Precarious Precision

Daddy was precise. Precarious! So precarious, Mum complained, as long as he was alive, about the way he was, the way he couldn’t help being. When he died, we the children found in his wardrobe several clear plastic bags of coins, sorted by value: the tiny, golden ten-cent coin, so light it barely feels real; the curvy dodecagon that is the twenty-cent piece; a bauhinia graces heads on the elegant fifty cents, the way it does all the other new coins; “1” declares the value on tails of the one-dollar coin, the way roman numerals do them all; the two-dollar piece apes the twelve-sided polygon that is twenty cents, except that this is larger and silver like all the coins that cross the dollar bridge; five is weighty, the largest coin, thickened by layers; at ten, coinage reshapes, smaller, more manageable than five, although similarly stacked, and the only one to mingle silver and gold in its minting (fig. 7).

But mingled among each denomination were numerous foreign coins and the old, colonial coins, many with Queen Elizabeth II on heads. My favorite are the really old ones with King George V because these are solid, larger, weightier, real value in my childhood (fig. 8). Fifty cents (the largest denomination) bought two soft drinks with change to spare; at today’s exchange rate this is less than an American quarter, while a soft drink is at least ten dollars in vending machines.

The king: KG5 we called him, echoing the name of the English school that Chinese children could not attend in my childhood. A precarious notion, this once-separatist colonial attitude, because now these same English schools survive only because upper-middle-class and wealthy Chinese pay as much in tuition for their children to attend these so-called international schools as you might for an Ivy League education. To perfect their offspring’s English. To keep them away from rote learning at local schools (memorize multiplication tables, trigonometry formulas, historically significant dates, Chinese dynasties, the elements table, and the odes of Keats!). To prepare them for an ever more globalized economy where pennies from heaven rain most melodiously in English and Putonghua (or Mandarin), not Cantonese, the language of the city’s teeming masses.

Isn’t it precarious, this thing we call history? Almost as precarious as money.

Daddy wasn’t a collector. Mum collected, or at least she did once upon a time before motherhood got in the way, the way it did for some women of her age and times. Stamps, mostly, although she liked currency as well—bank notes—the greater value of paper compared to silver or gold simulations. But Daddy was precise, and the mini bus from our hilltop flat we call home cost exactly $3.30. Fourteen years after his death it costs $3.90 and is likely to go up soon. This mini bus is yellow and green and seats fourteen, its route from our hilltop locale to Kowloon Tong rail station and back.

Kowloon Tong. The station where you connect to life: trains that whisk you across the border to the Chinese mainland or take you to the island of Hong Kong (where the Fong, that international nightlife slope, is located) or to Lantau Island (site of the city’s airport that is rapidly running out of runway space). At Kowloon Tong, taxis line up patiently at the rank each day, buses head for hither and yon but mostly to the New Territories where verdant nature is sacrificed to house the teeming masses. At Kowloon Tong, Festival Walk gleams, a high-end shopping mall and commercial complex that is a little less high end now since its “breathtaking” completion (marketing language is so imprecise) the year my father died. Daddy might have liked this mall with its myriad restaurants and fancy groceries and designer goods, but I doubt it. It doesn’t feel either exclusive or marketplace-messy enough, the way the city used to be when he was alive. It’s just another shopping mall in just another globalized city, sanitized, where Bally reigns and imported Japanese tchotchkes cost twice those from China. But he would have liked the regularly cleaned toilets, a sign of progress, especially after SARS. Pestilence and war are the most efficient cleansers of humankind. Public toilets used to be as absent here as they still are in New York, and about as clean as the ones in Paris aren’t. Measuring civilization in toilet stalls.

