"Amélie in Tuen Mun'' by Ye Si, translated from Chinese by Chris Song
Someone once said that Amélie looked as though she was born in Montmartre, but according to what she told us, this was not the case. She was born next to the Yuen Long Main Drain, and the house she lived in those years is now the third floor of B’s Chilled Rice Noodle Shop. Her father loved fishing, spending his days doing it and his nights selling fish porridge from a stall on a nearby cross-street, returning home in the wee hours. On the nights her father was away, her mother would read the Bible to her. From a young age, Amélie was fascinated by stories of angels and, like her mother, she did not care for fish. She would gaze at the patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling, conjuring up all sorts of beautiful and bizarre stories, slowly drifting off to sleep to the scent of her mother’s talcum powder and the rhythm of her snoring.
Amélie’s happy and protected childhood continued until she was seven, when her mother became the first casualty of a dramatic stock market crash: not because she was trading stocks, but because she was killed when breaking the fall of a ruined investor who had thrown himself off a roof as she was about to enter an old shop on On Ning Road to buy sausages. The tragedy deeply affected Amélie and her father. Her father lost interest in fishing and switched to repairing tents and engaging in unauthorised rooftop constructions. Amélie, left unsupervised, started roaming the streets after school, going to Tuen Mun to watch movies or play arcade games. In the darkness of the cinema, she continued to imagine richly about light and shadow, believing that every female restaurant greeter was Sandra Ng and that every tattooed Triad might be Francis Ng, each with a kind heart beneath their fierce exterior, like the heroes of The Water Margin.
Amélie was like one of the few natural plants remaining in Yuen Long, roughly nurtured amid the unchecked development and the ruthless profiteering of property developers, growing among the remnants of container trucks under a dust-filled sky. After graduating from high school, Amélie and her classmates moved to the city to seek their fortunes. While some joined Triads, committing robberies, and others took part in the Miss Hong Kong pageant, Amélie found work in a diner. Having no skill for flattery, in addition to serving tea and meals and working the till, she also had to deliver food. Amélie, naturally cheerful, didn’t mind the hardship and happily admired the well-dressed office workers in Central, exploring every nook and cranny of the area. Her happiest moment of the day was at 3:15 p.m., when she would slack off to have milk tea and a butter and jam sandwich with her old friend Amy. They blended into the Central crowd, belying their Yuen Long origins. Amy worked in a bar, and whenever she saw foreign customers, she would imitate TV commercials, swaying and shrieking Oh, Hong Kong, so beautiful! as if she were from Yuen Chau Street in Kowloon, coyly asking for phone numbers and often leaving Amélie in awkward situations. Amélie thought Amy was a good person, though overly fond of TV commercials.
But good times don’t last forever. As the economy gradually declined, even the diners began to lay off staff, forcing Amélie to look for a new job. She eventually returned to the New Territories, finding a job in a diner near Tseng Choi Street in Tuen Mun. Amy, ever stubborn, stayed in Central, refusing to bend. She threw a farewell party for Amélie at the Nanbantei Yakitori, lamenting that Amélie was leaving the bustling city centre for the periphery. Recently, Amy has also taken an interest in new communities and peripheries, visiting artist villages like Oil Street or Cattle Depot with her boyfriend Ken, but only those peripheral communities promoted in newspapers and recognised by everyone interested her. Yuen Long and Tuen Mun, her hometowns, were regions she wanted to forget, desolate in her memory.
Amélie didn’t feel the same way. She returned to Tuen Mun under the autumn sun of November. The shops selling paper offerings near Yan Oi Tong were still as local and unpretentious as ever. Seeing her own face reflected in the minibus window, her skin softly glowing under the rare gentle morning sun. She was a bit worried about her father, who had become depressed in his old age, especially since her mother’s death, and no longer wanted to travel. She thought about moving back to be closer to him and take care of him.
