floral cloth in the Floral Cloth Street, while I could only see her in large black silk trousers, with the tight knot of an apron on her back.

 

My dad was my grandma’s youngest and favorite kid. Since my elder Bofu went sailing, my younger Bofu was terribly busy with affairs in the shop, so he accommodated my father and asked him to help with the business. Working at the shop, my father became thinner day by day. He should have been very happy and satisfied because he had a job as soon as he arrived in Hong Kong. However, he was not happy at all. His hair sticked up unnaturally towards the back, shining with hair cream, which made the sallow color of his skin conspicuous. There was always a wisp of stray hair escaping his hairspray, lying on his forehead, like the pieces of a broken dream. Grandfather believed that being energetic at all times is an indispensable characteristic of businessmen, but father’s eyes were filled with tiredness in the color of wool fabric. His cheeks sank. His entire being was broken like pieces of cloth waiting to be swept from the floor. His manner and facial expressions made him similar to my younger uncle, who was always frowning. Their weary look became the symbol of our shop. My father used to be an artist in mainland China. He hated patterns with stereotype. Dying cloth made him bored, and the unchanged lines of wool fabric made him depressed. Every time he unfolded a roll of grey cloth to measure it, he acted quickly but carelessly, which was totally different from the way he unfolded drawing paper or canvas. I have seen his face when he was painting—his expression was soft and lively, always changing with the contents of his painting. He smiled, then he became angry, and then he slipped into thinking and got lost in his thoughts, which made him look so innocent. However, now he sat dully behind the counter, nothing like a man in his early 30s, but like an aging night watch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Tong Lau* was a three-storey building, narrow and long. Go up along the round wooden ladder from the shopfront, and you would find a door halfway, behind which was a small interlayer. When I got sick, I would sleep there until I recovered. There were a drawing room and a bedroom on the third floor, and a loft specially built for my grandfather’s second wife was located above the bedroom. On the rooftop of the loft was our kitchen. Every day I lingered up and down the house. Two of my cousins (Tang Gege), the younger son of my elder Bofu and the elder son of my younger Bofu, would do the same during the summer holidays. We were not allowed in the cloth shop during daytime, however, it was a totally different story when it got dark. After closing the shop and locking all the cloth, many timber frames became empty, each of which was big enough to hide one or two kids. We three were likely to hide within them and curl up against the wooden surfaces, enjoying a sense of square security after a day-long banishment. We talked and played pretend. One would be a shop assistant, and the other a customer. We kept playing the game until we were called to bed.

 

My younger cousin and I were both eight then. He had a reddish-black face with eyes as big as grapes. He laughed a lot, and looked like the Q-version of my younger uncle. He was good at playing Chinese chess, and willing to “teach” me when my elder cousin was not playing with him. He taught me every step, and then gradually captured my pao (cannon), ma (horse) and ju (rook). At last he said “checkmate”, took my jiang and shuai (king) away, and announced his victory. I was very happy because I could finally do other things. Sometimes he also put some salty peanuts into a bottle of hot water poured from a vacuum flask, saying it made the peanuts easier to chew. He asked me to kneel on a chair to guard the peanuts without eating any of them. But I could never resist the temptation and ate them all. Before he came back, I would put other peanuts into the bottle again. He would still praise their softness and deliciousness. We took to the situation like a duck to water, and we were as close as twins.

 

My elder cousin was about thirteen years old. He even had more ideas than us. One time, I went down with an attack of tracheitis. He said that if I wanted to stop coughing, I needed to catch a gecko, envelope it with lettuce leaves and swallowed it. Once the gecko got frightened, it would clasp randomly in my throat, making the sputum loose, so I could recover quicker. My younger cousin and I were both too amazed to utter a word.

 

At that time, I was most afraid of taking a bath. There were too many people in our Tong Lau, and everyone had to take turn to use the bathroom which was rather embarrassing. Anyway, I finally bathed. But I had to remind myself of my “littleness” to make myself feel at ease. When I took the bath, dusk had already fallen and the sky turned grey. All the mansions surrounding me were bright with neon. In my memory, the brightest and reddest neon in Central was “guang’an（廣安)” standing for “extensiveness and peace”. But Hong Kong, the extensive megalopolis, could not make me feel peaceful at all. I took off my clothes piece by piece with the underwear as the last one, then I hurriedly sat down in the bathtub, holding my body between my arms. When I saw my small towel enveloping bubbles in the water with the red and green neon reflection, I could not exactly spell out what I felt. I just wanted to cry.

 

Unlike me, my cousins played happily during their bath and often splattered water all over the floor. I still remembered one day my elder cousin caught a cat. Nobody knew where he got it. He said it was necessary to bathe the cat too, and the two of them did it regardless of my loud objection. Finally, the cat was either drowned or froze to death. Our parents gave my elder cousin a good beating because he made the water dirty.