Planet Lolita (3 page)

I kept silent.

“Okay,” she added, “you’re not ready. I get it.”

“I think I look like her,” I repeated.

“Who?”

“The girl wearing my hat.”

She studied her phone again. “A little. Except she’s grown-up.”

“She’s only a year older.”

“This hottie is sweet sixteen? You sure?”

“She told me.”

“The final photo especially,” Rachel said, holding the screen up to the camera. “She’s doing fuckable.”

Images don’t transfer from screen to screen, leaving me staring at a rectangle of black. Still, I knew the photo she was describing. Meaning I had emailed all three, and failed to recall this as well.

“Not Milan runway or
Cosmopolitan
,” my sister said. “Not ‘You want to fuck me, but it’s a fantasy.’ She’s doing ‘You
can
fuck me, if you pay.’”

“Rachel!”

“Adult life lesson number one, Baby Kwok. This is a wet T-shirt shot! A teen wankadesiac. Can’t you see it?”

I examined the third photo on my own phone, the one of Mary pretending sexy. Her dress had gotten splashed. She was chilled from spending a night on a boat.

“Her perky nipples, dummy,” Rachel said. “You made sure to
include them in the frame … Are you maybe the youngest fifteen-year-old on the planet?”

“Definitely not,” I replied. “Kimberley Tsoi’s parents don’t let her watch YouTube. She didn’t even know Justin Bieber.”

She sighed. “In this case, it’s probably a good thing. It’s why you and Miss Asian Lolita here don’t look alike. Don’t look the same, talk the same language, or live in the same country. And be grateful for that fact,” she said. Her expression betrayed surprise at her own words. Which made sense—she’d never sounded like Leah MacInnes before. Our mom, who didn’t care about me, and Rachel said she hated.

“Mary’s a good girl,” I said, feeling teary.

“Who’s that?”

“Her.” I pointed to the phone still in her hand.

“Her who?”

I explained about our conversation on the beach, and her telling me her name, and it being Mary, in both Cantonese and English.

“Dad’s really got you hooked on that Catholic mumbo-jumbo, hasn’t he?” my sister said. “Or is it Gloria?”

“It’s her name.”

“There’s no chance this girl’s name is Mary. You just wanted to hear it. And that chain
will
break. And you
will
lose your precious Jesus stick.”

I quit zipzipping the cross. We paused for so long that Manga, curled on my bed, whimpered.

“You honestly don’t remember sending me the photos?” Rachel finally said.

“No.”

“Or the ride into Sai Kung?”

“Or much of the hike out from the beach,” I said.

“When did it happen?”

“On the bus, I’m pretty sure. I remember everything becoming bright and clear. Then I remember Mom shaking me at the village terminal, telling me that I’d had one.”

“A seizure?”

“An episode.”

“Did you take your pill this morning?”

“That’s the first thing she said—‘Did you take your pill?’ Like she wasn’t on Tai Long Wan with us, and didn’t notice that we’d been busy, and maybe someone might not have thought to swallow a pill, especially without water. She can be so nasty,” I added. “I don’t know why.”

“Because she’s married to him?”

“I went through my searches for the day,” I said, ignoring her remark. “I’d looked up two words, probably once we got a signal on the path. Do you know what a mamasan is? I figured it was a first name.”

“Polite Japanese for pimp,” Rachel answered. “The woman who runs the brothel and runs the girls.”

My tummy flipped.

“What’s the other word?”

I told her.

“Furtive?” she said.

There was a knock, and Gloria entered.

“She doesn’t wait to be invited?” my sister said.

I switched off my phone. When we first started doing FaceTime, the sound of Rachel’s voice freaked Manga out. Shih Tzu are normally as quiet as Buddhas, but he would yip-yip and jump down from the bed, nosing beneath it and scratching at the closet door, in case she was hiding in there. Gloria wasn’t much better, describing my appearance for Rachel and asking me to ask her
questions. She couldn’t believe my sister was live on the screen—was in the bedroom, courtesy of the digital superpowers—and could see and hear us almost as well as we could see and hear her. Two months ago I gave her my old Mac and told her to tell her son, Miguel, to use some of the money she sent every month to buy a web camera. Only once she began seeing and hearing her family in Batangas City, Luzon, did our amah get how people talk now, how we connect. Though Manga still didn’t get it, he eventually settled down, wagging his tail when Rachel called to him, his eyes perplexed behind his emo-boy bangs. Her absence-presence became yet another doggie-life mystery, like the stone Shih Tzu that served as temple guardians around Hong Kong.

