(Hong Kong & Tokyo 2011)
Friday March 11th, 2011, 2:46 pm.
I used to work in the 15th floor of a building in Shinagawa, a southern ward of the gargantuan city, just steps away from the oil-black waters of the Tokyo bay. The tower started hypnotically swaying, like a Mata Hari made of metal, glass, and concrete.
Most of my Japanese colleagues, used to the caprices of the land they live on, stayed on the phone to complete that call they were doing or kept pushing alphanumeric symbols on their keyboards. Then it shook some more and more again. Someone said ‘damn’, someone else said, ‘this can’t be’, another person said, ‘this one is quite big’. The half-closed blinds hit the window glasses in an anxious rattle. Coffee mugs, tea cups, computers, and keyboards started dancing on the desks. The tremor stopped for a moment. The quake stroke again from a different direction. There was a blow from below, as if the Devil were forcing her way from the ground with her claws. The building, along with everything and everyone inside it, jumped like a little girl would on a springboard in sports’ day. My workmates dove under their desks and, with trembling hands, extracted the white helmets from their silver fire-proof bags. I opened mine to find no helmet. A pocket lamp, a bottle of water, a portable toilet, dry crackers, a thermal blanket, and a pair of safety gloves, but no helmet. We waited sheltered by our desks for calm or death to come. Kerine came from his glass office to squeeze next to me. Kerine was born a Frenchman, with Russian blood running through his veins. He married a Chilean woman while he lived in Chile, became a father twice, went back to France, and after working for two years for the Corporation back in Europe was sent in a temporary mission to Shanghai. It took him two weeks to find the sunless places where he spent at least one or two hours, three or four times a week, while most of our colleagues of the Shanghai branch were having lunch or tea at noontime, paying to young Chinese women who had come from the countryside, for conversation, laughter, oily body and feet massages, hand, oral, along with every other type of sex imaginable. It took him three months to start dating one of the young Chinese women, taking explicit photographs, videos, written records of their relationship and their unquenchable erotic exploration. His wife, as it always happens, discovered his betrayal. She patiently waited during two years for the temporary mission to end, and accepted to move to Tokyo with him together with their two sons when the Corporation asked Kerine to do so. Three months after their arrival she went back with the pretext of spending the winter holidays in Santiago de Chile with the kids and their grandparents. Of course, she didn’t come back.
If I die today, said Kerine, at least I’ll die next to a friend. The trembling stopped. The building didn’t crumble. I took out my phone and dialed my wife’s number. The lines were saturated. It took us twenty minutes to go down the stairs of the fifteen floors that separated us from the ground following a never-ending line of frightened but composed humans. Kerine and I were the only ones not wearing a helmet. The voices through the loudspeakers told us to stay calm, to descend in order, to leave the building, to go to the baseball ground next to the business area. The first snakes of smoke were busy raising to the sky. A chemical plant had caught fire somewhere across the bay. The pavement here and there was cracked. The black arm of a mechanical crane erratically swung threatening to topple on our heads.
The entangled train and subway system that usually transports the largest portion of the almost forty million people living in the Greater Tokyo Area stopped. Goodbye, Winfried, said Kerine after he gave me a hug, I’ll be back, he added, and left on his scooter carrying Aube, a French expatriated employee of the Corporation, pregnant of her first baby at the time, on the back-seat. He didn’t come back.
At around half past four in the afternoon I decided to walk the twenty kilometers or so that separated me from home. I walked for about 45 minutes in circles before arriving at Shinagawa Station. At that pace, conscious of the fact that I would lose my direction repeatedly, I knew I would reach my daughter Sola and my wife no time before midnight. The station looked like a hectic beehive where the queen has just been decapitated by the peasants and the revolution that will end the regime with blood and fire has taken over. Thousands and thousands of insects pacing from one point to another, standing still, lying down, or seated were waiting for the trains to run again. I went to an underground bar next to the station, ordered a bottled beer, then another, ate radish pickles with mustard, slices of egg omelet, and dry seaweed. The trains wouldn’t bulge for a long time. I took the road again, asking every fifteen minutes to a passerby or to the attendants of the next convenience store where I was, how much distance I had left in my itinerary. Tokyo, a crowded city by nature, was unbelievably still, its calm and order almost eerie. No screams, no panic, no violence, no drama. Only mute, appalled people determined to get home. There were hundreds of bicycles resting against walls or sidewalks, a few of them chained to poles or racks or any other fixture on the street. No one tried to steal one to get home faster.
