In this week’s edition of In This Together, a curated column bringing you literature in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Asymptote is proud to present a short story by the Hong Kong writer, Wong Yi. Below, translator Jennifer Feeley discusses Wong’s work:
This story is part of Wong Yi’s ongoing fiction series Ways to Love in a Crowded City, which captures how ordinary Hong Kong residents compress and contort their love lives in the face of various constraints. Aside from the title story, the short pieces that make up this series have been published in her online columns for the Hong Kong periodicals Ming Pao Weekly and Fleurs des lettres, with a famous painting inspiring each story.
When Wong Yi began this series in March 2019, she was initially interested in exploring how physical space and work culture impact Hongkongers’ romantic lives, but as protests escalated throughout the city later that year, she began writing stories capturing people’s changing behavior and attitudes, highlighting their feelings of anxiety, fear, and anger. Wong Yi explains, “It was my way of coping with a very challenging period of time, and keeping record of the unimaginable things that were happening. Unusual circumstances and political events had become another category of constraints on people’s lives and love.”
In early 2020, the pandemic broke out, superseding the protests as the new “unusual circumstance” affecting Hongkongers’ lives, and she ended up writing “Patient” shortly after her friend moved back to Hong Kong from Australia during the height of the outbreak. As the virus spread throughout the world, people began referring to themselves as being in Edward Hopper paintings, prompting Wong Yi to pair her story with Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M. Whereas being physically together typically is regarded as an act of love, the story demonstrates how during a pandemic, having the patience to stay physically apart becomes a new way to demonstrate one’s love.
Patient
by Wong Yi
(After Edward Hopper, Eleven A.M., 1926)
I’m back in town, you say. It’s good you’re back, she says. But it’s not good, you think. During the past two months, the virus has spread throughout Hong Kong. She and others who’ve been living in the city have moved past the initial frenzy of shock and panic buying, gradually adapting to daily life under the pandemic. They’ve even started letting down their guard, loosening their masks and venturing out on the streets again; you’d been in Australia, listening to her report such things for two months, always taking on the role of comforting her, constantly offering to send her hand sanitizer or a small gift to cheer her up, urging her to stay home as much as possible to avoid infection, and then, in mid-March, not long after White Day, the outbreak in Australia finally began to worry you both. When people all over the world started buying up toilet paper and advocating staying at home to fight the pandemic, your roles were reversed. Have you bought enough food? she asked. Can you buy masks in Australia? she asked. Australia’s customs restrictions are so stringent—I can’t send you any food. Please take good care of yourself, she said. You solemnly promised her, I will. I’ll make it through graduation, and then I’ll come back to Hong Kong and we’ll “sweep street,” hitting up all the good food places. I’m going to eat fried stuffed three treasures, mango pomelo sago, buttered pineapple buns, and rice noodle rolls with sweet sauce, you said. Okay, when the outbreak is over, we’ll go eat, she said. You talked to her over video, virtually hooking pinkies. A few days later, while you were still contemplating whether to be a dutiful daughter and heed your mother’s advice to buy a plane ticket back to Hong Kong, seeking refuge like other overseas students, she said she saw that confirmed cases in Australia were continuing to climb, and she was concerned for your safety, and so that very day, you made up your mind to pack up your belongings and booked a room in a Hong Kong hotel that previously had been used to quarantine university students returning to the city from the mainland. The next day, you cocooned yourself in a windbreaker, gloves, glasses, and a mask and flew back to Hong Kong, every nerve on edge, embarking on your life of fourteen days of hotel self-quarantine.
It’s good you’re back, she says. You feel the same way when you close the hotel door. A few days later, Qantas goes as far as grounding all international flights—if you hadn’t already returned to Hong Kong, you probably would’ve had to swim back. At least now you’re both in the same city. Even if the whole world is caught in the same war-like disaster that’s turned the planet on its head with absolutely no end in sight, at least you’re back, and from now on you can live and die alongside her within the borders of the same city. She makes you promise her you won’t set even half a foot outside the hotel for fourteen days. She’d rather use up a mask shopping for the numerous Hong Kong snacks and soft drinks you told her are your favorites, dropping them off at your hotel and asking the staff to deliver them to your door, tucking inside a few extra goodies to brighten your hotel stay: a card to boost your spirits, hand sanitizer, Japanese sheet masks, and nail polish. When you open the overstuffed plastic grocery bag, you can’t help but sweetly smile and tear up at the same time: Doll pickled vegetable and pork instant rice noodles, Four Seas toasted seaweed, Sze Hing Loong dried seasoned cuttlefish, Vita lemon tea, and Garden Lemon Puff cookies—she’s remembered them all. She says, C’mon, of course I remember! You think your hunch is really spot-on; she must like you too, since she remembers every word you’ve said, and you remember every word she’s said.
