Afar

As you’re borrowing a folding chair from the grocery store,

and setting it teetering in the lane next door to cool off,

he heads out from an old tenement building in To Kwa Wan,

walks fifteen minutes to the Kowloon City Pier,

gets on the North Point ferry and sits in a seat by the window,

not for the scenery but because of habit,

he opens the Apple Daily, and someone’s jumped off a building, someone’s killed their son, someone’s been robbed, someone’s hid a body,

he flips to the porn pages, takes in a few big boobs,

then turns to the classified ads and the supermarket sales,

not because he’s looking for work or wants to buy anything,

but because of habit, just as he’s in the habit

of getting on the ferry every Saturday afternoon to go visit his mother. He disembarks, passes by the Oasis Avenue hotel, waits for the green light,

crosses Java Road, takes Tong Shui Road, turns onto Chun Yeung Street,

brushes past the tram and smells duck eggs,

preserved vegetables, pickled cucumbers, all the hometown flavours,

and at that point you stand up, wanting to move the chair

to the middle of the lane to get a bit more of a breeze,

and he walks close to you, just as another passerby walks close to you, and to avoid the passerby, he bumps into you,

your body tips, and he reaches out to support you,

his newspaper drops and falls open to the porn pages,

he says something, perhaps an apology,

he’s a manly guy with a mild face,

and his large, rough palms gently touch your shoulders

until you regain your balance and sit back down,

and then he picks up his paper and continues on,

as you watch his back recede,

like a father would watch his son leave,

as for more than a decade

you haven’t been so close to anyone.

—Huang Canran

Translated by Eleanor Goodman