Yeung was busy making an inventory of the library’s collection, something he had to do every year during the summer holidays. He’d make a note of all the books that had gone missing, repair damaged volumes, process new books from the previous year that had not yet been put out for borrowing, and report the worn-out, moth-eaten tomes that were too far gone for repair. All these tasks had to be completed before the new school term began in September. It would soon be three years since he had taken up the job of head librarian, and he had adapted to the work quite well. Before this, he had run a bookshop tucked away on an upstairs floor in Causeway Bay and had come to know his customers there very well.
This store of his was not like other run-of-the-mill affairs. It was more like a top-end homewares shop. For its overall layout, it took its cue from Japanese minimalism, and at the entrance he had arranged pots of monstera, Chinese ivy and rohdea to brighten up the sunless staircase with their fresh, vibrant greens. As you made your way into the middle of the shop, you’d see a number of long, white tables positioned side by side to form a display area. This extended all the way from the front entrance to the full-length windows and was covered in books of all shapes and sizes for readers to choose from. When daylight managed to penetrate into the store’s interior, the languid cat could not resist stretching itself and making a taut arch with its back. At such times, Yeung’s daughter Yuet would sit down with the customers on the sofa chairs, quietly whiling away her time with various weird and wonderful books she had picked out for herself. Although Yeung Fan-lap’s youth was now well and truly behind him, at heart he was as evergreen as the ivy and the rohdea. He liked putting on music in the store, and the songs he played all featured gravelly, textured vocals with emotions that could unravel the knots and tangles in a listener’s heart and tenderly enfold all those tiny nicks and cuts life inflicts on you, just like barbs do. When Cheer Chen, Sodagreen and Joanna Wang were still relatively unknown, he was already introducing their music to the people who came into the bookstore, but of course, when they stopped being the taste of a select few and hit the big time, he received no recompense of any kind for his efforts. If you asked him what his all-time favourite songs were, he would probably tell you that they were from the albums Lowell Lo made after 1989, including the title track from the album entitled Wish.
If, after that, you still felt any further interest in him, you might have asked him why his bookshop closed down. Actually, he himself wasn’t really sure why. Was it because the landlord wanted to force him out, or because there were difficulties in the running of things, or because of certain issues in his life? After the store’s demise, he had worked a whole series of completely unrelated jobs—film projectionist, high-class barista, express courier, property manager—things that, to all intents and purposes, had nothing whatsoever to do with books. He believed, however, that if you truly had a passion for something, it would fill your inner life with sunlight; for this reason, to keep his hold on that light, Yeung was perfectly happy to take on any kind of work just as long as it left him time for his endless reading.
He remembered back to the days when he worked as a projectionist. When Paper Towns was showing in the cinema, he read John Green’s novel of the same name and was constantly analyzing the implications in the story of “impressive but hollow towns”, “towns devoid of substance” and “pseudovision towns” with the person who worked in the box office. When they screened The Danish Girl, he read Niels Hoyer’s Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change of Sex by Lili Elbe and at one point discussed Elbe’s life in great detail with the part-time popcorn-seller. And when they showed Room, he read A Stolen Life by Jaycee Lee Dugard and also spent time with the new employee, the one who checked people’s tickets, delving into those eighteen years locked up in a dark room, trying to figure out how a woman could manage to go on reaching for the stars when, by day, she found herself in a cesspool of repeated sexual abuse.
Although his stint in the cinema had not lasted all that long, he would never forget what the experience had given him. And so it still was to this day. While he was counting off library books, he came across a copy of Moby Dick, its spine bleached by long years of exposure to sunlight. This discovery reminded him of the time he had screened the 4DX version of The Heart of the Sea. He must have sat through those special effects at least a hundred times. But what astonished him was not the cataclysmic technical trickery but the audiences who endured the ordeal. He recalled how, whenever a giant wave would come crashing down on the whaling ships, the seats in the cinema would shudder and spurt out water. Because the film was all about enormous, destructive waves and the white whale smashing things to bits with its tail, by the time people trooped out of the theatre at the end of the movie, their clothes and hair were well on the way to becoming soaked through. The sight of them was more harrowing than those scenes in the film of ships breaking up or of sailors going down to a watery grave. He considered himself to be very fortunate in comparison—all he had to do was sit there in the projection room controlling the computer, so his own copy of Moby Dick did not become a pile of sodden pages that looked as if it had once floated adrift in the sea. Otherwise, he was afraid that—having found a new lease of life—it would have spoken the following words to him: “Call me Ishmael. AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE.”