In a television screen in Gotanda I saw the first images of the tsunami in a loop. I thought at first that what I was seeing was old footage of an old tragedy in an old part of the world. The screen showed brown waves sweeping toy houses and toy vehicles over toy roads and toy fields, gold and green fields bathed by a sea of feces and debris, over and over again. Hundreds of beasts and people were also somewhere in there, swallowed or undone by the tsunami.
The first passenger buses showed up near the neighborhood of Hanzomon at dusk. I had already walked over three hours. Those few buses were packed so heavy that their bellies seemed to scratch the pavement. The faces looking at me from inside the vehicles belonged, with few exceptions, to the elderly. I walked some more taking wrong roads time and again, ending up far away from the place I should have been on or at a location I had been before. At around eight in the evening public servants opened the gates of Kudanshita station near the Imperial Palace. I wondered if the emperor was going somewhere. The station filled with hungry souls in a matter of seconds. People were murmuring that Ginza, Hibiya, and Mita lines were taking passengers again. Jimbocho station was still closed. I tried my luck once more at Hakusan, around one hour later. The insides of the underground building looked as if the Third Great War had broken out, as if the innards of the station had been chosen as a shelter. Hundreds of people were waiting with their backs against the walls, sitting, lying on newspapers or articles of clothing spread on the floor. After ninety minutes I found myself standing in front of the tracks. Each new pregnant wagon stopped in front of us, opened its doors with an exhalation, let go of a few individuals, and took in new ones in exchange in a very slow procession. I waited for eight or nine of those to come and go until I could finally get on board. The crammed machine advanced at a lethargic pace through dark tunnels until it slowed down almost to the point of immobility when we approached Sugamo. The engineer called for the attention of the passengers through the microphones in the wagons, apologized for the inconvenience caused, announced that it would be the last stop, didn’t waste time in any further explanation, and gently asked everyone to get off the train. To walk from Sugamo to Itabashi, a route I often leisurely took on my bicycle during the weekend, took me another hour. It was almost midnight, as I had predicted, when I arrived home. My daughter and my wife were appalled but safe. I watched the news, images of mayhem, desolation, and sorrow, until I fell asleep. I dreamed was at a luxurious cocktail followed by a banquet, surrounded by Japanese people. Everyone in the ballroom was naked, the smell of sweat and warm sexes was strongly present. Dinner consisted of seven dishes; fresh boiled vegetables, raw slices of different fish and shellfish, vinegar-soaked roots, cubes of silken tofu, horse meat barely grilled, broiled fish, live shrimps and octopi that the patrons hurriedly devoured one after the other, washing it all down with warm, clear alcohol. I put an amputated octopus leg inside my mouth. It glued to the inside of my cheek sucking the meat hard, refusing to go down my throat into my stomach and intestines without a fight. A handsome, well-built man who seemed to be the host of the event, systematically raped, one by one, sometimes two at a time, each of the girls and women present. The women didn’t cry nor smile, they remained, one could say, unmoved. A short man of around fifty was filming the whole event. As it didn’t seem to bother anyone, we drank, then drank more, until I found myself on my knees giving oral sex to one of the pale female guests. I am sick she told me, her eyes closed, while she caressed my head. It is contagious. I moved away from her hairy sex and took her hands in mine. Hers were the strong hands of a black man.
It was already Saturday when the newscasters cautiously confessed the imminent nuclear disaster. Fukushima this, Fukushima that, in every single channel. We found two empty seats in the first bullet train headed to Osaka on Sunday morning. Between Saturday and Monday there were hydrogen explosions and nuclear meltdowns in three of the six reactors. Most of my colleagues went back to work from Tuesday.
I was scared to death, worried about the health of my newborn daughter Sola the days following the meltdowns. I asked Monsieur Lebel, a highly placed executive of the Corporation, the left hand of the President (the right was already taken by Monsieur Salem, an older, wiser man who had grown up in the same dust filled neighborhood as the President in the outskirts of Beirut) for assistance. We will take care of your case, Winfried, he said in his deep, radio-host voice. Come to Hong Kong for some days, talk to my assistant, Yvonne will help you with the necessary reservations. We will discuss the rest later, he added before excusing himself saying he was engaged in other pressing matters, wishing me well, saying goodbye, and hanging up the phone.
