Barbara returned to Hong Kong after a two-year stint in Australia, where she thought she could put Bernie and all his nonsense behind her and start again. But it is not easy to go back to the place of your youth when you’re nearly sixty, and your legs have a hard time carrying what her ex-partner used to call “the finest bottom in Wan Chai,” now turned into a wobbly mass not even her thick jeans could contain.

Damned stupid jeans, I should have worn shorts, she thought when she landed at the Hong Kong airport, and the first thing she faced, as soon as the sliding doors opened, was that heavy, tropical mist she knew so well. She stepped outside and breathed into the muddy air. It tasted of sea and exhaust fumes. She was shocked, then relieved. Nothing in that moment felt more familiar to her. She had left Hong Kong two years earlier after separating from Bernie, who had gone to Manila to start a new business in the cosmetic industry. Over there, he found a new partner- a Filipina twenty years younger than him- who was the lead singer in the band he had finally been able to put together. 

 I wasted my life away with you, Bernie, Barbara said to herself while dabbing her forehead under the sticky blonde fringe already weighed down by the humidity. She shook her head in irritation and pushed the luggage trolley towards the line of red taxis outside the airport terminal.

Her friend Iris helped her find temporary accommodation in Wan Chai, an area Barbara knew well, in the northern part of Hong Kong island.

From the taxi window, she saw the city parading in the distance. A view that felt familiar yet remote, like a memory poorly kept. As she crossed the Lantau bridge, she saw the mountains dotted by spots of high rises and surrounded by the sea, whose color changed according to the weather. You could call it beautiful on sunny days or dreadful on those days when a thick coat of pollution devoured the city, the colors of sky and sea melting together into one dense grey. The taxi weaved through queues of cars until they approached the congested city centers, where flocks of bodies waited patiently in compact blocks for the traffic lights to turn green. As the ride came to an abrupt halt, the taxi driver tossed Barbara's luggage onto the pavement, snatched the cash from her hand, and bolted — leaving her stunned and rattled by a pace she had forgotten. She shouted something after him, and it was only then that it truly sank in: she was back.

The apartment was in a Queen’s Road East side road, a small alley that, with a bit of imagination, could resemble a shabby but trendy backstreet in Sydney, was not for the distinctive Hong Kong smell of chou tofu mixed with coffee. There was a coffee shop that attracted hip crowds on the weekends, a small Japanese restaurant, a healthy juice bar, a barber shop, a bubble tea kiosk, and a florist. Her front door had been painted bright red and stood beside a wall covered in a coat of ivy.

This view cheered her up. She led her suitcases to the elevator. A set of keys had been left in the mailbox at the entrance guarded by an old porter with a few strands of hair left on his head hunched over a Styrofoam box. The smell of chicken and cabbage caught Barbara by surprise, in a mix of familiarity and repulsion. The man dragged his feet to the mailbox and opened it for her while mumbling something in Cantonese. When she did not understand him, he raised his voice and pointed at his watch. Thirty years in this city, and she hadn’t learned much of the local language except for the occasional m goi, thank you. The reminder made her self-conscious and defensive, consumed by the desire to give this man a piece of her mind, but the lack of words crippled her, her face flushed in frustration and anger. She grabbed the keys from him and went upstairs.

The apartment was a typical Hong Kong flat, narrow and always less comfortable or beautiful than you’d imagined. In the poky living room carved out of the corridor, a small sofa faced a small TV, and a double bed entirely occupied the bedroom.

 The place must have been shut for months. The smell of mold mixed with a thick coat of dampness left her breathless. Barbara, who rarely questioned her choices, collapsed on the bed and stared at the ceiling where a black mold growth hung over her like a death sentence.

     Hong Kong is like a woman whose beauty is in her quirks, gestures, and how she speaks to you. You'll be hard-pressed to find her beautiful during the day when all her blemishes and imperfections stand out as the first thing you see in her. She's loud, unpolished, edgy. But at night, she will surprise you with those jaw-dropping views of the skyline glistening over the bay, flaws and frailties concealed by a coat of glossy makeup.

In her younger years, Barbara had enjoyed those nights when she roamed the city streets like a stray dog hunting for food, relishing the excitement of finding herself in a part of the world she’d never dreamed she would see, let alone live in.

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The next time Barbara visited the restaurant, Harukichi told her how he met his wife in Hong Kong, and how after he’d lost her to cancer, he decided to close his fish trading business and open his little restaurant instead. It had been a long-term dream of theirs, one his wife never saw come true. They had fantasized about this restaurant, sketched it in every detail, except, they never came up with a name for it, which is why he eventually hadn’t chosen one.

On hearing this, Barbara’s eyes got teary.