“Lean over,” I said to the only helper either of us had known. “Rachel can’t see you.”

Gloria Bella smelled of clove hair oil and Tiger Balm. She wore flip-flops non-stop, and was my Filipino mom.

“Rachel-boo,” she said.

“A mask, Gloria?”

Most of Gloria’s face squeezed next to mine inside the icon. The SARS mask dangled from the earlobe that was on camera. I wished she’d taken it right off.

“Another
epi-dem-hick
comes,” she said. “Any day now.”

“Comes to the Kwok-MacInnes residence?” Rachel said.

“To whole city.”

“We took showers the second we got home,” I said.

“SeeSee, not you,” Gloria said, putting my name first in her sentence, the Filipino way. She straightened up and out of the camera eye. “Those women on the beach this morning, maybe they are sick already. Last time, one Chinese man goes to wedding in Kowloon, he brings the killing flu.”

I’d told Gloria about Tai Long Wan. Not the details, or anything
about Mary. Just the facts. Already she’d twisted them, as usual.

“Dad said that we won’t wear masks this time either,” I told my sister.

“I could have guessed.”

“Your father is fool,” Gloria said, “and I hope he hears me call him this.” But she lowered her voice, in case.

“He says Hong Kongers never see waves, only tsunamis,” I said.

“And Mr. Clark, he is tsunami or wave?” Gloria said of the lower-school headmaster at East Island, the school that Rachel had graduated from in June and I still attended, grade ten. He’d been off sick for a month, and there were rumours. We’d both known Eric Clark for nearly as long as Gloria Bella.

“Is it definitely SARS?” Rachel asked.

“Who’s saying that?” I said.

“Everyone,” she replied, meaning everyone on Facebook. “Remember how he stood in the school entrance each morning, calling the kids by name and hugging the little ones? And how they’d all line up for a squeeze? He was a creepy Dumbledore, minus the beard.”

“Not creepy,” I said. “He smells nice.”

“Don’t tell me …”

“No! My last hug from Mr. Clark was a year ago, almost.”

“You’re not his variety of jailbait,” my sister said, her second nasty comment in as many minutes.

Gloria said goodnight to her, even though it was good morning in Toronto. She had trouble with time zones as well.

“What?” I said once the door was closed. But I knew.

“She’s our amah, SeeSaw, not our parent.”

I hated this conversation as much as the one about Mr. Clark. Strands of hair fell back before my eyes. I twisted a few.

“Sorry I’m not there for you,” she said.

“Because of the
epi-dem-hick?
”

“Your problem. Your condition.”

“When I was told about it, I knew right away what you’d have said if you’d still been living with us.”

“What’s that?”

“‘No big deal, Baby Kwok—I’m also damaged goods!’”

“Fucking A,” Rachel said.

“I wish Mom or Dad had said something nice,” I added.

“I wish they had too.”

“He just joked how he was pretty sure he hadn’t dropped me on my head when I was little.”

“Ha ha, Dad.”

“She freaked out for a few days, like I was going to die. Then she went to work making sure I got the best treatment.”

“Leah’s good at getting to work. It’s all she can usually handle.”

I didn’t know what Rachel meant by that, and didn’t want to. It had been a long, strange day.

“One request,” she said. “Two, actually.” The first was that I quit chewing my hair. The second was a shock.

“Do the parentals know about the photos?” she said.

“Dad saw me take them.”

“Did she?”

I shook my head.

“You’re sure?”

“I remember everything about the beach,” I said.

“Don’t tell her, or Gloria, okay? Don’t tell either of them about Mary.”

“Won’t Dad tell Mom?”

“Definitely not.”

“Not saying anything feels wrong.”

“Not saying to Mom, or to Gloria?”

“Both,” I answered, though I really meant my amah.

“Uh-huh,” Rachel said.