Amélie wandered around Tin Shui Wai, finally reaching her aunt’s house after some difficulty. She couldn’t understand why there were so many traffic lights on the streets of these housing estates. Ever since the three main roads were built, there was no longer a direct bus route from Tuen Mun, and taking the light rail felt like an intentionally convoluted journey, as if some unseen giant hands were toying with everyone, turning the area into an unreachable location within a labyrinth. Amélie drew on a map with her pen, challenging these malevolent forces with her imagination, redrawing an easier route to navigate her way out of this maze.
Looking out the window of her aunt’s house, Amélie cheered at the sight of lights shimmering through the mist in the distance. “So, from here, you can see the lights of Central!” she exclaimed. Cai, her aunt’s maid, doused her enthusiasm, shouting from the kitchen: “Those are the lights of Shenzhen.”
Amélie shared her biggest worry with her aunt: her father now spent all his time locked in his small room in Leung King Estate, having built a shrine for her mother. He never left the apartment, not even to eat out. Her aunt did not respond but just looked out the window, murmuring, “He’ll come back for Lunar New Year.”
Amélie’s uncle, who frequently went to Shenzhen on business, eventually set up home there and rarely returned.
During a meal at her father’s apartment, Amélie looked up to find her father asleep at the dinner table. She went into the bedroom, fetched a coat for him, and quietly cleared the dishes. The roast goose from San Yung Kee remained untouched, and she had barely eaten a spoonful of rice. The small cup of baijiu also hadn’t been touched. Unable to fulfil her role as a dutiful daughter, she placed it in front of the shrine as an offering to her mother, who had always enjoyed a drink.
The red light bulb emitted a dim glow, like a pair of dull unseeing eyes staring at her. Next to it was white porcelain Guanyin, which had been recently put there and which Amélie recognised as a souvenir her parents had brought back from a trip to Xiamen. She remembered her father saying that as long as it was filled with water, something would happen...but what exactly? She had forgotten if it was called a “water-filled Guanyin”. She also didn’t understand why her father had dug out all these gods and Buddhas from a pile of old things, as if these idols and incense burners under the red light could replace the tangible reality. Her father, once a man who enjoyed going out for drinks and snacks, now never left the apartment, losing his appetite for everything, his once wide-open eyes slowly closing to a narrow slit. His steady snoring began to sound. She looked at his closed eyes, then up at the white porcelain Guanyin with her eternally mysterious smile. Could She help Amélie?
Amy finally made the journey to Tuen Mun to visit Amélie. Amélie, unable to find a replacement at work, took advantage of her delivery run to bring Amy back to her diner from Tuen Mun Town Centre. Amy felt the ride on the 960 bus from Central to Tuen Mun had Amy was a great ordeal, as if she had just taken a Greyhound from New York to the Mexican border. Amy didn’t pay any attention to her surroundings in this congested area, her eyes fixated solely on Amélie’s face. “Oh dear, what happened to your skin?” she asked. For a moment, Amélie thought she had accidentally stepped into the cosmetics section of a department store, where saleswomen aggressively peddle their products. Had Amélie not been confident enough, she might have been dragged back to Central for a facial.
Amy blamed the bad skin on the dust in the city’s outskirts. Amélie wouldn’t let her friend take the long route across the footbridge to avoid the sun, and instead hailed a taxi to take her to the diner on the other side of the road. Along the way, Amy told Amélie about the latest beauty trends and the new look of the bars in Lan Kwai Fong. Amélie couldn’t help but feel like she lived in a different world, disconnected from what everyone else deemed important.
