Red Oblivion Read online

  “In view of the long history our families shared, I feel well within my rights to turn to you in our time of need,” I read. “What’s that supposed to mean? What is this long history, exactly?”

  “The two families were friends. Friends have history together.”

  “We are friends. My dad and this guy are not friends.”

  I bite into a slice of translucent jellyfish, which slithers over my tongue like something still alive. We’re at an old-school Shanghainese restaurant. White tablecloths and grey carpet and fluorescent lighting, like the place hasn’t changed at all since the 1950s, when it was a Shanghainese members-only club.

  “Let me tell you how a threat is structured. The letter would say: if you don’t pay up, someone’s going to come and smash your kneecaps. Or turn you over to the police. Or at the very least, expose you to your family. Some nasty consequence would be laid out. This letter does nothing of the sort. It just appeals to your dad’s conscience.”

  “Because Ba supposedly stole a bunch of their heirlooms!”

  “The letter doesn’t say he stole them. It says he hunted them down.”

  “Hunted them down and capitalized on them.” I keep chewing the jellyfish, which now tastes like soggy plastic.

  “Well, do you think there’s any truth to it?”

  “No, it’s absurd.” Sure, my father dabbled in the black market, but he’s no thief, for Christ’s sake.

  “Remember, it was a crazy time back then.” Terence’s voice seems to be floating, unanchored, as though he isn’t sure how far he should press his point, how much I can handle. “I’m assuming the letter writer comes from the landlord class. Or came from the landlord class, before the Cultural Revolution swept all that away.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The reference to family heirlooms.”

  “Oh … right.” It’s as though the details of the letter are only now catching hold in my exhausted brain, the shock finally wearing off. “Didn’t most heirlooms get destroyed around then? During the … what was it called? Attack the Four Olds campaign?”

  I try to remember what the Four Olds were. Old customs, old culture, old ideas … and there’s one other old that escapes me now. A bunch of kids in Red Guard armbands ran through the streets, ransacking temples and houses, slashing paintings, burning books, smashing furniture, and anything else they could get their hands on — all to prove their allegiance to Mao and the country’s utopian future. Intellectuals and anyone else tarred as bourgeoisie or capitalist roaders were harassed, interrogated, beaten.

  “My sister-in-law’s father was targeted,” Terence says. “He was forced to kneel for hours during struggle sessions while confessing his so-called crimes, wearing some ridiculous hat, in front of the whole community. Can you imagine? Eventually, the guy had had enough and he killed himself.”

  There are similar stories buried in my family, I tell Terence. Second Aunt’s husband came from the landlord class. Although she never talks about what happened back then, she harbours great bitterness. One of her sons died from the flu when he was little, because no doctor could be found to treat him. Doctors shied away from treating anyone of a bad class background.

  “I can’t believe they wouldn’t even help a sick little boy.” Terence shakes his head, bewildered. “Lovely country we live in.”

  Although I’m nodding, my mind’s circled back to what we were talking about before getting sidetracked. “If all the old treasures and heirlooms were smashed, why does the letter say my father ‘capitalized’ on them? What does that even mean?”

  “Perhaps not all the stuff actually got destroyed. The Party had a few secret collectors, I’m sure. They probably managed to protect a bit of the loot for themselves. Some of the stuff might have made its way into private collections, through the black market.”

  “That’d be right up my father’s alley.”

  I think of how proudly he used to recount his enterprising adventures. When it comes right down to it, I don’t think he’s ever seen much distinction between the black market and the market proper. For him, it’s all just the market. And the market has always been his oyster.

  Maybe that’s how he actually won his freedom — the travel permit and cash to return to Hong Kong. Did he take part in some smuggling scheme? Were those spoils the origin of his fortune, his fresh start?

  And now, one of the folks he ripped off wants payback.

  A restless sensation grabs hold of me, my skin turning hot and itchy, like I’m drunk, even though I’ve only had one beer. “So maybe my father did help himself to a few old vases that would’ve gotten destroyed anyway. I doubt that whatever he took is worth anywhere close to seven hundred K.”