Petit mal was why I was now the girl with the condition, the problem, treatable with valproic acid, 250 milligrams per pill, three times a day. Small epileptic seizures that I might grow out of, or might not. For years I’d been Spacey Xixi, the one who never listened to her parents or teachers and couldn’t remember the simplest things. That child was dopey and none too bright, but cute and loveable, another shaggy-haired mutt. Nice Xixi/Sarah. There there. But a fifteen-year-old who has to swallow stuff in order to stop the brain disturbances that last only a few minutes and are difficult to detect—some of us flutter our eyelids and smack our lips, pouty starlets at the premieres of movies we aren’t even in—and which leave gaps in memory, deep, narrow crevasses that are scary to look down, never mind to fall into and get stuck, shouting help! help! while basically waiting to die, alone and sad and with terrible skin? She wasn’t cute at all. She was damaged goods. She was mal-brained.

Better that I’d never found out. But I did, in early September, and with the specialist, Dr. Wilson, saying the diagnosis of absence seizure epilepsy had been confirmed, there was no going back to being that earlier Xixi/Sarah. Rachel had left for Canada a week before nurses strapped a suction-cup cap onto my skull, called an EEG. She didn’t really know her little sister anymore.

Before she fled Hong Kong for boring commerce classes and non-stop partying in Toronto, Rachel showed me a trick. “They spy on us all the time,” she’d said, “or on me, at least. We have to spy
back.” Since the move to 2201, 26 Old Peak Road, sixteen months ago, parental conversations of any importance had been occurring on the balcony, the sliding door clicked shut. Once, Mom accidentally pocket-dialled me, and I listened to five minutes of adult snarls until I ended the call. But otherwise the door, and the low, steady roar of Hong Kong, sealed them outside, him smoking and drinking at the railing, her seated at the table checking for texts and sighing.

Rachel’s old bedroom, where Dad now slept, had a window onto the balcony. Crack it ahead of time and keep the curtains drawn, squat or kneel below the ledge, and voices would come trickling in, easy as water under a door. Important to lock Manga in my room at the far end of the apartment, and under no circumstances bring a phone or emit a cough, even with cancer smoke passing through the crack as well.

Tonight, he was smoking and drinking—ice clinked in his glass—and she was reading messages between sighs. For a while they blah-blahed about how “flu-like symptoms” could easily graduate to “atypical pneumonia” and “acute respiratory distress,” and how “in this country” microbes jumped from animal to human with “terrifying ease.” If that happened, “all hell will break loose again.” Mom considered Asia an infected pool, smelly and scummy and coated in floating fish, and loved frightening everyone with warnings to Keep Out, to not dip a toe. She did the doom talking. He said “okay” and “right” and lit another tumour, poured another vodka.

At last, they moved on to an interesting subject.

“Any idea which Triad?” she said.

“The 14K, maybe. Or the Sun Yee On. They run most of the massage parlours in Mong Kok and control the Guangdong coast. Not that I’m any expert.”

“If you say so.”

“It’s true.”

“Tell me you don’t know anything about the Sun Yee On, Jacob. Tell me you don’t make it your business to be aware of whose food, liquor, and prostitutes you’re paying for in Shenzhen.”

“Don’t forget the opium dens.”

“Here’s what I know,” she said. “Earlier today those women we met on the beach were escorted to the apartments where they’ll be imprisoned, in effect, for the next several months. They’ll be cleaned up, told what clothes to wear and what makeup to put on, and be working shifts in the clubs and parlours by tomorrow. Lap dances, blow jobs, getting screwed in every hole—they’ll be expected to do it all. Most will be fine, but a few will struggle, like the too-pretty one wearing Sarah’s hat. She seemed fragile.”

“She thinks her name is Mary.”

“That child …”

“She says the girl introduced herself that way.”

“One or two may even commit suicide, their bodies dumped in international waters. The odd corpse washes back to shore, the faces gone.”

“Were they trafficked?”

“More likely they paid for their spots on the boat. Loads of superfluous females in Guangdong, as you well know. Cheap pussy couldn’t be easier to come by.”

“Are we going to have this conversation again?” Dad said. He sounded sad.

“You’re right. Sorry.” She stood, the legs of her chair scraping concrete, probably to watch the tram ascend the slope beneath us, its lights flickering up through branches. For the first year we lived in Mid-Levels, I never knew when the tram to Victoria Peak would climb past our building, and didn’t care. But once Rachel
went away and I had no one to talk to except Gloria and Manga, I taped the schedule to my bedroom wall. Every night since late August I’d slipped onto the balcony three minutes after a listed departure, and first listened for the grind of the cable, and then checked for the lights below. Only once had the Peak Tram failed to be at the exact spot at the exact minute. During a Black Rainstorm Warning—a typhoon, basically.