In That Other City, One I Knew and Loved
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A year after I left Hong Kong for good, I met Pablo at a bar in Camden. We were dancing at first, or rather I was watching him dance before he let out a hand and, on the first spin, drew me in. He was respectful and knew what he was doing, which is why I was glad to stay at the bar with him afterwards, sipping G&Ts as we cooled down on the outdoor terrace. Pablo, he introduced himself. From his accent, I guessed he was Spanish. He was clean-shaven and wore a striped collared shirt unbuttoned down to his chest, which shimmered with a light layer of sweat from the dancing. He worked as a consultant for some high-end legal firm in central London, and though I can’t recall what exactly he did, I remember being both impressed and depressed by its conventional sheen, respectable even by Hong Kong standards. I distinctly recall thinking that my writer’s life was an unglamorous affair when compared to his. I had not yet ascertained what kept me in our conversation by the time a bartender approached to say that the bar was closing for the night.
I wondered if it was time for me and Pablo to say farewell, to get each other’s numbers and promise to text one another but never follow through. To my surprise, he asked if I wanted to continue our conversation at his apartment. Though I had yet to go home with someone in London since my arrival, and I was, out of principle, wary of men who shared the likes of Pablo’s appearance and profession, there was something of an enduring earnestness to his enthusiasm that night, the way he would clap and say que bueno when I said something funny, that made me consider the idea with some interest. He hailed the first cab we saw upon exiting the bar, and, looking at me all the while, said he could drop me off at my place if I wanted. I said there was no need, we would go to his.
In the cab, I told Pablo that I had visited his country four years before with my mother, who had had an inexplicable though short-lived fascination with Spain. For two weeks, we drove a rented Audi from Madrid to Málaga, stopping in large cities along the way, and in each my mother would ask me to read and translate every plaque that we came across, as if understanding what others found worthy of memory would render her experience more memorable as well. Though I had studied Spanish at a language centre in Sheung Wan, where no more than three people could fit into the rickety elevator that connected the lobby to our windowless classroom, I found there were many words that I could only understand via the help of a translation app, which my mother had been disappointed by, believing I was fluent.
Like your English, Pablo said, your English is so good.
I explained, not without some reserve, that I had always spoken English with most people except for my mother, with whom I spoke Cantonese. Cantonese was a language I also shared with a woman named Kat who owned a local café I used to frequent in Hong Kong. My story reminded Pablo that he, too, had a favourite place in his hometown in Spain, a small tavern on the same street as his parents’ apartment, where you could get cheese and a large loaf of bread for five euros. I asked him if he ever regretted leaving Spain, and Pablo, defiant for the first time that evening, said that of course he loved living in London, it was where opportunities were most abundant for ambitious people like him. When he missed home, there were always places where he could return to Spain even on this island, like the bar where we had danced, for example, and many other bars besides.
*
Back at his place, Pablo invited me to sit on his cream-coloured sofa while he prepared las cosas. The sofa faced a set of French patio doors leading to a small balcony. Though the curtains had been left open, it was too dark to see the view. As I sat on the sofa, moving my fingertips across the plush fabric, Pablo fiddled with an iPad until a wraparound sound system – invisible to me until that moment – roared to life with a flurry of tom drums and synth and a line in rapid-fire Spanish.
Thank you, I said, as Pablo handed me a wine glass. As he poured from a freshly uncorked bottle, he explained that it was a Rioja 2017, made with grapes grown in vineyards not too far from where his parents still lived in San Sebastián. Then, after preparing a glass of his own, he came to sit on the sofa so we could listen to the song that had begun to play. To my amusement, it struck me less as a song one would play on a date and more like the introductory jingle of an 80s sitcom. From the rush of the first few seconds, I caught just one line – A la gente que cayó – to the people who fell. Asturias, Pablo said, by Melendi. Do you know this song? I shook my head and took a sip of my wine. It’s about Asturias in northern Spain, which is – ¿cómo se dice? – yes, an autonomous region. The Nationalists beat the Republicans there during the Civil War. Pablo picked up his leather-backed iPad and clicked around a bit before passing it to me. On the screen was a set of lyrics timed to appear and disappear along with the music: Diré que no hay comparación / Pues, no hay comparación / Que respirar bien profundo / Cuando pasas el Negrón.
