Kylie Chan - Red Phoenix

‘Why did you say he has scales?’ April said. ‘He’s a turtle ,’ Louise said with relish. I glanced up quickly. April inhaled sharply, her eyes very wide.

‘You say that about Emma’s man? You insult Emma too? What a horrible thing to say!’

‘What?’ Louise said, not understanding. ‘What did I say?’

April leaned across the table towards Louise. ‘You said he’s a turtle ,’ she hissed.

‘That’s a shocking insult, Louise,’ I said.

‘Is it? No wonder the Tiger says it all the time.’ Louise grinned. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Man who cannot satisfy wife,’ April said, very softly. ‘Wife turns to other men.’

‘Cuckold,’ I said.

‘Whoa.’ Louise’s eyes widened with delight. ‘Cool. Good one.’

‘Same thing as wearing a green hat,’ April said.

‘Why turtle?’ Louise said. ‘Why is that particular animal the insult?’

I didn’t want to discuss it. ‘I have no idea.’

‘I don’t know either,’ April said. ‘Just turtle is very offensive animal. Lot of insults attached to it.’

I studied them. April: living in dreamland, believing she had a family when she only saw her man every few weeks. Louise: willing to share a man with more than a hundred others. And me.

I was probably the most pathetic of us all.

‘Will I still be able to see you, Louise?’ I said.

‘Since you know all about it, you might be able to talk to me occasionally,’ Louise said, still obviously happy. ‘Don’t count on anything; usually when we go there we’re gone for good. Never seen again.’

‘What?’ April said. ‘You don’t mean that, do you? I don’t understand.’

‘Your poor family,’ I whispered.

‘Thoroughly worth it.’ Louise glanced down at the dishes. ‘Is this what we ordered?’

I looked at the dishes as well and sagged. ‘Nope.’

‘The economic downturn hasn’t affected this place at all,’ Louise said as she tried to catch the waiter’s eye. ‘They still act as if they’re doing us a favour by letting us eat here.’

‘I’m glad everything turned out for all of us,’ April said. ‘We’ll all be happy married women.’

I really did feel the need to bang my head on the table.

I tapped on John’s office door and opened it a crack. ‘Free to talk?’

‘Just let me save this file,’ he said, studying the computer, then turned and leaned his elbows on the pile of papers on his desk. ‘What?’

‘It’s May fifth. The festival’s started. And you haven’t done anything.’

‘ Aiya ,’ he said, and I giggled. ‘What?’

‘That’s an extremely Cantonese sound coming from you,’ I said, still smiling.

‘I’ve heard you say it too. You can pick people who have lived in Hong Kong for any length of time, even expats. They all say it.’

‘Cheung Chau,’ I said, bringing him back to the point.

‘ Aiya ,’ he said again. ‘It’s already started?’

‘The buns are up, John. The three effigies have already been built.’

‘When’s the big day?’

‘Three days from now. May eighth.’ I sighed with exasperation. ‘Why don’t you ever look in your diary?’

‘I have a secretary and I have you,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to.’

‘You forgot your own birthday, Pak Tai.’

‘You know it’s not my birthday,’ he said impatiently. ‘It’s the Buddha’s birthday. They just lumped me into the holiday because it was convenient.’

‘Did you know him?’

‘Who?’

‘The Sakyamuni Buddha.’

He hesitated, watching me, then, ‘No.’

‘What about the teachings?’

‘What about them?’

‘Are they true? The Buddhist Precepts?’

He sighed. ‘You know better than to ask me that, Emma. You know you have to find your own way.’

I shrugged it off, it was worth a try. ‘Okay, so when’s your birthday?’

‘You know I have no idea,’ he said. ‘After four and a half thousand years I’d challenge anybody to have an idea. I doubt if I was ever actually born, anyway. I just am.’

‘Well then, Eighth Day of the Fourth Moon it is. May eighth this year. Three days from now. Thursday.’

He leaned back and retied his hair. ‘ Aiya .’

‘I’ve already cancelled all your classes, and booked the boat to take us over. We leave at ten in the morning. Okay?’

He grinned broadly. ‘You already arranged it?’

‘Of course I did. You don’t think I’d leave it to you, do you?’

Cheung Chau was a dumbbell-shaped island about an hour’s boat ride from Central Pier. The island was only three hundred metres wide at its narrowest point and hardly any height above sea level. The two ‘weights’ on the dumbbell stretched to either side, and were slightly higher.

The island was completely packed with people for the festival. John carried Simone so that she wouldn’t be crushed.

The air was full of the noise of shouting, drums and gongs, and the smells of food and sweat. A thick pall of incense smoke hung over the entire island.

We stopped for lunch at one of the small restaurants near the pier before we went anywhere. The restaurants usually specialised in live seafood, held in tanks next to the kitchen. Diners could select exactly which fish and shellfish they wanted, how they wanted them served, and the restaurant would oblige. But for the week of the Bun Festival the entire island of Cheung Chau went vegetarian in Pak Tai’s honour. The butcher shops closed for the holidays.

After lunch we wandered through the packed streets to the Pak Tai temple. The bun towers stood proudly outside the temple, enormous ten-metre-high bamboo cones held by a bamboo scaffold. The buns were strung around the outside of the cones.

The tradition was that at the end of the festival, after midnight on the final day, young men would climb the towers to retrieve the buns for the crowd; a good-luck race. But in 1978, one of the towers had collapsed and some of the bun racers had been killed. Since then the buns had been distributed to the island’s residents by the clergy of the temple.

John wouldn’t talk about what had happened in ‘78. Apparently he hadn’t been present that year; normally he would have been there to make sure that nobody was injured. But in ‘78 he hadn’t been able to make it, and wouldn’t say why. It may have had something to do with him losing the Serpent about that time, but with a creature as strange as him it was impossible to tell.

Three enormous effigies had been constructed out of bamboo and brightly coloured paper, about five metres tall. They were of a black-skinned demonic-looking deity with horns; a benign elderly scholar with a flowing white beard and traditional robes; and another demonic-looking red-skinned figure. They were Dei Ching Wong, Ruler of the Underworld; Do Dei Gang, the Kitchen God; and Shang Shan, the God of Earth and Mountains.

There was no effigy of Pak Tai; he was far too awesome to be shown like that. But he would have his chance later.

After we’d lit some incense at the temple and John had bought Simone a brightly coloured good-luck pinwheel, we wandered back to John’s house on the island. No motorised vehicles were permitted on Cheung Chau, so the streets could be very narrow.

We stopped at a plain concrete three-storey village-style house on the main thoroughfare. John pushed the door open.

The lower floor of the house was paved with pale green tiles and had bare concrete walls. The living room was minimally furnished with old-fashioned rosewood furniture and a stained coffee table, with a folding mah jong table. A set of rusting metal bunk beds with faded silk quilts folded at the feet stood against the wall on one side. It appeared to be a typical island village house, like many rented out for holiday weekends. John led us up the stairs to the second floor.