  “That’s Hong Kong dollars, remember.” Terence tips his head back, doing some mental calculation.

  Dividing the figure by six, I arrive at roughly a hundred and twenty thousand Canadian dollars.

  “Sounds about right for what a year of schooling costs here,” he says, “tuition fees and apartment included.”

  “The kid’ll be living well. An apartment with a view of the harbour.”

  “Fine, they’re highballing a little. Maybe the money’s meant to cover more than one year. And the father has stock-market debts, too.”

  “It’s weird how he hasn’t even tried to conceal his son’s name. Benjamin Ma. He could’ve asked for the cheque to go to a corporate account, at least. What if I were to take this letter straight to the police?”

  “And say what? You’re being blackmailed? As I was saying, it doesn’t sound very threatening. It reads like one old man reaching out to another, cashing in on an old favour, settling the books, as the letter says. And these people are simple folks. Corporate bank accounts and anonymous money transfers aren’t on their radar.”

  “Huh.”

  “You don’t sound very convinced.”

  My hand jostles the teacup, knocking it over, brown water seeping into the tablecloth. I watch the stain expanding and losing colour. I think of Ba’s troubled sleep, his terror of slipping away into the abyss. Maybe whoever wrote the letter thinks that Ba will jump at the chance to make up for whatever he did. Cleanse his conscience.

  “Why don’t you ask your father what to do?” Terence says. “Read him the letter, see what he has to say.”

  “He’s in no state.” An image of him clutching his chest and seizing up again fills me with dread.

  “Well, I guess you’re on your own, then. My advice? Bring your old man home from the hospital and let him die in peace.”

  Rina’s still up when I get home. She’s in the kitchen, making herself a cup of tea, and asks whether I’d like one, too.

  Shaking my head, I turn away, unable to bear her bright gaze.

  She senses something’s up. “Ma’am? Are you all right?”

  I hesitate. With the language barrier between us, I don’t feel capable of explaining the possibility that Ba ripped off a bunch of heirlooms during the chaos back then. Also, part of me thinks that Ba is coming home to rule the roost; he’s still Rina’s employer. It seems wrong to undermine him by exposing his shady ventures. Or maybe I just don’t want to admit that my father is a crook.

  It was a mad, confusing time. Ba, being Ba, couldn’t help but sniff out enterprising opportunities from the rubble and ruins. He must have thought that all the old treasures were going to be destroyed anyway, so what difference would it make if he salvaged a few and used them for his own ends?

  Ba’s a survivor, a scavenger. Growing up in poverty wires a person’s brain very differently, I believe.

  “Nothing’s happened, Rina. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.”

  Her eyes fall downward. “Ma’am, your sister told me about dead mouse.”

  I brush aside my irritation with Celeste. Well, I suppose Rina would have found out sooner or later. When Ba comes home, he’s going to be asking her to check the mailbox multiple times a day.

  “You know who sent it, ma�
��am?”

  “I have no idea.” I make an effort to keep my voice calm, indicating that I’d like her to do the same.

  But the poor woman doesn’t seem to notice, her lips pinched like they’re trying to hold in an inflating balloon.

  Then it occurs to me that maybe she knows something. Maybe she has her own suspicions about who sent the package. After all, before Ba’s collapse, she’s the one who spent the most time with him. “Did my father ever say anything …?”

  She begins shaking her head, pacing back and forth. “Sir never tell me … but … but …”

  “But what?” Grabbing her by the arm, more roughly than intended, I manage to get her to stop moving. “What is it, Rina?”

  “Every week, you know how sir want me to come with him shopping for food so I can carry bags?”

  It’s ridiculous how controlling my father is. In any other household, the housekeeper would do the shopping on her own, but Ba worries that Rina won’t bargain at the market aggressively enough or she’ll pocket a bit of change.

  “Well,” she continues, “a month before sir get sick, I notice someone following us behind. A man.”

  “Someone was following Ba?”

  A feeble nod.

