The Year of the Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

everything, and also owned nothing yet owned everything. Why else could America, that omnipotent giant, come cap-in-hand, begging this dot of a place to restrict its manufactures because the USA suffered? Hong Kong laughed a lot at things like that.
    She was hungry. Already her hour was eroded by silly thoughts. She allowed herself six Hong Kong dollars a day for food, nearly a whole American dollar! She’d brought a plastic bottle of water, having filled it in the office. No costly Coca Cola for KwayFay, despite her need.
    The hot rice street vendor was a scarecrow. He moved swiftly on his bicycle with the elastic bounce of the coolie under loads slung on a bamboo yoke. She admiredhis knack, pedalling baskets of hot food on poles, among dense traffic.
    She queued, third in line, her stomach churning unpleasantly at the aroma from his steaming baskets.
    Today, he had the ubiquitous
jap-seuy
, the equivalent of the English bubble-and-squeak. Tempting, but money was always a problem.
    She asked for plain boiled rice in a foil box. It would do. She carried her own chopsticks, and ate the food leaning against the end post in Statue Square, her place having been stolen by numerous Philippino women. Not wanting to be shamed, surreptitiously she brought out a piece of foil and unfolded it, placing her secret strip of boiled green vegetable on the rice, to make a lunch she could be respectably seen with.
    Then she noticed the man.
    He was standing smoking a cigarette at the corner as if waiting for someone. Taxis dashed, wheels shrilled, trams clanked, pedestrians rushed, but the shrivelled man looked steadily in her direction. Face of a walnut, clothes of a star, watches to die for glittering on each wrist, stones of higher reflectivity than diamond showing he was at least partly phoney yet composite, in the way of shopping malls financed by different companies without a common theme. He was calm, absurdly so. Oddly, people avoided him. Usually, Kennedy Town to Quarry Bay, you were hard put to walk a step without being nudged, elbowed, shoved, impeded. Not this man. He stood in ominous serenity, as if the populace conspired to leave him alone.
    Perhaps they felt an emanation of threat? She noticed a young clerk bump into him and immediately withdrawwith nodded acceptance. Obeisance? The man drew on his cigarette. The ash stayed intact! He wore sunglasses that made hollows of his eyes. He wore a hat, almost unique except for tourists off some cruise ship at the Ocean Terminal.
    He looked at her, still as a stork. Waiting for her to finish her meal, perhaps? Were Triad threat-men so polite?
    KwayFay drank from her bottle, replaced the cap, slipped it into her bag and wrapped her chopsticks away. The foil container she always took back to the office, making sure it was seen, as defiant proof that she’d eaten a meal more expensive than any hawk-eyed observer might assume. It showed them that she was doing quite well for herself, thank you. Even if she had no man, she could eat like the rest. She moved off, deciding not to see the spy, and was almost in the building when he touched her elbow.
    “Come,
Siu-Jeh
.” He said Little Sister as though she were a shop assistant and he about to buy something. “I give you a lift.”
    “Me?”
    “The taxi can only wait so long.” He was so calm. How did people be calm?
    “
See-Tau
is expecting me at work.”
    “We expect you more.”
    “I might get the sack.”
    “Impossible.” So calm, that “impossible”. Others would know this man represented others who were calmer still.
    For a moment she stood in the rescuing bliss of air-conditioning , then reluctantly went back into the street.She felt little desperation, just her familiar sense of loss. A taxi was parked and held up a tram, several bicycles, a column of motors. All waited with unusual serenity, so weird. For her? No, for this calm man.
    He extinguished his cigarette. She settled in the worn leather seat. He sat away from her