Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 7
Hong Kong, 1959
On the last day of November, 1958, Frank flew to Hong Kong to accept a full-time position on the staff of the Time-Life International regional office. About three weeks later, he followed along with Ely and their baby son, leaving Taipei on Christmas day 1958. They lived on the top floor in an apartment building called Golden Court, on Electric Road in North Point. This was the first time in his life that he didn’t live in a house. And it was the first time he had lived so close to other people. Unlike the ranch, where the closest family was a mile away on one side, and dozens of miles away on two sides and maybe forty miles away on the fourth side and unlike even Taipei, where there was a garden and a wall and a road and an alley between Frank and Ely’s house and their closest neighbors, in Golden Court, neighbors were a mere foot away through a none-too-solid interior wall on one side and perhaps two feet away below through a far from sound-proof floor. There was nobody above them and nobody to the east or south because their apartment occupied the southeast corner of the top floor. But to the west and below there was only a foot or two of distance between their lives and those of their neighbors. At first he was alarmed at this situation but within a week or so he had grown used to it. He did not congratulate himself on this, because at his age he did not or could not look back much. Only in old age, when his joints ossified, when nine times out of ten something billed as progress meant annoyance, when he dismissed the latest gadget with a snort of contempt, when the tendency to stay put gradually replaced the desire to move, as he was dying in other words, did he realize how amazingly adaptable he used to be. But when he was that flexible boy, he did not think of adaptability as perhaps his top talent. There was little or no thought involved. He had to accept it and he did, immediately, with at most one second thought. Then.
At the beginning of February, a few days before Chinese New Year, late in the evening, nearly out of cash, he sauntered along a Wan Chai waterfront alley where the cheapest streetwalkers, most old and some sick, shone a flashlight into their own faces to show what the buyer might expect for the equivalent of fifty cents. They were literally dying for money, and a very small fistful at that. As he looked into the sad eyes of a broken-down woman, he said, “Okay,” as much out of empathy and a sense of adventure as sexual desire, and she led him up four or five floors to the roof where they crawled into her stall.
A few minutes later when, alarmed by the noise, he rose up off the woman, she urgently pulled him back down and shook her head No, No, No, meaning Do not get involved. Stay out of it. He fancied himself a go-for-broke kind of fighter, with a determination that did not stop, necessary compensation for his small size in fights with the big boys back home, but a drunken sailor in his prime would have probably turned this young punk and his old lady of pleasure into minced meat. No, no, no, do not get involved. Let it be.
When in doubt, do nothing. This attitude, attested to in many forms, would begin to seep into his heart and influence the rest of his life. Funny thing, the old woman herself was one of the most enjoyable of his life. She was juicy and there was a deep and immediate rapport, as if they’d known each other well. Maybe the contrast between his soon-to-be-sullied baby bod and hers, aching with rheumatism and God knows what else, entered into it. She was insistent and he complied. He was the stranger here. He did not try to stop the abuse that rattled the tin walls and roared forth insults in the next stall. He kept on fucking.
A few days later, he walked out to explore the spit into Causeway Bay, to get close to the ocean, to feel the sea again after his first and long-anticipated encounter with it on the ocean voyage to Taiwan on the M.V. Hai Min five months earlier. A small bundle in a blanket lay on the rocks ten yards or so from the water’s edge. He drew closer and saw the face of a tiny infant at the same time that he guessed what it was. It sent a cold chill down his spine. He didn't know what to do. The baby was dead. He stared at it for a long time, then walked away, back toward the beach. He met a policeman on a bicycle and tried to tell him there was a dead baby over there, pointing to the spit, using English and hand gestures and a few of his newly learned words of Mandarin. The man merely said, Yes, Yes, and continued on his route. It was unclear whether he understood. There was something sad and symbolic about this encounter. He probably picked it up from his dad’s True Magazine: The Magazine for Men, but the phrase “Life is cheap in Asia” kept circulating in his brain as he walked back to North Point and Frank’s apartment. To him it was another Humphrey Bogart tough-guy line, a hard truth about the real world that separated the men from the boys.
Whichever way he chose to classify it, the encounter with the dead baby symbolized the end of his childhood and seemed more important than dispensing with his virginity in the Taipei whorehouse or hearing a drunk Yank beat a prostitute in the tin-walled rooftop stall next to him. The stakes of the game were rising.