Ava wasn’t as nostalgic about Kai Tak as Uncle. To her mind, the Arrivals hall at Chek Lap Kok might be huge and sterile, reducing people to ants scurrying under its soaring roof, but its almost brutal efficiency made up for any deficiencies in its character.
“I’ll sit in the Kit Kat Koffee House,” Uncle said.
The business-class section of the airplane was more than half empty, and the window seat next to her was vacant. That was good; Ava wasn’t one for casual conversation with strangers, and now she didn’t have to find an excuse to avoid it.
It would be a thirteen-hour flight, leaving Seattle at 7 p.m. (10 p.m. Toronto time) and getting into Hong Kong at 11 p.m. the following day, factoring in the International Date Line. Ava hated that, because jet lag was almost inevitable. The only way she could avoid it was not to sleep at all on the plane, and for her that just wasn’t possible. For reasons she couldn’t understand, the moment a flight took off her eyes began to close. On a one-hour flight to New York in the middle of the day, she could sleep for forty-five minutes. During one seventeen-hour flight from Toronto to Hong Kong, she figured she had slept for fifteen hours.
The Seattle-Hong Kong flight turned out to be not that extreme. Ava managed to stay awake long enough to eat dinner and to watch a Hong Kong action film starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau. Then she fell asleep until the flight attendant woke her two hours before landing, to serve her breakfast.
When the plane landed, Ava found HKIA its usual ruthlessly efficient self. She was off the plane and through Immigration, Baggage Claim, and Customs within twenty minutes of landing. She spotted Uncle at the back of the Kit Kat, a plain, square box with round glass tables, metal chairs, and posters of coffee beans on the walls. He had a Chinese newspaper open in front of him and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. Even in Hong Kong there were places where you couldn’t smoke now.
He was tiny, not much taller than Ava, and thin. He was always dressed the same way: black lace-up shoes, black slacks, a white long-sleeved shirt buttoned to the neck. The monochromatic image was part convenience, part camouflage. It made him easy to overlook — just another boring old man not worth a second glance, except to those who knew.
Ava thought Uncle was somewhere between seventy and eighty, but that was as close as she could come to determining his age. Many people meeting him for the first time guessed that he was younger, and not from politeness. His face was fine-boned, with a small, straight nose and a sharply defined chin with a hint of a point; his skin had not begun to sag, and he had only the faintest of wrinkles around his eyes and on his forehead. His hair was cropped close to the scalp; Ava could see streaks of gray, but it was still predominantly black.
“Uncle,” she said.
He looked up from his paper, a smile cracking his face as his eyes fell upon her. She loved his eyes: pitch black pupils and dark chocolate brown irises set in a sea of white that seemed immune to lack of sleep or too much alcohol. They were eyes whose age was indeterminable: lively, curious, probing. Ava had learned rapidly that Uncle’s world was defined through those eyes, not through his words. They could embrace you, mistrust you, detest you, adore you, question you, or not give a damn whether you lived or died. And she knew how to read them in all their subtlety. Ava had seen their many moods, although their darkest intent had never been directed at her. She was part of his unofficial family, after all, the only kind of family he had ever had.
She leaned down to kiss him on the forehead. “You didn’t have to come,” she said.
“I was eager to see you,” he said. “You’re as beautiful as ever.”
“And you look as young as always.”
He looked around. “I don’t like this place. We’ll go to Central for noodles. Let me call Sonny. I’ll have him bring the car down from the garage.”
They walked through the cavernous Arrivals hall, Uncle’s hand resting lightly on her elbow. Two Hong Kong policemen watched them as they neared the exit. The older of the two nudged the younger and they nodded their heads in Uncle’s direction. Ava saw the movement, looked sideways, and caught Uncle nodding in return.
Sonny was leaning against the front fender of the car. It was new, a Mercedes S-Class.
“What happened to the Bentley?” Ava asked.
“I sold it. Sonny said it was time to move into this decade.”
