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At airports, he’s Lai Yiu-Fai; overseas, he’s Fai, sometimes mispronounced Fay by some of these gwai lou, even after he corrects them. (He doesn’t waste saliva doing it more than once; you know with these people, once they’ve gotten it into their thick heads how they want to pronounce something, it’s impossible to get them to change it.)
Back in Hong Kong, he’s A-Fai again; exasperated, annoyed, loving, hollered by parents and relatives. Served alongside scoldings and second helpings of rice and vegetables and soup and meat he doesn’t have to cook himself, out of the same bowls he’s been eating meals from for as long as he’s remembered.
His first night home, he allows himself to cry only twice. Once, in the new shower his parents had installed in the time he was gone; the second in his bed, when everyone’s left and his parents have bade him goodnight and his hair’s dry.
So unfamiliar, the old blue tiles and the bucket that held water replaced by newer, brighter blue ones and a metal showerhead attached to a white heater unit. So similar, his scratched wooden thing of a bed frame, his mattress, the old sheets laundered soft and not scratchy enough against his skin.
The sound of water muffles his sobs and the stream disguises his tears well enough. His pillow only does a half-decent job.
He repays his debts with the money he’s earned and saved in Buenos Aires, father by his side as he bows in apology. He gets a job. Everything goes well for the first 6 months, until he and his parents grow too comfortable with each other again. With familiarity comes nagging and the scoldings, no longer held back. The dancing around about his preferences. Hints about how his kau fu was once the same way, but eventually married a girl.
It’s during an argument with his mother and father that Yiu-Fai realises all over again what made it so easy to leave in the first place. There is no lack of love, but he’ll go crazy being cooped up with them; sometimes, love is best experienced with a gratuitous amount of space between each other, when the opportunity for smothering and scrutiny’s absent.
Yiu-Fai moves out once he finds an apartment cheap enough. His mother sighs, but she helps him pack. His father calls an ex-colleague he knows who owns a truck big enough. They load his things and make the two-hour drive to his new place, and he yells himself hoarse at his father to stop trying to carry things up and at his mother to stop trying to rearrange things, can she just leave them where they are? To which she replies, it’s not like you’re hoarding gold, what are you so afraid that I’ll see?
She’s not wrong. All he brings with him is a few nice shirts and jackets and pants, two pairs of shoes and his slippers. A box of books, and a shoebox he’s taped up, the first thing he unpacks and places right inside the closet.
A neighbour from down the corridor storms over to their apartment brandishing a broom, and shouts for them to stop being so fucking noisy. His uncle and aunt, who’ve come to spectate and offload some of their own furniture, curse her mother to die.
Yiu-Fai chases them all away; they’re not the ones that have to live with the auntie. He apologises to her after, and she tells him: I don’t know how you turned out so well. His laugh’s awkward, and she shoos him away, but not without a bowl of leftover soup.
The apartment isn't big; a kitchen big enough for one person, a bedroom, a living room he barely fits a dining table large enough for one right next to the sofa, in view of his aunt’s still-new tv they gave him as an excuse to buy an even newer one. The toilet flush doesn’t work sometimes, the kind he has to push down and hold there for three seconds before it even wants to do its job. But it’s his and still not as bad as some places he’s lived in before, so he doesn’t complain.
His new apartment complex feels like Buenos Aires all over again and nothing like it at once—for one, he can fully follow the yelled conversations of the neighbours. He’s trying that thing A-Chang does, listening. And it surprises him, how the noise, the relationships between these people, the constant shouting at the landlord when he comes calling for rent—even without words, he recognises it all the same. It’s a similar flavour, the same varying cadences conveying familiar exasperation.
Sam-po who lives upstairs and her daughter that she keeps trying to marry off to him; Auntie and her family to his left. He’s met her quiet husband once, although he’s less quiet when yelling at his daughters to do their homework. The couple to his right are bastard husband and dead woman; he doesn’t know their names, but he knows they’ll be divorced within the year.
Yiu-Fai settles into his new daily routine easily. It’s a fifteen minute walk to the MTR he’ll ride to work, across jagged steps cut into concrete and narrow paths and that one corner everyone pisses at after drinking at the bar right across. It’s an extremely lucky morning when he gets a seat, unlucky when he can barely get on and the air-conditioner’s not working that day, baking him and every other commuter pressed up against him.
Everyone tells him how lucky he is that he’s managed to get a place that close, even as they remind him to go back home every weekend for dinner. That journey’s longer, and he has to switch lines; he makes it once every two weeks, although he speaks to his father and mother and sister and nephew on the phone on the weeks he doesn’t.
He’s been employed at his cousin’s travel agency since he stepped off the plane from Buenos Aires—demand for travel’s booming, people always want to go overseas, so there’s always more people to meet, more paperwork to fill and file, more trips to plan and plane tickets to book.
Yiu-Fai helps them plan the tour group agenda for Buenos Aires, but doesn’t actually take care of the logistics of it. Apparently, they’ve found a local based there who does it for a good price. He doesn’t look at the name, and they’ve never mentioned it in front of him. He doesn’t think he wants to take the chance. It was a past life lived; the further away he is from it, both in metaphor and distance, the better it is.
