Hayden's Ferry Review

Jody Chan

2024 HFR Contest fiction winner selected by Venita Blackburn

beginning, beginning, end

YAN & MEI

2019

 

MEI: What do you think happens when you die?

 

YAN: Starting off with the easy questions, I see.

 

MEI: This isn’t our first conversation.

YAN: I picture a hill, and at the end of it, the ocean. A hand in mine, but I’m running too fast to turn, to look at the face that the hand belongs to. The gravity of street signs draws me down: Fung Tak. Choi Hung. An empty minibus passes by me. Beyond the housing estates, the barbed wire crowning cobblestone. The old airport runways. When my toes touch the water, I dissolve. Not like sugar, like a dream. My edges pulled apart by the day. So too the pills, the pain, the ego, the shame, the police, the fences, the lacks, the longings. All the detritus of survival. All gone.


MEI: So death, to you, is absence?

YAN: Your grandma and I lived at the top of such a hill, once. Behind a door marked for orphans, whose key we were never given. I always wondered— how many blocks, how many breaths between us and the ocean?

MEI: How did you find each other again?

 

YAN: Like anyone does. Luck, social media. A pixelated photo in a square frame. The city I left, the face I loved.

 

MEI: Are you afraid of death?

YAN: The day I was diagnosed, I hadn’t seen her in nearly seventy years. Prognosis: stage 4 cancer, some single-digit tally of months. Yesterday, she blew on a spoon and fed me egg drop soup from its tip. Sometimes, an hour cracks open and inside it, a pale yolk of fear. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But your Popo Kit’s thumb skims my palm— it’s her hand, in the end— and the yolk breaks. Briefer than memory.

 

MEI: Like a building blurred behind a flock of birds?

 

YAN: Like the sound of a single bird flying away. No, even lighter. Like the shadow of a wing. And you, my Meimei? Are you afraid?

 

MEI: Yes. I am.

 

YAN: You’re young, yet.

 

MEI: I don’t want you to leave.

 

YAN: Listen. The ocean is singing. Who says I’m going anywhere?

YAN & KIT

1960

 

 

We did not have a word for what we were. The nuns who ran the orphanage, the other orphans— they would have said we were best friends. Or sisters. And we were. Sure. But it was other than that, too. Yan and Kit, Kit and Yan. Our childhoods braided together without separation. No beginning, no middle, noend.

 

When we were found, we were four and five. At that age, the one-year difference seemed immense. We celebrated our birthdays together, though they were months apart—one on the summer solstice, one during the thickest of the August heat. We had no records from before, anyway. What we marked, what passed for a birthday, was simply the date the orphanage nuns picked us up—on a garbage dump, in a dank stairwell, in a cardboard box, bundled in rags, outside a hospital, on the orphanage’s front steps, streaked with dirt, soaped and scrubbed, crying, not crying, abandoned, and lost. As if our lives began when we passed through the orphanage’s front doors. When the kitchen spared us a bit of ground meat, or half a boiled egg, we shared it.

 

Yan’s parents died in a flood while visiting family— rural villagers living by the whims of an angry river. A second cousin found her in a hammock tied between the upper branches of neighbouring pine trees. Kit’s parents gave birth to two children during the Japanese occupation. A girl and a boy. There was no work for them, under the imperial administration. Without work, there was no food. Daughter, or son? They could only choose one.

 

We didn’t know how we ended up at the orphanage. Did it matter? No one pitied us. Every girl—it was mostly girls—came from the same circumstances. Parents poor, or dead, or otherwise gone, it didn’t really matter how. The orphanage was a house full of daughters. And by 1956, fifteen thousand refugees from China were arriving in Hong Kong each month.

 

We were the oldest of the orphans, the least eligible. Prospective parents wanted their babies blank, impressionable. They rarely adopted anyone older than three years old; anyone with memories they could put words to. Children were meant to leave the orphanage by eight, but the nuns were short-staffed and overworked. Babies left to nurse themselves from bottles in their cots, two or three infants fed from the same bowl. We became older sisters, mothers, extra help. We mixed up juice, or milk when we had it, from powder. We boiled congee, thinning the porridge with more and more water, to extend our rice rations. We snapped biscuits in half. We held the babies two at a time, inventing our own lullabies to soothe them into sleep. We contrived games that needed nothing more than twigs and stones to play.

 

We weren’t technically allowed to leave the grounds unchaperoned. But on tepid summer days, we slipped through the side doors and onto the street. From outside, the orphanage’s five-story facade blended in with the apartment blocks surrounding it. We never escaped too far, or irreversibly. It was enough to pretend, for an hour or two, that we could. The mountains formed a ring around our small world, their proximity both comforting and deadening. Beyond the mountains, ocean. And beyond the ocean? Neither of us had climbed Kowloon Peak to see for ourselves, though we’d lived most of our lives in its shadow, breathing in its brazen green, its tree-capped hush.