I called Monsieur Lebel’s assistant after three mails without response. Yvonne didn’t greet me. She sounded irritated when she picked up the phone. Yvonne expedited our conversation in a matter of seconds saying that I would receive the plane and hotel reservations in my inbox in a short time after which she hung up the phone. The gong-sound indicating I had new mail rang the moment I put the phone down. One could say many things about Yvonne, except that she was inefficient.
My wife, our daughter Sola and I spent a week in Hong Kong, all expenses paid by the Corporation. I let my beard grow, not having the required patience or cool head to this kind of morning rituals under such circumstances. I went to work, or to pretend to do so. My wife and Sola visited the city to kill time while time slowly killed us all. Every night, when I went back to our hotel room after eight or nine hours spent in the regional bureaus of the Corporation, my wife told me how gray the sky was in this city, how everything smelled like dust, oil, and warm animal blood, and showed me the pictures she had taken during the day.
Rows of unkempt skyscrapers in different shades of gray, shopping malls, the maimed bodies of beheaded ducks hanging from metal hooks, their roasted skin gold and crisp, parks with ponds of what seemed to be coughing syrup, skies of milk, a hundred pink flamingos imprisoned in a wire mesh, banners that read Do Not Spit in Cantonese, billboards of Citibank, Adidas, Prada, Quiksilver, DHL, Pizza Hut, Heineken, Canon and others that simply read Your Ad Here, dozens of unfinished buildings, a buddha sitting on the sky, fake dolls of Japanese anime characters, fake designer bags, fake designer underwear, The Avenue of Stars, a Bruce Lee made of bronze, blue containers and blue container vessels, the fishing port of Sai Kung, crystal boxes full of red and brown lobsters, shrimps, prawns, and many fish and crustaceans whose name I still ignore, all sentenced to an impending death, streets where laundry dried hanging from the branches of one of the rare oak trees or rows of plastic tubes arranged on balconies.
We queued for half an hour and went up Victoria Peak on Saturday morning. Some of the locals, for the most part women over fifty, kept smiling and touching Sola’s cheeks, feet and hands as if they had never seen a baby. We ordered a bucket of fried shrimp and fried onions at the highest Bubba Gump in town and watched the gray sky and licked our shiny fingers without saying much. My wife never said much in any case. I watched the rows of ugly skyscrapers, spikes of cement sprouting from the crammed ground. Over seven million souls living inside an area of a thousand kilometers. There are neighborhoods in Hong Kong, like Mong Kok, in the Kowloon Peninsula, where the density is of more than 130,000 souls per square kilometer.
There is immense wealth in Hong Kong. One sees billboards and neon signs advertising luxury brands on every building, street, and corner. There are hundreds, if not thousands of luxury restaurants, where people devour the chopped corpses of millions of animals every day, luxury boutiques, and luxury hotels. Prostitutes from every country of the world. Sumptuous cars are of course omnipresent. There is also, albeit not as obvious, appalling poverty.
The same year Father died, Channel NewsAsia devoted half an hour to introduce the public to what they called the Infamous Cubicle Homes of Hong Kong. Seeing an opportunity in the combination of overpopulation and scarcity of public flats and homes, greedy apartment owners decided to split their units into three or four rooms, each one the size of a three or four queen-size bed, and rent each division at an elevated price. The reporter went from end to end of one of the apartments, where a Mr. Cheung Chiu Yuen, a single parent, lived with his eight-year-old daughter, Elaine, in five steps. The reporter then showed a seven hundred square feet apartment, approximately 65 square meters, which the landlord divided into thirteen units, including what seems to be a cage embedded in the roof which the landlord rented, or so said the reporter, to an old man. And it gets worse. A factory floor divided into thirty windowless cubicles, each barely bigger than a single bed, tells us the male narrator in a British accent. A middle-age man introduced as Mr. Yu Wai Chan, whose wife and daughter are said to live in Shenzhen, mainland China, tells the reporter that he does not get a lot of rest, that the walls are thin, that his routine consists in getting home, drinking some alcohol until he is slightly drunk, going to sleep, and waking up to work the following morning. Reporters of Agence France-Presse covered in a couple of minutes the Cage Homes, mesh cages where the poorest and elder live, a deep step lower in the scale of degradation and the state preceding homelessness. Al Jazeera focused its attention not on the cubicles and cages but on the elder. The reporter of Hong Kong: Aged and Abandoned showed us elder men and women, gray-haired, wrinkled, and hunchbacked, who survive recycling cardboards, reselling old paraphernalia, going through bins of refuse, queuing at night for food prepared and offered by volunteers. Let the old rot and the wealthy rise and graze the dusty sky at night.