And how you’ve really missed these foods. When you lived in Australia, your kitchen was never without Vita lemon tea and Nissin Demae ramen, but still, you could only miss the fresh deep-fried salt-and-pepper siu mai that was so hot it’d burn your mouth, a midnight street snack of lettuce and fish balls mixed with imitation shark fin soup, and her. Over and over, you’ve imagined how after coming back to Hong Kong, you’ll chow down on all the foods you’ve missed, which cha chaan tengs and cart noodle shops you’ll eat at, how you’ll cling to her despite everything and not let go, telling her how much you’ve missed her, holding her and breathing deeply, but now that the outbreak has hit, your longing can only be prolonged. She thinks of herself as your quarantine officer: at a different time each day, she asks you to take photos proving that you’re obediently staying inside the hotel. Of course, you know it’s just an excuse for her to see your face day after day, and you’re happy to play along. Every day you send her photos of your room service dishes and snack-filled afternoon tea and report your daily temperature—you even arrange to have dinner together over video chat, like a date between an astronaut and someone on earth. In the days when you can’t leave your room and make personal contact with the streets of Hong Kong, she sends you familiar tastes so that as you eat, you can gaze out the window at the miniature streetscapes and city that conceals her silhouette, slowly absorbing the reality that you’ve really come back to Hong Kong. It’s really good you’re back, says the she on the screen scarfing down take-out char siu pork and chicken on rice. Now that you’re back, I can breathe easy, she says, smiling. You see she has ginger and scallions stuck in her teeth, but still, you think how elegant and beautiful she is.
You’ve never been so close to her as you are during quarantine—sunrise, sunset, separately eating meals together in the same time zone, keeping an eye on the same city’s press conferences and number of confirmed cases, saying good morning and good night to each other every day, following the same routine, the same tide. When you wake up early in the morning unable to fight off jet lag, you check your phone that hasn’t yet received her good morning message, counting all the street snacks you told her you hoped to eat before the pandemic broke out. You wanted to go with her to eat charcoal grilled egg waffles, seizing the opportunity of her holding her purse in one hand and a scorching egg waffle in the other to feed her a piece of hot, crispy waffle as though it were perfectly natural, and perhaps your fingers would graze her lips at last. Or, each of you could buy a cup of different-flavored bubble tea, then under the guise of taking a taste, indirectly kiss through straws, like two friends close enough to dispense with formalities, or newlyweds exchanging cups of wine on their wedding night. You also imagined your thumb gently brushing bits of salt-and-pepper squid from her cheek, cupping her face and locking eyes in the process, holding a bowl of curried fish balls and siu mai while waiting for her to bring her face closer so that you could feed her, or being bold enough to kiss the hard-to-wipe-away syrup staining the corner of her mouth. You imagined all this while you were abroad and couldn’t be together with her in person, the intimacy you silently told yourself you’d have a chance to bravely try once you were back in Hong Kong, along with the face and tastes you’d no longer be stuck missing as long as you came back. How you long, oh how you long to touch her, even if you have to use food to cook up various excuses, putting out feelers like it’s no big deal.
However, at this moment, true love means not exposing the object of your deep affection to any risk of being infected by the virus, and the greatness of an ordinary person is not to casually engage in high-risk behavior, but to be calm and patient at all times. If she becomes infected from going “sweep street” with you, or if you don’t know you have the virus but go out and infect people on the street, who in turn end up infecting her, you’ll never be able to forgive yourself. You like her, you really, really like her, you like her so much that you’re willing to be patient and not see her, as long as she’s safe and sound. And so, just keep on being patient. Wait for the quarantine period to pass by, wait for the outbreak to subside, wait for her to reply. You pluck two pieces of seaweed from the goodies she sent, stick them inside your upper lip to form two tusks, then make a funny face and send her a selfie. I’m a walrus who just swam back to Hong Kong from Australia—it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, heehee, you say. Then you lie alone in the hotel’s empty king-size bed, waiting for her to wake up in her own single bed at home, chuckling in response.
March 22, 2020
Translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley
Wong Yi（黃怡）is a Hong Kong writer, librettist, and editor-at-large at the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres. The recipient of the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards 2018 Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts), she is the author of three short story collections: The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (2019), Patched Up (2015), and News Stories (2010). Additionally, she is the librettist for the Cantonese-language chamber opera Women Like Us, commissioned and produced by the Hong Kong Arts Festival. She has served as a columnist for various Hong Kong newspapers and magazines and currently co-hosts the program “Book Review” for Radio Television Hong Kong. In 2019, she participated in the Singapore Writers Festival and Los Angeles Architecture Exhibition “Island__Peninsula.” She holds a Master of Arts in English from King’s College London and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong.
Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi (Zephyr Press and MCCM Creations, 2016), for which she won the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and which received a 2017 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Award in Literature and Fiction. Additionally, she is the translator of the first two books in the White Fox series by Chen Jiatong (Chicken House Books), and her translation of the selected works of Shi Tiesheng is forthcoming from Polymorph Editions. The recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship to translate Xi Xi’s novel Mourning a Breast, she holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University.
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