  “What did this person look like?”

  “Maybe I mistake. I don’t know. That why I not come to you before now, ma’am.”

  “It’s all right, Rina. Just tell me what you saw.”

  “Sir and me, we walk along Robinson Road to ParknShop. It start raining, so I turn around to put up umbrella. That’s when I notice man in white T-shirt, baseball cap. In ParknShop, I see him in aisle again. Then at fish market, too. A few weeks later, the same man following again!”

  “Are you sure it was the same guy?”

  Although Rina shrugs, her eyes remain fearful and quite certain.

  “Well, what did he look like?”

  “Chinese man.”

  That hardly narrows things. “How old?”

  “Not too young. Not old, either.”

  “Around my age?”

  “Maybe. No, younger. A bit.”

  “Short? Tall?”

  “Your height, ma’am, maybe.”

  About five and a half feet.

  “Fatter, though. Not fat. Hard.” She grasps her upper arm.

  “Muscular, like he works out?”

  A hesitant nod.

  “Did he ever try to approach Ba?”

  “No, just watching us. Sunglasses on. But inside supermarket, he take glasses off for a second. And then, I notice …” Rina points to the edge of her eye.

  “There was something weird about his left eye?”

  She draws the shape of a large teardrop. “Brown spot.”

  “He had a birthmark?”

  “A birthmark?”

  “Yes, a birthmark. That’s what it’s called.”

  We continue staring at each other, though there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say.

  “Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Rina.”

  As she turns to go, I reach out and grab her wrist. A thought darts through my brain, quick as a lizard. “I’m just wondering — this guy you saw? Do you think he could be a university student?”

  “I don’t know …?”

  “But he’s around that age, right? Younger than me, you said.”

  She nods.

  After she’s left, I wander into the living room and perch on the edge of the sofa, my brain in overdrive. It makes sense that the kid — Benjamin Ma — would want to track down my father and see where he lives. Follow him around to get a sense of his daily routines. Get a feel for how much money our family could be fleeced for. Fury, mixed with a confused sense of injustice, surges over me. Even if Ba did seize his start-up capital through underhanded means, that doesn’t mean that all our money’s tainted. Ba still had to work hard, using his brains and instincts. I wonder if Benjamin even goes to university or if that’s just a cover story, a scam — no different from Ba’s tale about how he escaped from Guangzhou. These people have the nerve to accuse my father of being a crook, but how do I know that they’re not the real crooks? It takes one to know one, after all.

  “At least now we know what we’re dealing with,” Celeste says, clutching the letter. While sipping her first coffee of the day, she rereads it, with all the concentration of a lawyer assessing a damning piece of evidence.

  It startles me to see how calm my sister appears. More than mere calmness: her face emits a flushed glow of superiority.

  “Whatever the case,” she continues, “we know that Ba’s guilty of something. Sounds like he ripped off these people’s heirlooms. And probably a lot worse.”

  “We don’t know that.” But a nauseous feeling assails my gut, as last night’s conversation with Terence echoes in my head.

  “So what now?” Celeste uses her pyjama sleeve to clean smudges off her glasses. “I say we pay up. There’s more than enough blood money to go around.”

  “You must be joking.”

  My sister returns my gaze, perfectly straight-faced.

  “We have no idea whether there’s any truth to this,” I say. “To these … these allegations!”

  “Oh, please. Just think about it for a second, okay?” Her eyes glint with sudden anger, frustration. “I’ve had suspicions since we were kids. Haven’t you? If you’re honest with yourself?”

  When I remain silent, my sister looks at me with disgust. Like I’m either a perfect coward or too stupid for words.

  “No one makes that much money so fast,” she says. “Think about it, Jill. Ba returned to Hong Kong in ’68, destitute, jobless. By ’72, he owned a supermarket, this condo, and half an office tower. Where did all that money come from?”

  I’m beginning to recognize a different side of my sister now: a steely, practical, ruthlessly logical side. How I yearn for the whimsical, scatterbrained Celeste.