Ava had never known Uncle to be without Sonny, and she’d never met anyone who had. He was technically Uncle’s driver, a monochromatic match to his boss in his black suit, white shirt, and plain black tie. He was tall for Chinese, a couple of inches over six feet, and heavyset. For someone that large he was quick — deadly quick — and he could be vicious when the circumstances required. He was one of the few people in the world whom Ava feared physically. And he wasn’t talkative. If you asked him a question, you got a simple answer with no embellishments. Beyond that he didn’t seem to have any opinions he needed to share.
When they approached the car, Sonny gave Ava a small smile and reached for her bags. She and Uncle climbed into the back seat as he put them in the trunk.
It was a quick ride to the city centre. Their route took them over the Tsing Ma Bridge, six lanes of traffic on the upper deck, rail lines beneath. The bridge always took Ava’s breath away. It was close to a kilometre and half long and soared two hundred metres above the water. The Ma Wan Channel, part of the South China Sea, glittered below in the early morning sun as sampans and fishing boats skirted the armada of huge ocean freighters waiting to be escorted into Hong Kong’s massive container port.
They slowed when they reached the city proper, caught in the last of the morning rush hour. Hong Kong isn’t a city filled with private cars. Finding a place to park isn’t easy or cheap in a place where office and retail space is rented by the square inch, but there are red taxis everywhere, scurrying like beetles. Sonny drove carefully — too carefully for Ava, but he was a cautious man, maybe even deliberately cautious. It was as if he were restraining his true nature. She had seen this trait in him when he attended meetings with Uncle. He didn’t do that often, but when he did, he remained standing off to one side, his eyes flickering back and forth as he followed the flow of conversation. Ava realized that his body language changed along with the tone of the meeting. If Uncle was having his way, Sonny was placid. Any opposition to Uncle’s position caused him to tense, his eyes growing dark.
The financial and commercial heart of the Hong Kong Territory is divided into two main areas: Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, two dense urban settings connected by the Cross-Harbour Tunnel and the Star Ferry. Ava’s hotel was on the Hong Kong side, in the Central district, set just back from Victoria Harbour and a short walk to the financial sector.
They reached the Mandarin within forty minutes of leaving the airport. Uncle walked into the hotel with her and sat patiently in the lobby while she checked in. She sent her bags to the room.
“There is a noodle shop a block from here,” Uncle said when Ava joined him. “We’ll walk.”
It always took her a day or two to adjust to Central foot traffic — the jostling, the pushing, everyone eager to get to the next corner, where they could wait in a throng before shuffling along to the next intersection, their pace dictated entirely by the mob around them. Ava and Uncle were hemmed in on all sides by a crush of people. Central streets weren’t a place for the claustrophobic.
The noodle shop was a hole in the wall, ten tables with pink plastic stools. The place was full, but a man in an apron came from behind the counter to tell two young men sitting by themselves to move to another table that was occupied but had vacant seats. He then waved Uncle and Ava to the empty table and bowed as Uncle walked past.
She ordered har gow — shrimp dumplings — and soup with soft noodles. Uncle ordered beef lo mein and a plate of gai lin, steamed Chinese broccoli slathered in oyster sauce, to share.
“How is your mother?” he asked while they waited for their food.
“As lively as ever.”
“A crazy woman.”
Ava’s mother was highly sociable and made friends as easily as other people changed clothes. Marian and Ava’s friends weren’t immune from her attention. It bothered Marian but never Ava; she saw it as just a natural extension of her mother’s all-consuming interest in their lives. So it had come as no surprise when her mother, in Hong Kong to visit her own friends, called Uncle and said she’d like to meet him, to find out what kind of man her daughter was working for. If Ava had been working in Toronto for a North American firm, she would have been mortified, not because of what her mother had done but more because they wouldn’t understand why she was doing it. But Uncle understood Chinese mothers; they met and got along well enough that from time to time Jennie Lee felt free to pick up the phone and call Kowloon. Just keeping in touch, she called it.
“She sends her love,” Ava said.