Bar Sur isn’t on the itinerary. He puts in a good word for the one he always went to after work with A-Chang to the would-be tourists who come in, and mentions it as somewhere they can choose to drop by for a more local feel.
He recommends A-Chang’s family’s stall at Liaoning Street Night Market to an older couple going to Taiwan; they remember his recommendations, and they make a point to drop by the office to thank him for it. They remark that the owners’ son is very handsome as they hand him an entire crate of pineapple cakes.
His cousin jokes about converting the pantry into a Taiwanese snack shop upon seeing them on his once-monthly visit to the office, and his other cousin takes on a particularly shrewd expression at that.
(Four months on, and he’s unfortunately been roped into part of the telephone gossip chain once his extended aunts and uncles find out about his cousins’ estrangement, for all he yells at them that he has work to do and to please call someone else. Some do; others change course to ask if he’s getting married soon. He fakes having to do work and immediately hangs his work telephone up.)
Yiu-Fai removes the shoebox from the back of his wardrobe one night, cuts through the tape he’s sealed it shut with, and methodically goes through each and every single photograph and written note. He places them in a ziploc bag. It goes even further into the wardrobe than the shoebox had been.
In the now-sparse shoebox remains a passport and a single photograph. That last one still looks as saturated and brilliant as when he first saw it, all those years back in Liaoning.
A-Chang said he liked lower voices. He said Yiu-Fai had a nice voice. He brought his sadness with him to the end of the world.
Yiu-Fai remembers the last time they saw each other in the flesh; how he’d told A-Chang to close his eyes. He’d thought about kissing him, but the ever-present hope and fear and thought that Po-Wing would appear that always lived in his heart froze his feet where they were, and stole the moment away from them.
He’s sure he didn’t imagine it, the way A-Chang had turned his head into his neck, breathed him in when they hugged. His breath had tickled Yiu-Fai’s skin. They stood there, and held each other.
Yiu-Fai isn’t as lonely as he feared he would’ve been. He has his family. His fist is good enough company on the nights he’s not too tired to get it up, as is his pillow. One or two old lovers, when they’re between boyfriends. He doesn’t go cruising; too afraid of what he could run into. Never again. They tell him about the new saunas that have sprung up since he left, the ones he shouldn’t visit now; he tells them it’s a waste of effort, because he’s never planned on visiting them. Too far, he grunts, cigarette hanging from his mouth and wiping at his skin with a wet towel before rinsing and re-wetting it and throwing it to them.
When he does think about it in his spare time, he’ll call his parents instead and tell them he’s going over for dinner. They cluck at him when he’s there; tell him he’s too skinny and laugh when their neighbour, Kao-gong, tells them they’re lucky that Yiu-Fai’s so filial.
One day, without him noticing, it happens: that place A-Fai moved to becomes A-Fai’s house. He greets Bak-po at the wet market nearby as he exchanges money for his usual order of vegetables that she’s already set aside (“Only the freshest for you, Yiu-Fai.” “Bak-po dotes on me the most.”). Auntie who still lives in the apartment to his left is scolding her younger daughter about how her sister’s won a scholarship to study in the USA and she’s still unable to pass simple mathematics. The couple on the right’s finally divorced, and a policeman lives there now. Sam-po’s daughter has gotten married, and she and her husband visit Sam-po regularly enough.
He can walk the distance to the MTR and make the trip to work in his sleep. He’s got a promotion, and substantial savings and a salary that actually warrants him moving to a bigger apartment, maybe one with a fully-functioning toilet. His cousins now jointly own an imported snack goods store in addition to the travel agency.
He thinks about A-Chang again. He’s been thinking about the words and conversations they’ve had more and more, about adventures and his place in the world, and having a home to return to.
Unsurety of one’s position in life is a cruel thing. The fear of instability runs deeper in human nature than most dismiss too easily; some are built to wander, but others thrive on thinking something like this is for them until they’re forced to live it.
Excitement about the unknown manifests in so many different ways. For some, it’s in the adventure that lies ahead when they go on holiday—for others, it’s simple things like what they’ll get from the new Western-style restaurant opening across the office.
Yiu-Fai hasn’t worried about anything except work and what he’ll cook for dinner in a long while.
He used to believe that Po-Wing was the biggest adventure he’d ever have, and it turned out to be true. He’s an older man now, and he’s too tired in his soul for such big things. Sometimes, simple is good enough. Near is good enough.
Yiu-Fai doesn’t know if A-Chang’s similar to them or not. He mentioned liking girls, after all. But some liked both—Po-wing was always better at it, could spot them from a distance away; he’d leaned over to murmur it into Yiu-Fai’s ear if they were in public, a joke between lovers disguised as a whisper from a friend.
A friend is what Po-Wing never was; a lover, what he’ll never be again. But A-Chang was, despite the hint of what could’ve been—that, Yiu-Fai’s still not sure about. Even if it was purely imagined, borne out of his own desperation and loneliness at the other end of the world, it would still be nice to reconnect with a friend.
The next day at work, he applies for leave, and buys a plane ticket to Taiwan.