Planet Lolita

A Novel

For Mary, Anna, and Claire

I’m see-through!
—Chihiro,
Spirited Away

Here’s what happened.

“Wake up, Dad,” I said. “Mom, wake up too.”

“Xixi,” he said.

“Sarah,” she said.

“Parentals,” I said. “There’s something outside.”

“The ocean,” she said, “and isn’t it perfect, waking to the sound of waves?” Mom, lying on my right, brushed hair from my eyes. Though surprised, I did the same to her, forgiving her morning breath. Up close she smelled of herbal essence and kiwi, her skin oily from sleep and peeling along the shoulder from being
gweilo.
On my other side lay Dad, reeking of hair gunk and tumours and the vinegar snap of overnight sweat.

“I need a smoke,” he said.

“No you don’t,” she said.

“Maybe you should wait,” I said, not sure why.

Groaning and rubbing his shoulder, Dad sat up. “Whose idea of fun was this, camping in Hong Kong?”

“I had fun,” Mom said. “Kind of. Did you, honey?”

“Dad snored,” I answered.

“You think?”

“It was loud.”

“It was a string of firecrackers going off. Wasn’t I glad to be closest to the water. It drowned him. Almost,” she added.

“You wish,” he said.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I’ve been trying to tell you both,” I said. “There’s something out there.”

“A-smoking I go,” Dad said anyway.

“Aren’t you going to put on your shorts?” she said.

But he had already unzipped the flap and wiggled out in his black boxers, pack of tumours and Zippo in hand.

“How about that,” we heard him say. Then, “Good morning, ladies.”

“Ladies?” Mom said.

By the metallic click of his lighter, I knew he was firing up a Marlboro Red, the only brand for Cool Kwok. “Leah,” he called to Mom, “we may need a lawyer.”

I made the first move.

“Put on your hat,” she said.

“I don’t burn like Peking duck,” I said. “You do.”

“Put it on.”

For the beach I had brought my straw bowler with the crown of blue ribbon and the three pins. Once I had slipped on my knock-off Vuittons, the lenses pink-tinted, and slid my phone into my pocket, I was one-two-three go.

I crawled out.

“Sketchy,” I said.

“Mermaids,” Dad said, “come to serenade us.” His smile was easy but his grip, when I took his hand, was not.

“Shit,” Mom said. To my offer of holding hands she made a Lawyer Leah face. Not a scoff, nor a smile.

I counted thirteen “mermaids” between our tent and the ocean, a few with their flippers still in the water. Neither parent could quite believe their old eyes, and squinted at the sight, as if it all might be a dream and them still sleeping. I had excellent hearing and vision and knew at once that the most remote beach in Hong Kong had been invaded. Remoteness made Tai Long Wan ideal for camping, Mom had read. The strands were accessible by two methods. There was a long, sweaty hike through a New Territories country park, or a short, terrifying speedboat ride from Sai Kung. Fifteen minutes ago I had awoken to a motor being cut, and the splash of feet and shush of giggles.

“Are they amahs?” I said. I was thinking a little of Gloria, who took care of me, but more of the maid armies occupying city parks and squares every weekend. Going on appearances and postures and uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, twelve of these women would have blended into any Sunday gathering in Kowloon or Causeway Bay. They were about the right age, early twenties or even older, totally grown-up. But Hong Kong amahs were mostly Filipino and Indonesian, along with a few Thai. Those ladies arrived on discount flights, their visas arranged by agencies and paid for by rich people. They didn’t wash ashore at dawn like Styrofoam cartons.

“Back inside the tent,” Mom said.

“Why?”

“We shouldn’t be here. Or they shouldn’t be. We definitely shouldn’t be here at the same time.”

“And yet here we all are,” Dad said.

“Sarah,” she said to me, “what did you just do?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you—I think she just waved to one of them,” she said to him.

“No, I didn’t.”

“A furtive Asian-girl wave. She tried hiding it from us.”

“Is that a crime?” Dad said.

The girl I’d waved to, an open-palmed, fanning wave—“furtive,” according to my mother—stood out. First, she had on a dress, blue with white straps, and though it was shapeless and cheap she wore it well, thanks to her model posture and leggy legs. Second, in order to keep her distance from the far worse fashion around her she was allowing the ocean to caress her ankles, her knees knocked together. Third, she wasn’t only the tallest and prettiest but was also A-cup and hipless, not much in the way of bum. Though she noticed me looking, she didn’t wave back.

“What’s that older one up to?” Mom said. She was talking about a different mermaid who had emerged from the pack. Squat and bow-legged, with a sweat bib across her chest and an inner-tube belly, she made any amah in a Hong Kong park seem a regional beauty queen by comparison.

“Making a call,” Dad answered.

Twice already the woman had punched in a number, her face scrunched to read the keypad. Both times she then raised the phone—pink, plastic, the kind of China knock-off on sale in Chungking Mansions, minus a SIM card—over her head.

“She’s contacting her local connection, isn’t she?” Mom said. “Triad.”

“Mos def,” he said.

“They aren’t speaking
Putonghua,
” I said, meaning Mandarin, or real Chinese.

“Inside the tent, Sarah. I already asked.”

“A dialect,” Dad said, “from one of those pirate cities along the coast towards Fujian.”