I live on this same hilltop today, not entirely willingly, to help care for an aging mum with Alzheimer’s. The other day, I watched myself stack the last of my father’s coin hoard in neat piles: two, one, fifty, twenty, and two tens, exact change for the fare on the mini bus. The mini bus today, like all public transport, has a card reader for the ubiquitous Octopus, a transport cash card you refill (electronically through your bank or with cash at ticket machines) to travel to the world and back (it works on the airport express train line), to buy soda and snacks and medicine and tchotchkes from 7-Eleven or other messily unchained shops. Few still drop coins into the fare box or bother with cash. The other day, my young colleague at the university where I now work laughingly told me of an older woman friend who does not use Octopus, preferring to buy a ticket with coins from the machine instead to ride the trains. I laughed too because I also depend on my Octopus the way I once depended on Daddy to be his usual, precarious self, even after retirement, balancing coins in neat piles on his wardrobe shelf, piles so precarious that anyone could knock these over, although who this anyone is is a mystery known only to Mum, since their maid would never have dared open his or my mother’s wardrobe, especially not Mum’s, because she locked wardrobes and safes and front doors and gates, fearful of thieves—mainland refugees!—who would break in and rob us in this dangerous and precarious city. The city my parents emigrated to after the war and called home and raised us, the children. Not entirely willingly.

Can we precisely name these emotions we harbor about life and change? We, the children, are no longer children, any more than we are “we,” an emotionally charged foursome who hid life from parents and dreamed of lives away from our city. Three of us returned for a time as adults to live and work, and all of us come and go, come and go, following flight paths from wherever we happen to have last landed. Time, tides, and deregulated air transport. It has been precarious, keeping a foothold in this rootless city that survives on precision. Buses and trains run on time, and transport fares are calculated to the tenth cent (it used to be the fifth), even though only the elderly and eccentric use change these days. No flat fare for trains in this city-village of bean counters who once clicked their abacuses, long replaced by adding machines, calculators, computers and spreadsheets, eyeing that bottom line. Just like property developers who rule this city, our economy built on a paper tiger that roars the price per square foot, a number that rises and falls as unpredictably as the tides of the Yangtze and now even of the Mississippi.

My father had an adding machine in his office. The metal hammers imprinted long rows of figures onto its paper roll. Meanwhile Daddy inscribed numbers with a fountain pen onto large sheets of accounting paper, notebooks, invoices, bills of lading, bank deposit or withdrawal slips, back when human tellers were ATMs. His handwriting is almost as indecipherable as a medic’s scrawl, although we can read it. Genetics, perhaps, like my penchant for precision, despite my hopelessly messy life. Daddy was a neatnik as well, forcing crap into order the way I do my life.

Despite all attempts at order, when imprecision rears its ugly head, the result can be catastrophic, as it was for Daddy when his business collapsed. The problem with precision is that you will watch the collapse in disbelief and move numbers around so that things look neat enough again. And move them and move them until there are no numbers left to move, and you must face the empty bank account, the worthless share certificates you held onto too long and finally confess to your wife, it’s gone, all gone.

My mother echoed all gone for years. Bemoaned it. I heard it from the time I was ten or so for much of my life until her memory collapsed (almost all gone) and she could be spared the pain of remembrance.

I think about money these days, because I have a full-time job again (not entirely willingly) for the first time in over a decade.

For more than two decades, I embraced a parallel business existence to my writing life, working mostly as a marketing and management professional for multinationals in Asia and the United States, tripping around profit-makers that included printing companies, ad agencies, airlines, architects, corporate and private security, logistics and media, even a Wall Street law firm. I also briefly picked up contracts as a freelance research consultant for corporate trainers and venture capitalists or ran nightly production lines for design firms during periods of unemployment. Most of those years, I was employed full-time, except for a five-year hiatus spent traipsing around Europe trying to be a writer, after which I hung out at grad school in Massachusetts for as long as possible while completing an MFA in fiction.

When I quit my last corporate position in 1998 (the Asian Wall Street Journal, sometime before Murdoch besmirched the news of the world), I had no desire to work full-time again. Instead, I traded stocks and futures. Taught a little. Bought inexpensive property that accumulated value. Consulted occasionally, edited here and there. Wrote the odd commercial article or book review. Traveled. Instead, I reveled in the literary life, secluded at writers’ colonies or in far-flung lands, and wrote and published several more books. It was messy, precarious, and thoroughly imprecise.

But then Mum’s memory became precarious, and Precision blinked, looked me in the eye, declared: darling, it’s time to make order again.

