Student Translation Project
HKBU 2021
Ka Lili Moving to A New Home (by Chan Hay Ching)
Ka Lili was dragging her luggage down two flights of stairs. With a “cola, cola” sound, the luggage was moving on the gravel road. Ka Lili swallowed. Kapok and Cuckoo were in full swing, though Ka Lili didn’t care about them. Kapok seemed to be so ignorant of her emotions that a flower fell on her head. She left the luggage aside and was about to kick it. However, the house was still in her sight. She gave up that idea and kept on walking ahead. “Where is the wind?” Ka Lili cursed the bad humid April weather.
Living with Benjamin was a hasty decision. They were classmates in the MA course. Everyone thought that they would be a perfect match. So, they started dating. After a one-year class, she was about to adapt to her new life. A whole bunch of work was waiting in front of her. Looking for a job, hunting for a house and applying for a visa made her really stressed out. Those were extraordinarily troublesome stuff, especially for a young woman starting her new life here. Benjamin generously asked her to live together. Ka Lili agreed. Then she began to live with him and his mother (Ka Lili called her “Old Biddy”) in Fan Ling.
Classmates all said that Ka Lili was a lucky dog who was dating a handsome and wealthy man. However, she did not think so. Some more lucky guys purchased apartments and invested in real estate, then the housing price in Hong Kong got higher. For them, that was just a piece of cake. Ka Lili, however, was like a lamb to the slaughter. But then, even though Benjamin was glad to marry her, she was not willing to marry him. “Old Biddy”, Benjamin’s mother, was a tough woman who made people daunting. Benjamin was a Taiwanese, and his parents divorced when he was eight. “Old Biddy” started her own business in the Mainland and got married again. She went back to Hong Kong after the divorce from her second husband and bought some properties downtown. She went to the Mainland occasionally, in her own words, “for business”. This woman was really something and had made such an achievement in the Mainland on her own. Ka Lili was not a submissive woman. She never cared about rents, utility bills and housework, and those were naggingly repeated by “Old Biddy”. After dinner, she immediately rushed into her room chatting with friends on WeChat, made “Old Biddy” hot under the collar.
Benjamin and Ka Lili were teachers, teaching in different institutes. One taught English, and one taught Mandarin. Although both of them were language teachers, students’ attitudes towards them were completely different: students looked squishy speaking English, stutter and always apologized with a flushed face; whereas students spoke Mandarin without paying too much consciousness, you could definitely find a few of them being proud of their nonnative accent. Friendly students, indeed. They would always be happy to have some little chit-chat with Ka Lili after class yet kept a distance from their English teacher. Ka Lili found a feeling of disdain, unconsciously and inconspicuously, in such a friendly relationship. Not pointed at Ka Lili herself, but towards her Mainland background.
The “Old Biddy” was making a phone call with her friends using Taiwanese Hokkien, which Ka Lili didn’t speak. Sometimes, she used a bit of Mandarin and said, “Oh, you don’t understand, money can buy everything! Kid, oh, you don’t get it, you can buy whatever you want…”, followed by a bunch of words in Taiwanese Hokkien. Ka Lili noticed a piece of news about a quarrel between two Hong Kong men and two Mainland women arguing because of queuing and even having a fight. What was the conflict? And what was the manner? She was afraid of being a person with bad manners. To put words into action, she moved away from the house. They didn't have a future, Ka Lili didn’t love him, and he didn’t feel the same way for her as well. She wanted to live thoughtfully, to love someone seriously.
(in Taiwanese Hokkien)
The rain was pattering when Ka Lili got out of the bus. She was running into a mall while dragging the luggage. There were only a few customers in McDonald’s. Someone died a sudden death in one of the branch stores of McDonald’s last week, which caused a disorder for six hours, but no one noticed. Ka Lili drank the hot chocolate milk while chewing. People were hurrying to and fro, not affecting others. Only their families would feel the sadness, but as time passed by, that would also fade away gradually. Everyone needed to live. What a city! There were a few rigid shops, and Hong Kong people slammed the tyranny of enterprise who snuffed creativity out and quashed small shop tenants. Ka Lili felt heartwarming from this familiar configuration. The rain made the window mottled. Ka Lili’s exuberance and ambition when she left home in the morning were replaced by tiredness and worries. She was too hasty again.
Translation by:
Chan Yuen Tung, Hailey
Lai Yee Ting, Samantha
Kong Han Xiao, Mike
So Ho Hin, Henry
Ka Lili was dragging the luggage when she walked out of the McDonald's, walked out of the mall, walked into the rain, and walked towards her colleagues… She walked through buildings one after another, passed through a parking lot, bypassed a garden, and walked past a security post… Ka Lili studied on Hong Kong Island, worked in Kowloon, and lived in the New Territories. Every piece of land she stepped on belonged to the ones called Lee/ Li (李), either Superman Li (Li Ka-shing) or Uncle Four (Lee Shau-kee) -- Those tycoons had carved up Hong Kong. No matter where Ka Lili goes, she still could not get rid of Lee's/ Li's family. Standing in the rain, Ka Lili watched the hurried pedestrian and the red light far away, just like a kapok flower in the misty drizzle.
The rain just kept falling.