I found I didn’t mind his explanations, however long and unsolicited. They reminded me a little of my mother’s passions.
Feeling my cheeks flush from the wine, I pointed out how the combination of elements in Pablo’s flat – the music, the wine, the hand-painted canvas of an ocean beside the balcony doors – had the curious effect of bringing me back four years to a country I had not seen or visited since. Que bueno, Pablo replied, moving his wrist in circles as he aerated his wine, that was my intention.
After Melendi, we listened to several other songs: some rock, several ballads and Júlio Iglesias, who I recognised by the warble of his voice. Though Pablo and I would exchange stories here and there, mostly we focused on the music; whenever a new song came on, he would explain how he had learned about it, where the singer was from and any other fact he believed I would want to know. I found I didn’t mind his explanations, however long and unsolicited. They reminded me a little of my mother’s passions, like what I had witnessed on our trip to Spain, where she would occasionally pause our meanderings to explain how the places we were standing in – the cloister of a church, a random side alley – had featured in the guidebook she had pored over that morning. I wondered what about Spain had ignited such zeal when Hong Kong was full of equivalent fascinations, where the bilingual street names evoked dualities that spoke to ways in which history split our home city. Maybe it was the blindness associated with familiar places that prevented my mother from developing the same zest for Hong Kong. Maybe, had she chosen to move to England as I had done, she would have started compiling stories to share with someone who would want to listen, as I began to do when Pablo turned to me and asked if I wanted to play any songs from Hong Kong.
The first singer that came to mind was Leslie Cheung. Kat had loved listening to Leslie and would play his music in her café all the time. I ate there every other day before I packed up my things and left the city for good, which is what Kat also did the last I heard from my mother. Unlike me, however, Kat had moved to Manchester. Though I considered visiting her briefly, I didn’t have the heart to make the three-hour train ride north, because even if I did, what would we talk about? We had never had reason to sit across from each other at the same table, but in this country the possibility felt so real that it made my knees buckle to understand what it meant.
The piano prelude began to play, there was a swelling rise of strings, and Leslie began: 這一生也在進取 / 這分鐘卻掛念誰 / 我會說是唯獨你 / 不可失去… And in the brief space of those few lines, I could see Kat cutting the crusts of my egg-and-ham sandwich and asking about my work, which she had never read but believed in all the same. I had known, from early on in our acquaintance, that Kat loved literature, and that she liked to read the so-called English classics in translation. She once said that her dream was to visit the Yorkshire moors that had inspired Wuthering Heights, because there must be a certain magic to places that imbue a writer with so much feeling as to produce such timeless prose – prose that made her look differently at her own place in the world, in the way, for example, she looked upon in the hills in Tai Tam with a touch of romance she hadn’t felt before.
I never learned if Kat was married, or had children, or if she, like me, was still living with her parents. I didn’t know how old she was. I never thought to ask about these facts of her life, believing that there would be time to learn more about her still. But things changed quickly after 2019. During the protests, an ad hoc flurry of Post-It notes had started gathering on a wall at the café. Sympathetic to this sudden phenomenon, Kath had left stacks of sticky-topped coloured paper on each table and a collection of Muji pens in a plastic cup by the till. After some time, however, the Post-Its disappeared, as did many of the usual customers, who either moved abroad or decided it was too risky to come back.
The morning I was set to leave Hong Kong myself, I intended to stop by Kat’s to say goodbye. When I arrived at the shop, I learned that it was closed due to a family emergency, or at least that was what Kat had alluded to in a little handwritten note taped to the glass door. The café would open later that afternoon, but by then it would be too late. I would be on a plane to London.
Though Pablo and I were several songs deep into the Leslie Cheung album by then, he made no moves to reclaim his iPad. Instead, he asked me if I missed Hong Kong and if I planned to go back. Isn’t your mother there? he asked. I nodded. But some time had passed since we’d last spoken. When she told me about Kat’s departure, she had done so with great disapproval, muttering aiya over and over in a refrain that unnerved me the longer it lasted, like an echo from a previous life reaching its gaunt hand through time. I said to Pablo that I was happy to be in London, that maybe I didn’t need Hong Kong as much as I once did. I turned my face towards the balcony, and I could see that the sky had endured a slight shift in colour as a hint of light pooled into the total darkness, such that I could see the shapes of trees and the tangles in their uppermost branches, but not much else.