Funny thing, the changes of life. Menopause wasn’t a big deal, but Mum’s memory loss was. Alzheimer’s is a way bigger deal than menopause. The latter is only physical and can be managed, the way money can. You cannot manage that which has no shape or physical certainty, and to date we still know too little about this change of life that mucks up memory to make any precise declarations that mean a hill of beans.

So instead I bean-count, making small hills of change atop an old chest of drawers, one that has come upstairs to my space through my parents’ lives. This small, oblong four-drawer piece was acquired many years ago, when exactly I do not know, but it is solid, crafted of wood and not modern pasteboard that collapses and warps. All it needed was a coat of paint and voilà, I can avoid buying cheap furniture that will end up on the garbage heap when Mum passes away. You cannot gaze too long at trash in this city, or any city, because the sight will repulse you, scramble your emotional circuits, paralyze your brain cells, even as you continue to consume. A material madness defines civilized life, and we measure progress by exporting garbage that we soon must lose in space.

Money appears in my bank account each month, a regular amount that is more income than I’ve earned in years. Cash accumulates because there’s little I really need to buy anymore. I pay off the last of my mortgages, buy new clothes for work, eat out and take taxis more often than I used to because time is again of the essence, with no more space to loaf. I measure my life in iPhone calendar segments: a breakfast meeting to counsel an anxious student at 8 a.m. because he must go to work afterward; a conference with my department head at 10 a.m.; remember to show up at the committee reviewing evaluative measures at noon and the subcommittee where gender matters at 2 p.m.; meet an overseas student in town at 3:30 p.m.; my publisher at 7 p.m. And so it goes. To where did time vanish, I wonder, now that order and precision reign again?

Daddy’s precision was leisurely, like loafing, because he eschewed working for others. As a child, my great treat was to visit his tiny office on Ice House Street, where giant ice blocks once were made and stored, but which was, by the sixties, Hong Kong’s version of Wall Street, more or less. My father is a Bartleby who laughs. I wonder if my willingness now to reinstate a full-time work life is partly due to his own unwillingness to do likewise. When his business collapsed, he refused to take any job. Mum begged, borrowed, and perhaps even stole, not money but dignity, all through Dad’s refusal to accept his situation, so that he could wear the public face that pretended his business was well. Even when I earned a pittance (as a grad student for instance), I was never really broke. Pennies hoarded, purchases postponed till money returned because in this messy, imprecise life I lead, I always manage to find a way to have money. Money did return to my father eventually, but at home we witnessed his face of depression and shame.

This face haunts me still.

I talk to Daddy here in his room, this creation of which he was once so proud, this solidly constructed mini house that has survived typhoons, subtropical humidity, and the Hong Kong Government’s bureaucratic angst for more than forty years. This UBW or unauthorized building works has outlived him and several decades of the Building Authority’s orders that demand it be removed, the way the owners of every “illegal” structure in Hong Kong have been so ordered but who regularly ignore such orders until that ultimatum. To date we have received several ultimatums but not the fatal one.

Daddy, I demand, how did you know when that time would pass, so you would one day wear a happier face again? He is silent, unwilling to reveal the secret of his existence. Did you ever doubt your choices in life, the responsibilities you shouldered for marriage, family, di wei?

Di wei. 地位. I can speak to Daddy now in Mandarin—Putonghua, the People’s Party calls it—because that was his Chinese, the Chinese I did not learn to speak in Hong Kong, the Chinese I studied in Massachusetts at grad school. 地位, your place in life, in society, the space that gives you face. An awfully precarious face, one that dominates socially conscious Hong Kong. Much more than mere status, it cuts so deep you might throw yourself off a building someday, as Leslie Cheung, the AIDs-infected actor, did, because it cuts into your hetero-loverboy face, your homoerotic beauty, your precariously real existence on screen that was the heart and soul of you. Or so we surmise.

