winning

E-Yah!

/ PilotKay / Leave a comment

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Goddamn, I’m tired.

Lijuan ‘Alice’ Fung shook herself awake with a start, and wondered if she’d actually missed the ferry home to Kowloon while she snored away some of the long night of office cleaning at the Peng Building in Sheung Wan.

In Mandarin, Li-Juan Fung meant ‘beautiful and graceful bird’.  But with all due respect to the honored, long-dead parents who named her, right now Alice felt a lot more like an old goat.  No imminent, glorious flight here, she thought; just a lot of bone-ache and back spasms.

‘E-yah’, she said to no one in particular, as she noticed that the Star Ferry she’d meant to be on was, in fact, already docked across the bay.  At least the next one’d be along in twenty minutes and she wouldn’t be too late.

I’ll still have time to shower, make a bowl of congee with that leftover chicken, and maybe even watch half of my TV soap before taking the #23 bus to the early afternoon pai-gow game with my useless cousins.

Gotta keep sharp.  The only way to have another good weekend in Macau was to keep playing, keep learning, and keep figuring out the angles.  All that, plus a whole lot of joss, and maybe, just maybe, her winning streak in the glittery casinos would keep rolling.  Fortune had certainly been with her.  More or less.

Work wasn’t nearly so glorious, and lately it’d been even worse.  The Pengs were cold, ungrateful bosses, who hadn’t given her a raise in who knows how many years.  She was fairly certain she was heading to an early grave because of the cheap cleaning products they made her use as she went from floor to floor six nights a week. 

Recently, the Pengs were even more irritable, as they negotiated the sale of the building to a Kowloon holding company, which was surprising given it had been the cornerstone of their very profitable Hong Kong real estate empire.  It was, after all, a very solid building – well-built, good location, with fairly reliable, established white-collar tenants.  It even had decent congee downstairs in the restaurant, although their lai wang bao were disgusting.

Alice looked back across the landing, and noticed that the ferry was about to dock.  It was the Meridian Star, which meant nothing to her other than she knew all the classic Star Ferry ships had ‘Star’ in their name.  How much this city has changed, she mused.  The Star Ferry was once the only reliable, affordable way to cross the bay between Hong Kong and Kowloon.  But with multiple (expensive) underground tunnels for traffic and the MTR, and all the land reclamation projects, the Ferry was being relegated to nothing more than a tourist must-do.  Still, she thought, she’d used it her whole life.  No sense switching now.

She climbed aboard the green, black and white ferry, and took her favorite wooden bench seat on the sunny side of the ship.  As she did, the first smile of the daylight hours crept across her face.

She couldn’t wait for her purchase of the Peng building to close next week, so she could finally tell those pig-fuckers what she thought of them.  Thank you, Macau. E-yah!

“I remember you like the spicy food”

/ PilotKay / 1 Comment

“I remember you like the spicy food”, Juan, the painter, said proudly as he asked to use my downstairs bathroom.  Juan was a truly nice guy, but his English was still a little on the broken side.  Lord knows it was better than my truly-busted Spanish.

Juan’s mention of my fondness for chilies was, I knew, his way of reaching out to me, bridging the language divide enough that we both felt good about his decision to ask to use my bathroom.

I don’t think Juan realized that while he’s been here working on this particular paint job, updating my daughter’s one bedroom wall from her toddler pink to her very-specific tweener purple, that he’s been mere feet away from my growing crisis of faith.  Even if he knew, I bet he’d be relieved that our respective language limitations safely precluded a dive that deep into one another’s lives.

Have you ever painted anything?  I mean a real multi-hour job kind of painting, like a room, a table or a canvas?  Like most tasks in life that you don’t routinely tackle, painting starts with those first tentative strokes, those first anxious moments of a beginning.  Did I get the right brush?  Is the paint the right color and type?  Did I tape the edges so it doesn’t look like I had a seizure every couple of inches?  It’s one of two moments of truth in any endeavor.  It’s The Beginning.

I’ve often needed to remind myself that courage can be defined as ‘being afraid, but going anyway’.  And you need a little courage to start a paint job, because it always opens up some part of your personal box of fears and insecurities.  But you know you have a job to do, and you get on with it.  Courage.  Belief.  Hope.

Then a great thing happens.  You start to get into the groove swing of the painting.  Strokes become more sure and even.  Rhythmic.  You take less paint from the container and drip less on your pant leg, and find less of it smeared on the sides of your fingers.  You start to think of other things.  In fact, you think of anything other than painting most of the time…this middle time.  You drift into that other place.

To me, it’s like swimming under the surface of the ocean.  You go as deep as you feel like going, only occasionally surfacing for a breath of air.  Or in the case of the painting, you come back into the here-and-now, and make the required observations and adjustments to your progress.  And then you go back under again.  Focus.  Lack of focus.  Here.  Not here.  Linear.  Parallel.

Before you know it, you’ve come to the end, and as with all endings, the other moment of truth arrives.  The Ending.  How did it go?  How does it look?  Was it worth the effort?  It takes a different kind of courage to face an ending; an even worse kind.  For it’s far scarier to end something than to start it, and even more terrifying to evaluate your own ending.  Courage.  Belief.  Hope.

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