“Why didn’t you go back to Japan, when your wife passed away?” she asked.

“Once a traveler, always a traveler,” he said. “Once you leave your country, the whole world looks different, Japan is a hard place to go back to and fit in.”

“Not only Japan,” Barbara said, “I lived here for thirty years before heading back to Australia, but I just came back. I guess you could call it a failed experiment.” She looked at the glass of whiskey she was holding, staring at the melting ice.

“But Australia is such a beautiful place, lots of sailing opportunities over there.”

“Yeah I guess, but I am not into sailing, I am afraid,” Barbara said, “I don’t know if I am into anything, really.”

“There must be something you love doing, everybody has a hobby, a passion,” he said emphasizing the word passion.

Barbara looked at him in a suspicious way. Did she have a passion? Not that she knew of. “I love gardening,” she said finally, “I always thought plants and animals are better than people. Digging the soil with my hands makes me happy, so yes, I would say gardening is my hobby. As for passions, I am not so sure.”

“So, what’s wrong with Australia?” Harukichi said.

“Ah, I don't know. I just couldn’t find myself over there.Something about the mentality, the people, I come from a small town, everybody is so happy over there, it seems they have no space for somebody as grumpy as me,” she said, laughing.

Barbara thought about Bridgevale. That lovey-dovey community that made of homologation the foundation of their society, and empty kindness a subtle, sugar coated tyranny that looked innocuous as it was insidious. Thinking of it, she could still feel her blood boiling. She couldn’t suffer the petty gossip, her passive aggressive neighbour who every Sunday, with a smile on her face invited her to church even if she knew Barbara couldn’t care less about religion. Her affectation was just as insufferable as the subtle attacks to her privacy when she tried to sneak into Barbara’s house with the excuse of freshly baked cookies, asking her questions about her private life. Barbara had never felt a rightful member of that community, but rather an exotic animal people could not help but whisper about.

“What made you go back to Australia then?” Harukichi asked.

“I separated from my partner of thirty years. He left and that was that. I thought I would do what most people did, go back home. I had my mum’s house over there, and I thought I’d come to enjoy the sleepy little town lifestyle, now that I was older. But as it turns out two years was the maximum I could stand,” she said, while fixing her hair. “So here I am, back to old Hong Kong.”

“To old Hong Kong,” Harukichi said.

“To old Hong Kong,” echoed Barbara.

  “Tell me more about your ex-partner, were you married?” Harukichi asked her when they met again, a week later.

“God no,” Barbara said, “At least I was smart enough not to marry him.” 

She enjoyed chatting to that strange man, who whistled or hummed while preparing food with precision and care she almost envied. She got into the habit of going to the restaurant early at night -when Harukichi had just opened-to avoid the other customers and have a chat with him. She found fascinating the way he connected to people, so effortlessly. Rather than being jaded by life, he was still curious about the world, like an artist who is constantly looking for inspiration.

“Why did he leave you, if I may ask?” Harukichi said.

“He didn’t exactly leave me,” Barbara said. “We just fell apart, I guess. He moved to Manila and I didn’t want to follow him.”

“Hong Kong can be tiring. One day I’ll go to South America. Brazil! That’s my dream. To live in Bahia. Sailing, listening to Bossa Nova, and drinking cachaça all day,” he said laughing.

Barbara smiled, then said, “I don’t think Manila was Bernie’s dream. More like an easy way out.”

“How did you meet?” Harukichi asked.

“By chance. I met him on the street and asked him for directions. I was fresh out of college and I had got here after six months backpacking around Asia. I came to teach English. He was charming, in his own way. He’d been here for a year and still didn’t know his way around the city. He looked so helpless. I felt like I needed to take care of him. We discovered Hong Kong together, we fell in love with the city and, somehow, with each other,” Barbara said.

“There is nothing like young love, isn’t it?” Harukichi said.

“Life looked so much more interesting to us compared to what we’d both left back home. Everything open until late at night, everything at our doorstep. The bars, the food. The hiking trails, the beaches. This city had everything we wanted and more. But then we got older, we watched friends leave, the party was suddenly over and we wondered if we’d missed out on something big. You can’t live the life of a twenty-year old when you’re in your fifties, can you?”

“Well, I am sixty-five but, I still feel like I am twenty-five, not much has changed. Look, I still listen to the same music,” Harukichi said, pointing to his records corner.

“I don’t know…at the core Bernie and I were very different, I guess,” Barbara said, “Plus we went into business together and that, let me tell you, was a mistake.”

“Mixing business and pleasure it’s not always a good combination they say, but I am not sure if that’s always the case. What business were you in?” Harukichi asked.

