5
Kwan borrowed a bicycle from Tan Sun for his trip across the city to the neighborhood of the big hotels. She wheeled it out from the cool shady storage area under the house and handed it over to him, along with the chain to lock it up while he was with the reporter. Her expression was fretful and worried. “Be sure to look for police,” she said, “before you go into the hotel. You know what their unmarked cars look like.”
Kwan laughed, because he’d been through much worse than this, an interview with a reporter. “Everyone knows what their cars look like,” he said. “Clean, for one thing, and with no toys hanging from the inside mirror. And everyone knows what they look like, too. They all go to the same tailor, and he gives them the material the British won’t buy, the shiny grays and light blues. And then he cuts their jackets a little too short in the back.”
“Don’t act as though it’s a holiday,” she snapped, getting angry with him because she had no way to release her tension.
Why did girls always have to become so possessive? Kwan had been hiding with the Tan family for almost two months now, more than enough time to fall in love with their beautiful daughter, explore with her the petals of romance, and grow bored. He couldn’t simply tell her the affair was over, lest her family kick him out on the unfriendly streets, but why couldn’t she see it for herself? Did she want to conceal him under her skirt forever?
Oh, well. Knowing her concern for his safety was real — and the dangers were real — he sobered and said, “It isn’t a holiday. There aren’t any holidays any more. It is an interview with a reporter for a very important American news magazine.” He smiled, to reassure her. “Don’t worry, I’ll bring back the bicycle.”
“The bicycle!” she cried, outraged, and stormed into the house. Which was just as well.
The first time Li Kwan had seen Hong Kong, from the forbidden city of Shenzhen on the Chinese mainland, it had seemed to him like a city in a fairy tale, risen out of the sea just long enough to tease him with its possibility. That had been the occasion of his first failed effort to get out of China and across that narrow strait to the free world, as exemplified by Hong Kong. Traveling south away from Beijing through the vastness of his homeland, a fugitive from the ancient murderers’ injustice, he had been helped along the way by friends of friends, by parents of schoolmates, by people with whom he was barely linked, and of course, by women (women had always been very helpful to Li Kwan), and along the way, he had learned that the iron grip of the ancient murderers grew increasingly slack the farther one traveled from the center of their web.
In the farthest south, in Guangdong Province, and particularly in the coastal city of Shenzhen, central government authority counted for very little at all. Here, most power centered on the rich traders and the Triads, the criminal gangs whose strength came from gambling and smuggling and prostitution and a variety of protection rackets.
Shenzhen, established as a special economic zone in the late seventies in imitation of Hong Kong, before the ancient murderers learned they would be getting the original back, had become almost a parody, a distorting mirror image of that bubbling cauldron of capitalism. A wide-open city in the sense that everything was for sale there, from Western clothing to forged identity papers, it was a closed and forbidden city in the sense that no Chinese national was permitted inside the perimeter without a special certificate from the central government. Hong Kong businessmen in search of cheap labor had moved many of their small factories and assembly plants across the border, and by the early nineties two million mainland Chinese worked for Hong Kong employers in the city of Shenzhen.
It had seemed to Kwan that in such a boiling cauldron of greed and political ambiguity and fevered ambition it should be easy to slip through Shenzhen and into Hong Kong, but in fact at that cliff-edge of China’s influence the guards were everywhere. Kwan’s forged special certificate, allowing him into Shenzhen, was a poor imitation not meant for close study. Chinese police and soldiers were everywhere along the razor margin between the two realities. Kwan was hailed, challenged; he ducked away, lost pursuit in the crowd of shoppers in the free-port streets, blended into a shuffling throng of homebound factory workers, and made his way out of the forbidden city, frustrated, frightened, not knowing what to do.
The family he was staying with, twenty miles northeast along the coast from Shenzhen, were distant relatives of a student who had died in the square. Kwan had not known that student, but it didn’t matter. Nevertheless, after his first failed escape those people became increasingly nervous, particularly since the man of the house, named Djang, was a local official in the China Bank with much to lose. The face of the infamous counterrevolutionary, Li Kwan, was very well known, after all, despite the bullhorn he’d been holding to his mouth when that news photo was taken. So Djang it was who worked out Kwan’s next escape route, and drove him to the rendezvous in his private car, a perk of his job at the bank.
This time, Kwan saw Hong Kong at night, across a mile of black water, the city a frozen firework never quite sinking into the sea. “The boat will be down there,” Djang said, braking to a stop along the narrow dark road, they the only traffic, the rocky weedy brush-dotted slope leading down on the right side of the car to the water’s edge.
They both got out onto the packed-stone road, looking around in the darkness of the night, afraid of patrols: by land, by sea, by air. They scrambled together down the steep slope, holding to the tough shrubbery for balance, then made their way crabwise along the water’s edge.
The boat was there, as promised, old and battered but watertight, with the oars hidden under brush nearby Kwan and Djang shook hands formally, bowed, and separated, Djang to return to the relative safety of his normal life, Kwan to begin the final leg of his trip, across the water to Hong Kong.
Steadily he rowed through the dark, and every time he looked over his shoulder, the city was still there, a million white lights painted on the black velvet of the ocean’s night. And every time he pulled on the oars, facing the stern of the boat, the deeper and more dangerous darkness of China was also still there.
Kwan’s enemy then had been the army, and the old guard, and two thousand years of unquestioning obedience. His enemy now traveled under the name “normalization,” and that was why Kwan had to come out of hiding, had to cross the city in the full hot light of day to meet with the reporter from America. Normalization meant that Japanese aid to China was in place as before, that American businessmen had gone back to China to “protect their investments,” that politicians all over the world were prepared once again to raise delicate small bowls of rice wine to toast the ancient murderers. Normalization meant that a little time had gone by, a year or two, and it was enough for memories to bleach away Normalization meant that it was possible after just this little time to forget a tank driving ponderously over a dozen unarmed human beings. And finally, normalization meant that last year’s hero of Tiananmen Square was this year’s fugitive, hiding from the Hong Kong police.
Kwan locked the bicycle to a lamp standard a block from the hotel, and as he walked he checked his appearance in the tourist shop windows along the way. Small and slender, looking younger than his twenty-six years, with prominent round cheekbones that he’d always thought detracted from his looks (and which made him distinctive, a little too distinctive, even among a billion), he was dressed neatly in pale shirt and chinos, and still walked with an optimistic bounce, forward-moving, like waves on a shore.