Because we were found in the same year, we shared a last name. Tam: 譚. A complicated character, one whose vertical and horizontal strokes we both struggled to reproduce in our notebooks during writing class. An administrative convenience. Tam: a family defined by bureaucracy, not by blood. Our given names, we kept. These, at least, our parents had left with us. Some of the other girls, anonymous babies, were named by orphanage staff. Their files boasted English translations like bright mind, born beauty, lucky bird, in the hopes of enticing overseas adopters.

Yan and Kit, Kit and Yan. Our bodies belonged to us, but also to each other. As time stretched us, and puberty agitated our smells and desires and shapes, we took turns asking questions and attempting answers. How long are your arms? We lined up our shoulders and pinky fingers. What colour are your nipples? We took off our shirts. Where does your body fight against itself? We compared patches of eczema, mapping red half-moons on our necks and elbows. How does your hunger sound? We laid heads against stomachs, an ear cradled in the bowl of a ribcage, and the world rose and fell to the rhythm of our breaths. And your pain? We rubbed white flower oil into each other’s joints as our bones ached to accommodate their growing. Almost every dream we had was of floods. Sometimes, we woke with a wetness between our legs. How does it smell? We dipped our faces into the darkness and inhaled. It changed nothing between us. It changed everything.

Life in the orphanage was defined by waiting. Lining up for the bathroom, lining up for dinner. Hoping your adoption file would be passed into the right pair of hands—hands attached to stable occupation and secure housing and a gentle smile. The waiting droned on and on, like a bee in an open field. And so, sometimes, the waiting ended in sting and swell and burn. A pair of British schoolteachers came in one day, looking for an older girl. They taught at the English and Cantonese all-girls’ college on Tai Hang Road. Their friends in London, who had just adopted an eleven-month-old from our orphanage, wrote to them about parenting. Its unpredictable joys. Their precious Oriental treasure. The teachers, nearing retirement, wondered if they might find a quiet child to help around the home. A child who might doubly serve as an example of good British upbringing and civility to the other girls at the school. Of course they chose Yan.

 

Yan was the one who told Kit. I’m leaving, she said. Kit picked at her own hands. Her cuticles peeled away from her fingernails in thin strips. I know, she said. She had followed Yan to the office earlier, pressed her ear to the closed door. She had heard the nuns deliver the news, she had heard Yan weep into the hollow silence, the long afterward that followed. In what register, relief or dread, she couldn’t tell. Her own adoption prospects were slim to none. That, she knew. She was thirteen, almost fourteen; Yan was twelve. Her features were pinched, rigid; Yan’s were open, soft. Her best qualities were her seriousness, her affinity for self-sacrifice; Yan’s laughter was sunlight and somersaults stirred together. Kit: a stone dropped into water. Yan: the water, a rippling roof.

 

The night before Yan’s departure, after headcount and curfew, Kit crawled into Yan’s cot. We lay side by side, arms and legs braided.

You’ll have your own bedroom.

I’m going to miss you.

You’ll eat meat every day. And real fruit.

I’ll write to you, Yan said.

Kit rolled onto her side. Yan’s eyes were closed. I’ll find you, said Kit. When I get out of here. When they make me leave, she didn’t say. When I age out.

Let’s not fall asleep, Yan said, with a hot and sudden urgency. We can’t spend our last night together sleeping.

Okay. What should we do instead?

Yan tugged Kit close and kissed her. Kit slid her tongue over Yan’s collarbone. Under her shirt, Yan’s belly was cold. When Kit grazed her palms against Yan’s bare skin, we both shivered. We had to be very silent. Yan’s tears fell into Kit’s mouth. Kit’s face remained dry, though she wished she could cry too, that it would pull us closer. Closer even than when she whispered Yan’s name into her neck, like a secret. Closer even than when Yan’s fingers found their way inside her, like a wish. No, not like a wish. Like a promise.

 

If you ever get married, Yan said, You’re not allowed to love your husband like you love me. And I won’t ever love mine like I love you. Swear on it?

Ho la, ho la. I promise. Like that.

 

We didn’t sleep. We didn’t yet know how long a life could be.

The next morning, Yan wore her finest dress, an ankle-length cheongsam in lily-pink silk. Sister Thomas, who ran the nursery, had bought it for her. An act of pity, or charity, or both. Her new parents were waiting in the office. Yan’s adoptive mother donned a fitted dress, in a Western style. The pale yellow cotton washed out her pastel face. They mispronounced her name. They seemed kind. Yan scratched at a scab between her middle and ring fingers. The skin fell onto the ground. A stitch slipped. A door opened. A sister, a friend, an unlanguaged love. Fleeting, fleeting, lost. The sun was behind her. When she turned back on the threshold to wave goodbye, Kit couldn’t see her expression at all.

 

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Jody Chan is a poet, care worker, and community organizer based in Toronto/Tkaronto. They are the author of two books of poetry, sick (Black Lawrence Press) and impact statement (Brick Books), a member of Daybreak Poets Collective, co-host with Sanna Wani of the podcast Poet Talk, and an editorial board member of Midnight Sun Magazine.