“Trading. I soon enough I realized being a teacher wasn’t my thing at all, so I joined Bernie’s business and became a partner. We sold gadgets for promotional campaigns. Cheap bags, mugs, things like that. We sourced them in China for major supermarket chains and department stores in the States, Australia, and Europe. In the beginning it was fun, making money was easy and we made the most of it. Then the business changed, costs became higher, the margins smaller and smaller. Eventually we had to shut down, we got tired of that life, and each other.”

“Mmmmm…” Harukichi said, his arms crossed over his chest. “How do you know when you are tired of each other?”

“Well, it’s in the little things, I guess. You just don’t tolerate each other as much as you did before.”

Barbara thought of the last years of her relationship with Bernie when they no longer enjoyed a glass of wine on the balcony in the evening, listening to the sound of the waves coming from the little beach near their house in Clearwater Bay. He no longer played the guitar for her. She no longer laughed at the accents Bernie was able to pull off so masterfully. She seemed to spend her days patrolling their common spaces to find evidence of Bernie's poor hygiene habits and catch him right at the moment he had forgotten to flush the toilet, left the toothbrush outside the holder or his dirty underwear on the floor for her to pick up. His incipient baldness and round belly, due to too much beer drinking irritated her, just like his grand plans which he never followed through.His childish dream of being a musician and that same goddamned leather jacket of thirty years. It didn’t help either that his sex drive got lost somewhere at the end of the past decade and barely made it into the new century.

Grow up, Bernie, grow up! She could hear herself saying. One day she woke up and realized they were no longer young, Bernie and her, and Hong Kong had gotten old with them. She’d asked herself who this man was and what was his role in her life.

But she didn’t tell these things to Harukichi, she had already said too much. She kept them to herself, finished her glass of whiskey and called it a night.

The day after, Barbara was browsing the classified ads, when something caught her attention.

“Adult sailing classes at the Hong Kong Royal Yacht club.Open to members and non-members, beginners to athletes, a 5-day practical and intensive course recognized by the Hong Kong Sailing Federation, sailing RS Quest and Fusion dinghies from Middle Island.” Barbara hesitated, put the pencil down, then picked it up again. She thought she was silly, then she thought it could be fun, then she thought she was out of her mind and remembered she once used to getseasick, then she decided, what the hell, and noted down the number.

A week later she was ready for her first sailing class.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had done something out of her comfort zone. While walking from the bus stop to the Yacht club premises, whose name already sounded intimidating, she couldn't get Rod Stewart's song out of her head. It was one of her favourites back in the day and Bernie would often play it on the guitar for her.

“I am sailing / I am sailing /home again / 'cross the sea / I am sailing / stormy waters / to be near you / to be free.”

This may as well be the second dumbest thing I’ll ever do in my life, after staying with Bernie for thirty years, she thought while marching towards the club’s door.

As soon as she got there, however, Barbara felt a tingle of excitement, the unexpected euphoria of being a beginner again. She met her coach, Roy, a Hong Kongese guy who looked like he wasn't a year older than twenty-four. He wore a wet suit that showed off his sculpted body, leaving almost nothing to the imagination and Barbara found this slightly distressing, wondering if her own attire was appropriate. She looked at her buttoned flowery shirt, her white cotton shorts and sandals, and once she realized that the young couple in her same class were wearing wet suits as well, she cleared her throat and said, “Excuse me, am I also going to wear that thing you guys are wearing?”

“No worries Barbara,” Roy said with a heavy American accent, “we are only going to cover the basics today, like vocabulary and some fundamental rules, we are not going to go out at sea, but yeah, for next time you might want to consider a wet suit or a technical outfit.”

“I’m an old woman you know, not sure how this thing is going to look on me, I’m just warning you all.” She said, looking around and laughing to break the tension.

Roy laughed out of politeness, but the couple didn’t bother which made Barbara even more nervous.

You can always quit if you want to, she said to herself.

On that first day, they learned the vocabulary of sailing. What is a tiller, what is a mast, what is a point of sail, a no go zone and how beam reach area is the optimal zone to be because you’re going to get the most force from the wind. Barbara dutifully took notes, but she found the start to be incredibly boring. The only fascinating fact for her was that on a boat everything had its place and its own purpose. It’s like a little world apart, one that had its own specific rules, different from land. She could see why Harukichi loved sailing so much. Rather than the rules of the ground, he preferred to follow the rules of the sea.

    Her second lesson was to take place the next day, so she had time to go get a wetsuit. She tried several styles and she decided not to go for a long one which made her look like a giant seal and instead she settled on a rash guard and a pair of swimming shorts even if they showed her varicose veins. As she looked at herself in the changing room’s mirror, under those unforgiving lights, she saw a woman she could not recognise. That view of herself so up close and final like a death sentence suddenly turned her enthusiasm into hopelessness. How long had passed since she’d last looked at her body? Known as “Chunky Barbie” in high school, she had always felt too stocky and too awkward for people’s liking. She didn’t have the natural allure and petite frame of Joan who had inherited their mother’s genes.

