The Year of the Woman Read Online Free PDF

and didn’t need to tell the driver the destination. They drove to the Vehicular Ferry.
    “You take me to
Gao Lung
, across to Kowloon?” she asked timidly, wanting friends – had she any, for events on this scale? – or anybody to see her, take the taxi’s number, stop the ferry because of a
dai-fung
, typhoon, coming across the South China Sea.
    He said nothing. Was being calm boring? She envied him his tranquillity. Perhaps it was all show, just as a woman, dressed for an occasion and looking serene, might feel her heart thumping as her reception neared.
    They crossed the harbour and in Kowloon took a series of turns. She tried seeing where the detours led: hateful Jordan Road itself, where she had stolen food so often when six, seven, eight years of age. Then Nathan Road with drifters looking for girlie bars that would charge them $800 for entry and another $1,000 for a girlie to sit with and drink the coloured waters, to report back home that they’d had a good time.
    Tsim Sha Tsui, with its charging pedestrians and streams of motors and buses, shops glittering like one giant elongated crystal, seemed to be the destination. The taxi turned in behind Chungking Mansions, the cramped tourist ghetto of which the whole world knew, at 30, Nathan Road, dormitories with cockroach-infested landings stacked off malodorous stairwells. Thestreets grew more louring, shoddier. Twice the taxi ignored one-way signs, oncoming vehicles meekly backing away. The man twice took out a cigarette and each time put the smoke away unlit. The taxi driver never once checked the rear-view mirror, another first.
    “Here, Little Sister.”
    She alighted. The narrow street was new to her. Had they re-crossed Nathan Road, to finish up near the Bird Market? Or near the huge tented Jade Market, where she might be able to get an apple, some orange juice? She felt quite dizzy.
    The man didn’t pay the taxi. It drove away with a screech of tyres as if yelping at its liberation.
    He led into a hallway. Two grubby vendors shifted their cardboard panels of Rolex and Swatch lookalikes, eyes downcast as the man walked past. He made a gesture to a small bicycle, move it, and a hawker dragged it outside. KwayFay edged past up the stairs. The man was fidgety now, clicking worry beads and humming under his breath. He was afraid. KwayFay knew fear. Cockroaches scuttled. The place stank.
    A door opened on the second landing. Two men were seated in a pleasant room. A troubling aroma of antiseptic made her eyes water.
    “Sit down.”
    There was only one chair. KwayFay placed herself in it, clutching her handbag with its chopsticks, empty foil, her dollars for tomorrow’s street meal.
    The two men were so different. One was a transparent threat-man, tense, young and full of aggression. The other was hugely fat, middle-aged, his features shiny with a constant beaming grin she instantly distrusted.He hugged a black ledger. They wore western suits. The bulbous man had appalling teeth, all corrugations and brown stubs, and wheezed as he spoke.
    “I am Ah Min. Have you heard the name?”
    “No,
Sin-Sang
.”
    “Do you know why you’re here?”
    “
Mh ho yisi
.” She truly had no idea. HC’s garbled explanation had told her nothing, but was this anything to do with HC?
    “Ghosts? I know nothing about ghosts.”
    Except of course for Ghost Grandmother, and that was beyond human conversation. The mad thought crossed her mind that some Triad man might be a relative who shared her nocturnal lessons with long-dead Grandmother. Like listening in on a broadcast? Yet this older man looked vaguely Shanghainese, as did many from the east side of Central District on Hong Kong. “Little Shanghai”, the indigenous Cantonese called that place of sandwiched families and horizontal forests of washing projecting on bamboo poles from windows. She had no Shangainese relatives. Who had? she thought nastily. No Cantonese would admit to it anyway.
    “But you guess —” the