We went to the dark edge of dark bay to watch the Symphony of Lights, a show of laser beams of light starting at eight at night. The top of most of the buildings was concealed by the dense and usual fog that covers the vault over Hong Kong. The bay water was of a toxic waste- green. Back in the hotel room, we said good night and went to sleep looking in different directions. Grandmother visited in my dreams that night. She was standing barefoot, a glass of red wine in her right hand, at the border of a cliff. What’s wrong? I asked her. I am waiting for the wave to end it all, she said.
Sunday is the day when battalions of Filipino house-maids who spend from Monday to Saturday cleaning houses which are not theirs and caring for babies and children who are not their own, flock to the floors of plazas, parks, streets, sidewalks, bridges, and every patch of space available in order to catch up with their friends and colleagues, share hand-made Filipino cuisine, and tell each other how much they miss their families back home. We took with some of these smiling women the Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui to Central. Sola enjoyed the warm air, the view, and the breeze. Blue skies, an anomaly in many cities in or near China, were in bloom that day.
I worked that second week in the office of Kwun Tong, facing the bay of Kowloon, next to people I didn’t like being around, like the hyperactive Ludovic Rozain, a man in his late forties who shouted and worked till late, wore no belt, dyed his thinning hair light blond, and wore mascara on his eyelashes, the petulant Monsieur Lebel, whose major concern was the quality of the food and wine in the restaurants his hosts led him to in each of the many cities around the world he visited, and some people I did, like Mehdi Selhi, an Algerian who laughed a lot, slept with any woman who crossed his path and gave into his distorted erotic demands, and made of every man his brother, or Nicolas Lemaitre, who had lived in Marseilles, Valletta, and Kuala Lumpur before arriving in Hong Kong, and helped me get the job and meet most of the people I needed to meet if I wanted to survive and be someone inside the Corporation.
We arrived in a half-empty, half-dead Tokyo the following Sunday. My wife and daughter, afraid of the unknown, left a couple of days later to settle in Osaka for the next few months or years. I passed my days at the office of the Corporation reading the news regarding the advancement of the disaster, the probability of Mount Fuji’s eruption, the testimonials of fathers looking for their wives and children, children looking for their parents, men and women looking for their elders in the wet rubble, the radiation found in the supplies of drinking water and in tea plantations, the next earthquake that would soon destroy Tokyo. I passed my days studying computer simulations of the red and orange, green and yellow radiation plume, stretching from the East Coast of Japan through the Pacific Ocean all the way to the West Coast of the United States, watching over and over videos of the tsunami taken from the air, from hilltops, from the roofs of houses and buildings, and from the inside of cars that were minutes later swallowed by the waves, videos of people with Geiger counters measuring radiation on the sidewalks, inside their houses, next to the plates containing the food they were about to eat, and attached to the backpacks their children took to nurseries and schools every morning, videos that reported the fleeing of all foreigners, the mass die off of star fish that seemed to disintegrate near the West Coast of the United States, the record number of suicides and abortions in and around the nuclear plant areas, the slaughter of the farm animals and dogs that had to be abandoned, the elders that refused to leave their homes and preferred to starve to death or hang themselves.
I went back to Japan with the promise of a permanent position somewhere else in Asia, since the Corporation, as everyone knows, has offices all around the world. Details were to be discussed and defined in the following weeks. I was hopeful, but as concerned about my daughter’s health as I had left.
I flee the small apartment I lived in each time the mobile phone earthquake alarm went off, which was very often and at any time of night and day. I waited days and weeks and months and that promised position never came. I grew more and more impatient. I decided to leave. A human resources representative from the Corporation contacted me two months later offering me a new position, still in Japan, with a better title, more money, and a private office, because that is how things are done at the Corporation. And I of course sold my soul and time again for a wad of bills, a private office, and a new title printed on my business cards.