Back at the diner, her boss was still napping and hadn’t woken up. Amy, with an Orientalist gaze, was surprised to find that modern diners no longer had spittoons. Amélie quietly introduced her to the regulars: the young fruit shop assistant Ah Chan, constantly berated by his fearsome boss; the retired Mr Cheng in the middle, always reading the newspaper and commenting on current affairs; the unemployed artist in the corner, rumoured to have brittle bone disease, who spent his days writing a script, unable to perfect the image of his ideal female protagonist. Then there was Ah Ching, the dishwashing lady who passed by with a stack of dishes, known for breaking two or three dozen glasses daily, much to the boss’s anger. And at the front, facing the cashier Ah Ngo, was the skinny man who was her ex-boyfriend. Although they had split up, he sat there every day, monitoring her every move. Every time a male customer spoke a few extra words to her while paying, he couldn’t help but get sour. Thanks to his eternal presence, the dishes like sweet and sour pork and lemon chicken were always exceptionally tasty, and customers eating wonton noodles didn’t need to add extra vinegar.
At lunchtime, the restaurant was particularly busy. People from the nearby pet grooming service, law firms, universities, schools, charities, and the offerings shop all came here to eat. Everyone seemed to be facing similar problems: budget cuts, overwork, wicked people in positions of power, and good people being oppressed. complaints mixed with the sounds of chewing, lingering long in the air. Kind-hearted Amélie always thought: there must be some simple truths to help us face these bewildering times.
“How was Bridget Jones’s Diary? Did you like it?” That was Amy’s bible, but Amélie found it had little effect on herself. She tried to explain to Amy that she wasn’t in a hurry to marry, and she didn’t particularly have a thing for barristers or British men. Amélie wanted to revisit their old school, Ho Fook Tong College, having recently learned that it was once the site of the prestigious Ta Teh Institute. She was curious about its illustrious past. Amy, however, had no interest in returning to their alma mater, preferring to indulge in shopping, though lamenting the lack of good finds.
On September 11, when they returned to Amélie’s apartment in the evening, Amy wanted to watch Friends on TV, only to witness the tragedy of the World Trade Center collapsing. Startled, she dropped her thick glass cup to the floor. It shattered, and opened a hole in in the floor, revealing a hidden compartment, in which a small metal box was concealed. Inside it were photos and a diary, along with paper dolls, glass marbles, and other treasures left there by a child thirty years earlier. Amélie resolved to find the box’s owner, imagining the joy it would bring him to reclaim a piece of his childhood. Amy was sceptical, but Amélie was determined. She saw good people facing hardships every day and hoped to be an angel of mercy, helping those without the support to fulfil their dreams.
Amélie served a cup of milk tea and an egg tart to Mr Cheng, noticing his serious expression and wrinkled brow as he read the newspaper. She opened the phone book, wondering how she could possibly find the person who had once stored away paper dolls and glass marbles in a metal box. Perhaps, like most people, the child’s eyes hadn’t grown in proportion with his face as he aged. Maybe he had changed his name, becoming a different person. She looked around at the faces in the diner.
Amélie roamed the streets and alleys of Tuen Mun, carrying the white porcelain Guanyin she had taken from her father’s house. She emptied the water, wrapped it in a towel, transforming it into a baby in swaddling clothes. Every morning, she took a different bus route, not minding the convoluted journeys to the most remote areas, only to return to the main roads. She tried to recall the snack shops her father had taken her to when she was little, imagining the paths she might have taken, repeatedly taking wrong turns, then learning about the labyrinth of daily life by getting lost.
While riding in red minibuses, Amélie would strike up conversations with the drivers, asking them if they knew anyone called Big Eyes Ming. There were a few with that name, but none remembered their childhood dreams. Sometimes Amélie took the 521, which was a bit of a detour. On these early morning bus rides, she observed groups of elderly women getting on. Their clothes were the colours of preserved vegetables or black bean sauce, one of the ladies was laden with several red plastic bags containing newly bought pots, making her resemble a mobile kitchen cabinet. They seemed like stacks of old sweaters unearthed from ancient trunks, thick and reliable but hopelessly out of fashion, with no place in the world of Amy’s favorite book, Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Amélie got off at San Hui and wandered through the wet market. The sight of lively fresh seafood delighted her. She stopped by a stall famous for selling geoduck, remembering how her father loved geoduck blanched. She circled the stall, lost in thought, cradling the Guanyin, silently praying for her father’s health. Then, struck by a less spiritual idea, she placed the Guanyin next to the geoducks for a photo while the stall owner was busy haggling. Amélie sent the picture to her father from the post office, with a note indicating that it was Guanyin’s first message of well-being since descending to Earth.