  A glum, lethargic look passes over her face as we sink into silence. “You know, I really don’t want any of it,” she says at last.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ba’s money. The blood money.”

  I sigh. Why does my sister always have to be so melodramatic? “Look, it doesn’t matter which one of us manages it. I’ll take care of the money for both of us. That goes without saying.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I really don’t want it!” Her shoulders tremble as though she’s trying to shake off a ghostly chill or a terrible premonition. “You take it. You’ll do with it whatever Ba wants you to do and continue the cycle of profit-making carnage.”

  Again, I sigh, weariness hitting me.

  “You know,” she goes on, “all I ever wanted when we were kids was for Ba to stop counting his money and talk to me, see me. ‘Hey, Celeste, I see you’ve taken up the flute. What made you choose that instrument? And is everything going all right at school? Do you like your new teachers?’ But do you remember what he’d be doing Sunday afternoons?”

  Of course I remember. Sunday was the one day of the week Ba took off. Yet he’d still be working as he puttered around the condo in his old clothes, calculator tucked into his cardigan pocket, never far from his fingertips. He was calculating interest rates, he was double-checking the math on his investment gains and losses, he was reviewing the housekeeper’s shopping receipts against the amounts she’d entered in the ledger book. And many other things, I’m sure. Everything in life was a calculation, in our father’s eyes.

  “You know how much I came to hate that calculator?” Celeste says, throwing up her hands. “It was me — I was the one behind the defective batteries he kept getting stuck with. Remember how pissed off he’d get?”

  I remember all too well. Every few Sundays, Ba’s calculator would die and he’d be forced to walk all the way to Central to buy new batteries. It baffled him how he kept getting cursed with lemons. How livid he’d become, demanding that store owners give him his money back.

  “That was you? You kept fucking u
p his batteries?”

  “I’d wait until Ba was in the shower. And then I’d open his calculator and remove the batteries. I’d cut ever so tiny pieces of clear tape and place them over the ends, before putting the batteries back inside.”

  A giggle wells up, quickly swallowed — disloyalty leaving an unpleasant taste in my mouth. “Wow. Nicely done. You definitely succeeded in ruining Ba’s day. Many days.”

  The sarcasm in my voice makes her aura of satisfaction fade. A sunny glare takes over. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, Jill. Ba deserved it every bit. You know he did.”

  From Queen’s Road, I wander into Landmark, past Louis Vuitton and up a couple escalators that lead to Manolo Blahnik. From there, I make my way into the core of Landmark — which is really just a fancy, monumental name for a luxury shopping mall — and edge my way around the perimeter of a giant, light-filled atrium, populated by Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and Dior.

  I’m not in the mood to shop, or even window-shop. Right now, I just want to walk alone for hours, until my feet turn numb. And this retail labyrinth stretches for miles — beyond the atrium, a glass bridge leads across multiple lanes of traffic toward a silver-clad building marked ARMANI. Why would I dare to venture outside and fend for myself, crossing the busy streets, when it’s so much easier to follow the path in front of me? One mall feeds into another, new vistas of glimmering, opalescent walls appearing at every turn. Dramatic cliffs of consumerism beckoning me forward with their endless, traffic-free walking space.

  For the longest time, whenever I’d think of my mother, shopping was the first thing to spring to mind. I wonder, now, if it was really the shopping that enticed her or if she simply needed someplace to escape to, and malls in this city were the only option.

  I’m reminded of a passage in a book by Aldo Rossi that I read back in architecture school. Rossi writes about how we tend to see the house of our childhood, strangely aged, in the city as it changes around us. If my mother were alive today, I imagine, our condo would have this shade of curtain, that hue of bathroom tile. Some essence of her seems to be in the air around me, her ghostly presence: faint, fading notes of mint and jasmine. As tears cloud my vision, I can almost hear her voice, touched with both worry and disdain. “Why are you living your life in the past, Jill? You think you’ll always be young, but the truth is you’re not even young now. Let your father be. He’ll be a ghost soon enough, anyway. You have your own life to live.”