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. READ MORE…
Translation Tuesday: “The Results” by Bernard Comment
"Jealousy is always a weakness, an uncertainty, a lack of confidence, every other person is a competitor, a threat."
On a check-up at a health clinic, a father and husband’s interactions with doctors are punctuated by reminiscences of love and lust for his wife. Gradually, we learn of a chilling act of violence, which leads the protagonist to a twisted reckoning with his mental and physical condition.
It’s cold. A cold that bores into you, that hasn’t let up for days, despite the big woollen jumper I never take off, even at night. Carlo tells me I should take it off for sleeping, and wrap myself up well in the blankets, so that when I get up I would add a garment to make up for the change in temperature, but one evening I tried this and my teeth chattered all night. The other men I see at lunchtime don’t seem to suffer, there’s even a guy who always walks around in a T-shirt, but admittedly he’s a burly fellow, well-padded against the cold.
The doctor made me go back to him this morning, after fasting, he wanted to do further tests, two whole syringes filled with blood, I asked to lie down because I’m always afraid of turning to look, and it’s much worse if you get to see it. The nurse smiled, although I couldn’t tell if it was from pity, sympathy, or scorn. She had difficulty finding the veins, it’s always the same, I begin to tense up, to sweat at the temples, I become dizzy and pale; when I was a teenager I passed out each time, and once I fell backwards and hit my head on a sink, was sent straight to hospital for a battery of tests, a lumbar puncture, and an idiot teacher spread it around that I’d taken an overdose, me who’s never touched the tiniest amount of an illegal substance, for fear of my reaction, and my scrupulous respect for the law.
When I had the first tests, eight months ago, the lady in the laboratory was very considerate, settling me into an armchair and telling me to look away, and to think of something pleasant; so I thought about the film I’d watched the night before, with Julie, her warm body, her breasts in my hands, her smell after making love. Then it was finished, and already I had a piece of cotton wool and then a sticking-plaster on top, whereas here everything is rougher, more brutal. I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes, standing in front of the grey door. They came to get me around six o’clock. Immediate appointment. Everything moved fast, then the iron door in the corridor clanged shut behind me, with a heavy ringing sound, and since then, nothing. The doctor must be on the telephone, I hear his voice at times, a powerful, raucous voice, but I don’t understand what he’s saying, the rooms are well insulated. I’d love to smoke a cigarette, it’s what I’ve been brooding about for a full five minutes, it’d do me good, would relax me, smoking a cigarette.
READ MORE…
Contributors:- Bernard Comment
, - Carolyne Lee
; Language: - French
; Place: - Switzerland
; Writer: - Bernard Comment
; Tags: - clinic
, - condition
, - family
, - french
, - health
, - hospital
, - love
, - lust
, - marriage
, - Short Story
, - Swiss