Now, just at this moment, Yeung’s forehead was smooth and completely free from worry, and he was not sweating with anxiety. Inside the library, where the temperature was always kept constant, the sunlight had just happened to fall onto the spine of Moby Dick, and so he took up this literary classic with its faded spine and turned its yellowing pages. With great care he held the book in his hands—its life old and ailing like a candle guttering in the wind—and began to read aloud:
“Herman Melville was born in 1819, into a family that included (on his mother’s side) a distinguished Dutch ancestry, but later, because of the war, the family fortunes declined, leading to the death of his father by suicide. After his father’s death, the family now being very poor, Melville was forced to abandon his schooling at fifteen, whereafter he worked at various jobs—in a bank, as a farmer and in a shop. At the age of twenty, having reached a dead end in his life, he left the city and moved to the coast to earn a living. In 1841, on the east coast of Massachusetts, he started work as a sailor. During his time at sea, Melville was held captive by the Typee people. After his escape from confinement, he boarded an Australian merchant ship. He was then imprisoned in Tahiti for taking part in a riot. After another escape, he went to sea again as a whaler, his voyages taking him to Liverpool, the Galapagos Islands, the Marquesas Islands and Hawai’i. He returned to America in 1844 and began to write.
When he was thirty-one, he devoted himself to the creation of an epic novel based on his voyages and his experience of whale hunting. The contents focused on the whaling vessel called the Pequod as it travelled across the South Pacific Ocean in search of a monstrous white whale. By describing life aboard the vessel together with the expansion of the whaling industry, the book reflects on the aggressive behaviour of colonial policy towards indigenous peoples. The whaling ship in Moby Dick was loaded with various metaphors—“Pequod” itself comes from the name of an American Indian tribe, the Pequot, who once inhabited the north-east of America. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, European colonists kept constantly moving west to open up new territories, leading to fierce clashes with the Pequot. Taking the killing of a Boston merchant as a pretext, the English organized a reprisal in the course of which they burnt down Pequot dwellings, destroyed their crops and massacred five- to six-hundred members of the tribe. Those who managed to survive the reprisals but could not get away were made captives of the English or sold as slaves to New England or the West Indies, with the result that the Pequot became virtually extinct as a tribe.
Moby Dick is both a realistic adventure story and an exposé of the authoritarianism, bullying and exploitation of colonialism, expansionism and imperialism. Two thousand copies of it were printed when it was first published, but of those only five eventually sold. The book made no impression on society, just as the massacres of other American Indian tribes aroused no concern.”
In this way, Yeung Fan-lap established a dialogue across the generations with Herman Melville. He thought back to a news story he had read that morning with the headline “No-return Visas to Hong Kong from Mainland China Reach Sixteen-year High”. As he reflected on this, he couldn’t help feeling that he too, in some way, had become a member of the Pequot tribe. By this time, without his having noticed it, the sun had withdrawn its fingers imperceptibly from the bookshelves, unobtrusively transforming those that stood directly in front of him into sombre floating islands, whole archipelagos arranged side by side. The ocean became more agitated and pushed itself right up against the islands that lay before it, huge waves smashing into cliffs and turbid breakers towering into the sky. Underneath the foam that persisted everywhere stubbornly was a pair of enormous gaping jaws, an open grave lined with sinister, long segments of whale baleen. All of a sudden, Yeung had a foreboding of imminent disaster: it was as if he had glimpsed a tsunami in the distance surging powerfully towards him, swallowing up every living human being who happened to be in its way.