I think I know what you mean, Pablo said. But sometimes I think about Spain and feel very deep inside that I must go back.
I was surprised because of his earlier proclamation about London being the place where he needed to be. My cheeks burned from the wine and my body, exhausted, felt as if it were disintegrating on the sofa upon which, after some shuffling, I now lay with my feet tucked under my thighs, my head nestled on the headrest.
It was in moments like these, when the blue nights grew darker, that Pablo questioned whether ambition could be vaster than this.
When Pablo returned to Spain at least once a year to visit friends and family, he said, they were always glad to receive him. His parents prepared the bedroom he had slept in as a boy. His friends would ask him if he had met someone who made England worth the rain, to which Pablo would laugh, saying no es asunto tuyo cabrón, and his friends – many of whom were now married and had kids – would shake their heads. They would go to the familiar tavern by his parents’ house, where they would take turns uncorking fresh bottles of local wine. It was in moments like these, when the blue nights grew darker and the boats began to shimmer in the bay, that Pablo questioned whether ambition could be vaster than this: the ocean, the magnanimity of drunkenness around old friends, the heart-tug of seeing private concerns etched into their faces, all the sorrows he once believed would also be his. After too short a time, he would get on a plane to London, where he would emerge in the arrivals hall to the looming and expectant faces of strangers who, after a cursory glance, would look away, leaving him to travel to his apartment alone.
Outside, the light appeared as if it were yawning, absorbing the dark in a single breath before slowly releasing the details of morning: the branches of the trees; the squat, red-bricked estate buildings on the other side of the street; an occasional car traveling down the smooth asphalt road. I noticed that the music had stopped. The room was quiet. Pablo had closed his eyes, and I shut mine as well.
The summer my mother and I travelled to Spain, she brought back a fist-sized statuette of Don Quixote to remind her of the journey we’d made. For four years it sat on the window ledge overlooking the residential district where I’d grown up in Hong Kong, and from a certain angle it looked as if Quixote were standing on top of those straight-shooting towers at the end of a gallant adventure. Now, the same statue sat on my window ledge in Brixton, but it was not quite the same. Whichever way you looked, Quixote always stood before a blank sky, caught in a cloud of his own wordlessness. He would never again climb those Hong Kong towers, I thought, and neither would I. It made me think of all the other things I’d never do again: eat the curry fish balls served in warm paper cups near the wet market in Sai Wan Ho; watch the ocean unfold from the top deck of a double-decker bus swerving towards Stanley; trace my fingers along the little mosaics making up the colourful underground world of the MTR, where a woman’s voice would tell the crowd to please stand back from the doors, and people would wait patiently for the next train, dividing themselves into two neat lines.
Pablo listened carefully as I told him my stories. When I finished, he shut the lid of his iPad and put it aside. Then, in one swift motion, he got off the sofa and opened the doors to his balcony before inviting me to come and stand beside him. In the gentleness of the arriving morning’s light, I noticed lines on Pablo’s face that I had not taken note of before; there was a stain by his chest where a drop of wine had fallen. When I approached him, he put an arm around my shoulders, such that we stood closer together than we had all evening save for during our dance. Remembering that beautiful man and woman at the bar confounded me; they appeared like apparitions from another life, another city, where everything was easy and nothing had been let go of, just yet. By then the day’s light had almost fully risen.
Would you have stayed? The question entered the fresh morning air before dissipating into a hundred parts I would never see again. Pablo did not respond, but instead lightly pushed against my shoulder with his other hand such that I unfurled outwards in a twirl; then, with a tug in his direction, he spun me back.
Would you? he asked.
It was hard to tell if he was happy or sad, though his face was so earnest, his expression so pure. I could not help but smile back. We crossed the threshold of the balcony back to his apartment, holding hands, and I noticed that Pablo kept the patio doors open. We never got around to answering our question.
.
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Image credits: Charmaine Lee
Jimin Kang is a writer. Her fiction has been published in outlets including the Kenyon Review, The London Magazine, Joyland, Wasafiri and La Piccioletta Barca. She can be found at www.jimin–kang.com.
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