If Daddy contemplated the jump—as an insurance salesman friend of mine did, fatally—he never said and still does not say, although I sometimes think he did. Once, when I was in my thirties, I called home from New York at Christmas as I did each year and told Daddy my life was a disaster. I did not mean to say that. What I wanted to say was that my then-marriage was fine, that work was going well, that I was earning a decent living after my penniless years as a writer in grad school, that he would not have to worry about me anymore. But I couldn’t utter the words I knew I should because they simply weren’t true. It did not matter that every Chinese gene in my body screamed stop it, stop crying, stop with the depression and shame that you’ve failed in your marriage, lost your job, maxed out your credit cards. My move to New York had been precisely planned. A corporate job offer, more money than I had ever earned in my life up to that point, my first paid-for-by-a-corporation move. A move my ex-husband agreed to, not entirely willingly, since he was doing fine as a jazz musician impresario in Cincinnati, his hometown, the city where I was simply too globally weird. A year and a half after our move to New York, the company was sold, and I was among the first downsized casualties. It was the irrationally crashing eighties, the bubble deflating, the air sucked right out of me. I was not to find another full-time job again for over a year.

It’s okay, it’s okay, he told me through my crying jag. What was okay? Was shame and depression just the nature of this precarious moment, the way it once was for him? I never spoke to Mum that year. Dad knew better than to pass her the phone.

I am luckier than my father. I have no family to feed, no face to lose among an extended family of global relatives who expected him, the eldest son of his generation, to be a pinnacle of success. We the children make few demands of each other. My sister picks me up from the airport when I flip between New York and here. I bring her jelly beans and sweet-smelling handmade soaps from America. Years earlier, this same sister lugged a heavy electric typewriter for me from London to Paris by train during my itinerant literary youth. Genetics perhaps, doing what matters to the other even if it makes no sense to you, the way Mum once did for my father.

You want me to do this, right? I ask thin air, hoping his voice will reassure me that this too will pass, this looking after Mother, the once-furious woman who made my life hell but toward whom I must be filial.

You want me to do this, right? I say to the air, as I make order out of Daddy’s coin hoard, living my days on our rooftop, working for a living again. The job forces me to live in Hong Kong. The job is at a university down the hill, walking distance in winter, a five-minute mini bus ride in summer, the easiest commute ever. It is certainly easier than the F train in the eighties that often broke down between Brooklyn to lower Manhattan, or the hour-long bus trek to the new office tower that leaked in Singapore, or the forty-minute drive around the ring road to the architects in Cincinnati, or the two-and-a-half-hour public transport relay (one way) to the ad agency in Hong Kong. Thank god for small favors, as my sister would say.

You want me to do this, right? I ask Daddy, when life with Mum gets too much, when I’m homesick for Bill and the life I left behind, freed of an employer. Do not bite the hand that—and I do not, never have in fact, because once you oblige yourself, your face depends on meeting that obligation, even if it is a contract entered into not entirely willingly.

Because he cannot answer me right away, as he did that Christmas years ago, I parse time by sorting through his coins. First, a separation into foreign and local because there were numerous coins from elsewhere, evidence of his travels, the global life he bequeathed us that made us who we are. We the children have lived here, there, and everywhere as if such precarious peregrinations are normal. It has made for a memorable life so far, so what right have I to complain?

But I do complain, and to shut me up there were Daddy’s coins.

Now the foreign coins are in their own hoard, awaiting future separation. The pre-handover colonials and post-handover Hong Kong ones are almost separate, and I think about how to cash in defunct money.

And each day, I make hills of the usable change on that flat white surface. Two dollars, one dollar, fifty cents, twenty cents, two ten cents. The hoard dwindles. When I remember to do so, I snatch a tiny hill on my way out to catch the mini bus; other times, I default to Octopus. It is life for now, and it’s okay, it’s okay, this precarious precision until the mini bus fare goes up and the hills must be rebuilt, or my mother’s condition worsens and new medical care is needed, or life intervenes and sends me another curveball of shame or depression, although these seem less frequent now, more manageable, like money.

I never did get Daddy’s answer.

Summer is at its peak, but eventually the air will cool into bearable again. The rains will be less drenching, the sun a lot less blistering. The coins sit silent in their precarious mounds. Life changes. Life’s changes. One less complaint.