She continued her journey, taking a bus, switching to the light rail for one stop, and then walking. The region’s design lacked overall planning, and public transport seemed to have been conceived with little consideration for its users. In these circumstances, Amélie had to constantly use her brain, holding a map and plotting her route, creating her own vibrant trail in a rigid and impersonal urban plan.
Amélie posted her “Missing Person: Big Eyes Ming” flyer next to ads for “Chili Weight Loss” and “Mummy Slimming Techniques”.
She then visited Popeye’s, a Chinese vegetarian restaurant in the Tai Hing Factory Building that had adopted a Western name. There, she ordered a dish of baked vegetables in Portuguese sauce for the Guanyin to enjoy. She took a photo of the Guanyin with the dish, preparing to send it to her father to entice his worldly appetite. She wrote, “The asparagus is delicious, when will we plot to indulge together?” and imagined her father’s reaction upon receiving it.
Amélie called Amy, hoping to arrange a weekend barbecue at Butterfly Bay and a visit to the historic Red House, once frequented by Sun Yat-sen. Surprisingly, Amy didn’t complain about Amélie living in a remote wilderness or grumble about the traffic and time wasted. Instead, she enthusiastically praised a minibus driver they had encountered on a recent trip to Kowloon, admiring his stylish driving. Amélie could tell that Amy might start visiting her more often!
On another day, Amélie continued her wanderings with the Guanyin statue, navigating the town’s numerous but impractical modes of transport. She took weekly photos at different eateries: the immaculate Guanyin next to stir-fried clams at Thai Flavour Village, enjoying mango pudding at Fai Kee in Sham Tseng, savouring silver shrimp and clams at Tai Wing Wah in Yuen Long, and observing big bamboo hit noodles at Ho To Tai. Guanyin, a figure of compassion, didn’t seem to mind being part of these worldly photographs. Borrowing the Guanyin’s name, Amélie sent her father a weekly postcard of food, hoping to rekindle his interest in daily life. She recently saw her father standing by the mailbox downstairs. He claimed he was just throwing away trash, but Amélie was confident that under the influence of the Guanyin’s weekly food updates, he would someday regain his appetite for life and step outside again.
Stirring her tea, Amélie’s mind buzzed with eccentric ideas. She was plotting big plans: how to bring her uncle and aunt back to celebrate the Lunar New Year; how to play a prank on the fruit shop owner to give Ah Chan, the decent young assistant, a break. Maybe she could set Ah Chan up for the cashier, Ah Ngo. As for the sour ex-boyfriend, no problem; Amélie had a clever plan to match him with Ah Ching, the dishwashing lady. After all, vinegar was said to be effective for washing clothes, so perhaps it would be equally splendid for washing dishes. And the unemployed artist, who glanced at her briefly—Amélie didn’t look at him but twirled around in the cramped space with her milk tea. She was sure she could help him create his ideal female character. Numerous scenarios for a play danced through her mind in an instant.
Today, Amélie wore a red hat, making the ordinary windows of the A73 bus seem extraordinary. She hadn’t yet decided whether her next stop would be the Menzou Ramen in Chelsea Heights or to take the A59 to the Doggie’s Noodle in Chi Lok. Afterwards, she planned to take the Guanyin along Castle Peak Bay to Kadoorie Beach to watch the Leonid meteor shower.
Chris Song, a poet, editor, and translator from Hong Kong, is an assistant professor in English and Chinese translation at the University of Toronto. He has published four collections of poetry and many volumes of literary translation. Song is a founding councillor of the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation, executive director of the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, and editor-in-chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine.