ACT ONE: DISTANT VOICES

laughter from the television sprinkles pleasant notes that linger over the apartment becoming a pearled center of the world where nothing more rare could come in the silence of our dinners while chopsticks peck at the porcelain bowls amidst an unending drone of home, distant as those images of children on television refraining after their parents’ everyday phrases, about to learn some important truism that everyone would know and deploy at some significant moment. finished my food, i light some incense for the small shrine of my great grandparents, my mother would tell me about them coming up from nothing, their farmland taken from them in the mainland and coming here to form textile factories or whatever buildings that delivered them from the conflicts of the outside world. recounting this, she hoped to impart to me the same transcendental effort towards these nights studying that might conjure up this better tomorrow we had all been searching for.

saturday afternoon moldered along as i play pc first person shooters to take a break from studying, one of the games that took place in world war ii with soldiers running through swollen terrain patched in dirt textures under a grey sky, gunfire tattering between monologues about fighting for a nation breaking from the computer speakers, all within the clicks of the mouse and keyboard crouching through trenches waiting for the blood hued screen to fade back to normal. grave declarations made over podiums and grey airplanes soaring over continents engulfed in blood enmasse, big enough to rob all the jittering machine guns and yells over explosions that only muted the crumbling dirt for an instant but this solitude encompassed the room, not unlike with teachers who insisted in the reality of the world outside the window, the very same whose buildings washed over us until even the heat could no longer slick our fingers that now stamped at the computer’s mouse’s capped buttons, these slight agitations that pressed against my flesh, fixing the smooth movements of the cursor, the limbs that would move the hands grasping the guns on screen . my parents return exasperated after an ordeal of buying fancier clothes for all of us for the banquet tonight at sheung wan among glassy boutiques and perhaps glimpsing late night offices at high banks where our cousins once treated us to deserts in one of the european style cafes. Sliding my arm into the sleeves of a blouse, the cloth stretched a bit before it hovers off slightly from my shoulders, thinking in our languid movements, we could assume that same kind of still quiet that imbued their voices as their steps leapt in a waltz as smooth as watches, their thin seconds that struck each moment as we hoped in our fevered effort, even the sunlight could retreat just a moment from its endless heat that casted on us and we thought that the only kindness we could be afforded.

the banquet was for my cousin tsui who was getting married to some ui designer in central who would make cursory attempts to talk to us about sports and games i hadn’t watched. generally, the shengs were quite a well to do family. industrialists in the jungles of southeast asia in floral dress-shirts and gold chains with a gaudiness befitting young rajas, showing the world to visitors in just a span of the arms. the less extravagant became bankers or doctors out in hong kong island or shenzhen. when i attempted some light conversation with some of the relatives my age, they tensed themselves with sudden, hesitant answers, casting me as part of the throngs of people that they were to separate themselves from with this lofty silence and as i faced it, i could only think of both my own childishness that they stared at me with and their own possession that would always demarcate them as the accomplished family member with a decorum that i could not be a part of.