I almost gave up on this collection after reading the first two stories. I knew from the dust jacket that all the stories were set in Hong Kong, and two of the central characters in those stories - a 16-year-old girl and an 80-year-old masseuse -- have limited English skills, so their dialogue with the Americans they encounter is written in broken English. Those stories are both very powerful, but I wasn't sure if I could stand 200 pages of what, even in the hands of a writer as skillful as Row sounds like Charlie Chan movie dialogue. Fortunately, for me anyway, the first 2 stories are the only ones with those character-imposed dialogue constraints. It really is quite a powerful collection. All the topics you'd expect from stories in this setting are covered -- Zen Buddhism, the long-lasting and devastating impact of the Cultural Revolution, and the odd historical and political relationship between Hong Kong and China. But all of the stories took me places I'd never been before. Row offers wonderful descriptions of the city, and all of his characters have an incredible amount of integrity, as they struggle with their attempt to cope with their traumatic personal histories or the difficulty of making long-lasting personal connections. The 7 stories in the collection are: 1. The Secrets of Bats - 21 pp - An English teacher in Hong Kong tries to understand a project undertaken by a 16-year-old student whose mother committed suicide. The girl walks around with a headband over her eyes, trying to see and navigate her world the way bats do, without the benefit of sight. There is a Chinese superstition that the ghosts of suicides wander the world, so the girl may be trying to "see" her mother. 2. The American Girl - 25 pp - A graduate student in anthropology ties to get an old masseuse in Hong Kong to talk about his experiences as a child during the Cultural Revolution. The masseuse resists her attempts to speak of the traumas he experienced, though he can't help but be haunted by the memories. 3. For You - 27 pp - A photographer moves with his wife, a consultant for PriceWaterhouse, to Hong Kong. While she works all day, he can't find any assignments and starts to go crazy from the boredom and isolation. He goes off to a Zen-Buddhist retreat, but his elusive teacher doesn't give him any quick and easy answers about whether he should divorce his wife, just all the obtuse and elliptical responses that force him to accept there are no perfect answers and no way to control all the possible outcomes or consequences of his decisions. 4. Train To Lo Wu - 28 pp - A Hong Kong businessman starts a relationship with a Chinese woman when he visits a club inside China. The political situation, with restrictions on travel, prevent them from being together, but while he dreams of the hoops they could jump through to be together years into the future, she refuses to be one of those apparently all-too-commonly foolish Chinese women, who wait near the border for rich Hong Kong men to deliver on their promises to rescue them. 5. The Ferry - 24 pp - A great story about two black lawyers who are exploited in different ways by a prestigious, predominantly white firm. The older lawyer was hired as a PR ploy to show they weren't discriminatory, and after the older lawyer established a once thriving, but now floundering, outpost in Hong Kong, the younger lawyer is sent to the city to fire him. The younger man realizes he is being used in a political ploy too, but the older man isn't upset by the game the firm is playing because he's made a career of playing loose with the rules. After initially being thrown by the "foreign-ness of the city," the younger lawyer, at least viscerally, begins to sense its attractions. 6. Revolutions - 30 pp - A Buddhist nun, originally from Poland, serves as a physical therapist to an American painter who injured his knee in a motorcycle accident. His career has also hit a dead-end, and when the nun sees he is about ready to give up on life, she moves in and forms a relationship with him to help bring him back to good physical and mental health. She's proves to be an intriguing character, and far removed from the standard - or at least Catholic-influenced - idea of what a nun is. 7. Heaven Lake - 18 pp - When a widowed man's daughter is about to move away from their Hong Kong home to study for a year in Paris, he is forced to remember his own experience as a student in New York City when he worked as a bicycle delivery boy for a Chinese restaurant. Momentarily kidnapped by a bookie who owed his boss money, the man is still haunted by what he did to get free - and still isn't sure whether it was an act of self-preservation or cowardice.
The Train to Lo Wu is a collection of short stories written by Jess Row, who spent the two years immediately following the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule (1997-99) teaching English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The train to Lo Wu, incidentally, heads out of Hong Kong, towards its northern border with Shenzhen. This is the feeling I get from Row's stories. The seven here are intense psychological sketches, with Hong Kong as a backdrop for his mostly non-local protagonists. There's a sense of alienation, not belonging, not connecting, very at odds with the vibrancy, money-makes-the-world-go-round pragmatism, and consumerism I associate with Hong Kong, from which I just returned. However, the force of his writing made me not take arms against natives speaking in broken English and slightly off timelines and Cantonese. In short, an interesting set of short stories, but only superficially capturing the sense of Hong Kong.