“The pickup will happen shortly,” she said. “They aren’t walking off this beach.”

“Why drop the girls from one boat, only to collect them in another?”

She ignored his question. “We can’t be here when they arrive, Jacob. We can’t.”

“Will they care?”

“They’ll care about Sarah.”

“What does that mean?”

Mom was suddenly blocking my view of the water, and the girl in the blue dress. “Here she comes now—the Boss Lady.”

“I’m not properly attired,” Dad said. But he looked Cool Kwok in the boxer shorts, and knew it.

As the Boss Lady approached, waddling through the sand, Mom finally joined the hand-holding chain. Her palm was buttery, probably in fright. Boss Lady had a pig nose and chicken lips, a forehead of greased hair. Little about her was easy on the eyes. Even less was feminine.

“Good morning,” Mom said, stepping forward to meet her.

“
Jousahn
, Mom,” I corrected. “She doesn’t speak English, obviously.”

“Jousahn
,
”
the woman replied. She said something about her cell phone, holding it out. Amazed that she could talk without opening her mouth, I caught maybe half the words but none of the meaning. Her fingernails were painted with quarter-moons of dirt.

“What’s she saying?” Mom asked. “And why is she saying it to Sarah?”

Being six inches taller, I could look over Boss Lady and see
whether the girl was still watching, and noticing that I wasn’t showing fear.

“She can’t get a signal on her phone,” Dad said. “She doesn’t think it’s broken.”

“Tell her to look at me.”

“What?”

“Tell her.”

Dad translated. Pursing her lips tighter—her teeth probably resembled kernels of canned corn left in the sun—the woman shrugged.

“We can’t get a signal either,” Mom said to her. To my surprise, she held up her iPhone, sleeker and more lawyerly than any Android. “It’s one of the reasons we decided to camp here. That, and the guarantee of solitude.”

While Dad struggled to translate this, Boss Lady stared at the phone, as if she were starving and it a delicious treat. He knew, I knew, and Mom quickly knew too. By showing off the quality Apple product, she’d blown it. Realizing we had no choice, he pointed to the hill at the southern end of the beach, the one we had climbed down yesterday. “Yours should work up there,” he said in his so-so Cantonese.

“Kimberley Tsoi called my phone when we were on the trail,” I said in English. “Remember?”

“You’re pretty,” the woman said to me in her language. Then she spoke further to Dad.

“What did she say?” Mom said. Her cheeks were now ruddy, the legacy, she had explained umpteen times, of being a “MacInnes of the Isle of Skye.” If applied using rouge, the blush highlighted her Gollum eyes and distracted from the lines crossing her cheeks. If natural, it was a humiliation, making her feel and look, she said, like a helpless child.

“She wants me to walk with her to the top of the hill so she can make a call,” Dad explained. “She’d like me to bring our phone, which is a superior model, as she can now clearly tell.”

“No chance.”

“She’s asking nicely, Leah.”

“No chance, Jacob.”

“She thinks Xixi is a knockout.”

Mom glared at me, like it was my fault. I arced on my toes, not easy in sand, to locate the girl in the dress. “I’m not that pretty,” I said, comparing us. I wished I had a mirror, for a check. Also a brush for my hair, in spite of the straw bowler.

“I’ll walk her up the hill,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Bring some water,” I said.

“I don’t need advice from a fifteen-year-old.”

Even Boss Lady arched a brow.

“Tumour?” Dad said to her, offering the pack.

“Sorry,” Mom said, pulling me in for a hug. I didn’t soften against her, didn’t release myself into her arms, the way I did with him. But I did fetch a bottle of water.

“Should I know your name?” she said to the woman. “No, wait, I don’t think so. What do I want to know about these girls? Nothing. And what do you want to know about my family? Nothing again. Now let’s go,” she added with her own bossy wave of the hand.

We watched them etch tracks along Tai Long Wan. One set was tidy—super-fit Leah stepped lightly, her markings birdlike—but the other resembled the churnings of a dog with sloppy paws. Ten minutes to the south lay the headland they would have to climb, a craggy rock jutting so far into the sea that it severed the beach
in half. Out over the water a smeared sun was coming up. Soon it would be high and hot, ready to boil brains unprotected by hats and burn the skin of foreign ghosts, even those wearing SPF 60 sunblock.

“Why’s Mom so tense?” I said.

“Lawyer talk. Pay no attention.”

“Are we in trouble with bad guys?”

“Not that I can see,” he said, slipping on his Ray-Bans. “And you
are
a knockout, Xixi Kwok. Asian
Vogue
, front cover.”

“And you’re a Big Daddy-O, even in boxers.”

He gave his left buttock a pat. Then, guessing correctly, he glanced over at the twelve mermaids. A few giggled and covered their mouths with fingers, how Asian girls do. All were watching him, definitely with more interest than worry.

“Bet you they’ll smoke my cigarettes,” he said.

“They must be hungry. And thirsty.”

“We should help.”

“Can we?”

“Offer whatever we have.”

Back in the tent I found five more bottles of water, three apples and pears, plus an unopened box of six granola bars. Transferring Mom’s digital camera and Dad’s phone out of a knapsack, I filled it with the food. His real shorts were folded up in a corner, the belt still attached. I asked if I should bring them.