You pick up the phone. It’s a friend inviting you to Lamma Island for dinner. You say to hold on and put your hand over the mouthpiece to ask if she will come. If not, you will postpone for a day, so you will be able to spend the time with her.
“We can’t spend all the time in bed! If we do, you will turn into a skeleton and your friends will blame me for it.”
She gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom. The door isn’t shut and there is the sound of splashing water. You put down the phone and lie there lazily. It is as if she is your partner, and you can’t be away from her. You can’t resist calling out loudly, “Margarethe, you’re a wonderful woman.”
“I offered you a gift, but you didn’t take it!” she shouts back above the sound of the splashing water.
You call out loudly that you love her. She also says she wants to love you but that she’s afraid. You instantly get out of bed to get into the bath with her, but the door slams shut. You look at your watch lying on the table and open the curtains. It is already after four o’clock.
Coming out of the underground at Sheung Wan station, you see a line of wharves along the coast. The air is crisp and fresh. The boats in the harbor are tinged with the gold of the setting sun and there is a bright glare. A barge with the waterline almost right up the sides is cutting through the waves and churning up white foam. The texture of the concrete and steel buildings on this side of the water can be seen clearly, and the outline of the buildings seems to be shining. You want to have a cigarette to confirm that it is not an illusion, and you tell her everything underfoot seems to be floating. She draws close to you and gives a chuckle.
There is a row of food stalls below a huge Marlboro advertisement, but once through the iron gates, “No Smoking” posters are everywhere, like in America. Work has just finished, and every fifteen or twenty minutes, there is a ferry to each of the islands. Most of those going to Lamma Island are young, and there are quite a few foreigners. The electric buzzer sounds and is followed by the clatter of hurried but orderly footsteps. On board, people doze off or take out a book to read, and it becomes so quiet that only the sound of the motor can be heard. The ferry quickly leaves the noisy town, and the clusters of tall and even taller buildings gradually recede into the distance.
A cold wind starts up, and the boat gently rocks. She’s tired. At first she leans on you but then draws up her legs and lies down in your arms. You feel relaxed. She is asleep in an instant, docile and peaceful, and you cannot suppress a feeling of sadness. There are no signs in the cabin apart from the “No Smoking” signs and, with its mixture of races, it does not look like Hong Kong and it does not look like it is soon to be returned to China.
Beyond the deck, the night scene gradually grows hazy, and you become lost in thought. Maybe you should live with her on some island and spend your days listening to the seagulls and writing for pleasure, unencumbered by duties or responsibilities, just pouring out your feelings.
After disembarking and leaving the wharf, some people get onto bicycles. There are no cars on the island. Dim streetlights. It’s a small town with narrow streets, shops and restaurants one after another, and it’s quite lively.
“If you had a tea room with music, or a bar, it would be easy to make a living here. You could write and paint during the day and open for business at night. What do you think?” Dongping, who comes to meet you, bearded and tall, is an artist who came from the Mainland a year or so ago.
“And if you felt weary, you could go to the beach any time for a swim.”
Dongping points to some small fishing boats and rowboats moored in the harbor at the bottom of the stone steps down the slope; he says a foreigner friend of his bought an old fishing boat and lives in it. Margarethe says she’s starting to like Hong Kong.
“You can work here; your Chinese is good and English is your mother tongue,” Dongping says.
“She’s German,” you say.
“Jewish,” she corrects you.
“Born in Italy,” you add.
“You know so many languages! What company would not pay a high salary to employ you? But you wouldn’t have to live here; Repulse Bay over on Hong Kong Island has many grand apartments on the mountains by the sea.”
“Margarethe doesn’t like living with bosses, she likes artists,” you say for her.
“Great, we can be neighbors,” Dongping says. “Do you paint? We’ve got a gang of artist friends here.”
“I used to paint because I liked it, but not professionally. It’s too late to start learning.”
You say you didn’t know she painted, and she immediately says in French there is a great deal you don’t know about her. At this point, she distances herself but still wants to maintain a secret language with you. Dongping says that he didn’t study in an art college and was not officially recognized as an artist: that was why he left the Mainland.
“In the West, artists don’t need official recognition and don’t need to have studied in an art college. Anyone can be an artist. The main thing is whether there is a market, whether one’s paintings can sell,” Margarethe says.
Dongping says there is no market for his paintings in Hong Kong. What the art entrepreneurs want are copies of impressionistic concoctions with a foreign signature for Western galleries, and these are bought at wholesale prices. He does a different signature each time and can’t remember how many names he has signed. Everyone laughs.
On the first floor, where Dongping lives, the sitting room adjoins the studio, and the residents are painters, photographers, poets, and columnists. The only person who is not an artist or writer is a foreigner, a good-looking young American. Dongping formally introduces the man. He is a critic, and the boyfriend of a woman poet from the Mainland.
Everyone has a paper plate and a pair of chopsticks, and they help themselves to the seafood hotpot. The seafood isn’t alive but it is very fresh. Dongping says he brought it all home just before you arrived, but now, in the bubbling hotpot, it’s curled up and no longer moving. The crowd is very casual. Some are walking about barefoot, and others are sitting on floor cushions. The music is turned on loud, it is a string quartet on big speakers, Vivaldi’s vibrant Four Seasons. Everyone is eating and drinking, talking all at once and not about anything in particular. Only Margarethe is reserved and dignified. Her fluent Chinese instantly makes the young American’s Western accent and intonation sound inferior, so he starts talking to Margarethe in English. He raves on to her and makes the young woman poet jealous. Margarethe later tells you that the guy doesn’t know anything, but he was taken by her and kept hovering around her.
One of the artists says that he had been uprooted from East Village or West Village—you don’t remember which—in the grounds of the Old Summer Palace. In the name of urban beautification and social security, the place was closed down by the police two years ago. He asks you about the new art trends in Paris, and you say that there are new trends every year. He says that he does art on the human body. You know that he had suffered a great deal in China because of his art, so it is best not to say that his sort of art is now history in the West.
In the course of things, people start talking about 1997. All the hotels have been fully booked for the day of the handover ceremony between Britain and China, the day the People’s Liberation Army would move in. There would be hordes of journalists from all over the world congregating here, some say seven thousand, and others eight thousand. On the morning of July 1, the birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, immediately after the handover ceremony, the British governor of Hong Kong would go to the naval base and leave on a ship.