Barbara had always been the odd one out, loud and bad tempered. People found it difficult to like her, but very easy to fear her. This painful realization- although used to her own advantage on many occasions-was impossible to escape and had haunted her every day of her life.

She looked a little closer through her narrow, green eyes and started examining herself from both sides. Her long flabby arms, her broad shoulders, her thick legs and saggy breasts.The expanding bottom, the reckless mid-section that no girdle could conceal. She wasn’t exactly a vision, no doubt on that.Bernie had found her attractive back in the day, although she now wondered if it was indeed her body that he had found attractive or rather her resoluteness which on many occasions had exempted him from making decisions.

Something about the sun sparkling on the water, the blue sky, and the striking view of the harbour made Barbara feel like she was being part of something otherworldly and new. The central skyline looked so close she could almost grab it.  Hong Kong had never looked more beautiful. When Roy asked her to come forward and hold the tiller by herself, Barbara’s legs started shaking and she felt like she was losing ground under her feet.

A gentle breeze blew on her face. Her hands were trembling like the first time she had learned how to drive. Around her only silence, and she let herself be lulled by it, like an astronaut in a pressurized cabin. Roy was directing her gently, “fall off the wind…fall off the wind…let it catch, let it catch.”

I am sailing, was all Barbara thought, I am sailing, I am in the middle of the Hong Kong harbour, I am almost sixty and I am fucking sailing.

She didn’t hear the instructor when he asked her to give the tiller to the next person for her turn. When Roy gently nudged her, she blushed and moved over.

In the space of those ten minutes, Barbara was hooked.

She couldn’t wait to tell Harukichi all about it. As soon as she got to her apartment, she had a shower, changed her clothes, and put on a nice flowery dress and a coat of coral lipstick.

She could already see Harukichi giving her advice on how to better steer the tiller or how to properly fold the sail, but when she got there, she found that, to her surprise, the restaurant wasn’t open. It never occurred to her that Harukichi might have taken a day off, so she went to the nearby MacDonald's instead and then headed back to her apartment.

The following day, after her third lesson, when she had learned how to raise and lower a sail by herself, she passed by the restaurant sure to see it open. She was disappointed to see it closed again.

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One of the first things Barbara did upon her return to Hong Kong was to take a ride on the Star Ferry. She boarded at the Central Pier and enjoyed the slow ride to Tsim Sha Tsui on a cloudy, misty day. She watched the island drifting away, the the buildings becoming smaller and smaller; a scene that often reminded her of the elegance of an old movie. Time stood still on the polished brown benches, and for the time of a short ride she could pretend nothing had changed in a city where change is inevitable and often necessary.

She wandered the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok, reacquainting herself with the smells, markets, and little shops carved out of every building. There was something almost disconcerting about the heavy concentration of life amongst the maze of streets and traffic lights. She had loathed it in her final years in Hong Kong yet missed it while she was away. She had egg waffles and bubble tea. Swallowed by the crowds of the Ladies’ Market she found refuge in an air-conditioned shopping mall where she browsed the shops aimlessly. She was alone yet she didn’t long for anyone. Hong Kong, as cramped as it was, suited her solitary nature. She felt at home among the people quietly crossing the streets, tired commuters on the MTR absorbed in their thoughts, oblivious to her presence, unashamed of their unfriendliness.

Later that day, Barbara met Iris at the coffee shop near her apartment. Iris was the first friend she had called two years earlier on the afternoon Bernie packed his things and left for good. After closing their trading business, he had spoken of starting over in Manila, hoping the cheaper lifestyle and change of scenery would benefit them both. But Barbara struggled to envision them as a couple outside Hong Kong's confines. The city had temporarily eased their personality differences to accommodate their relationship. “I am not going,” Barbara had said, knowing Bernie—big words and no action—would never make the move. But he did, and that afternoon, she watched him leave with a rucksack, his guitar, and little else.

“Take care, Barb,” he said. “I hope to see you soon.”

“Goodbye, Bernie,” Barbara replied. She had fantasized about that moment many times, the moment when she would finally be free. She had always thought thirty years had condemned them both to a final and unavoidable togetherness, but she was surprised to see how easy it was to say good-bye. When Bernie closed the door behind him, she sat on the couch, legs crossed, and looked outside the balcony where a burning sunset had turned the sky a bright red. She asked herself if being alone at fifty-nine was to be considered romantic or just idiotic. She didn’t have an answer. She was alone, yet she didn’t know exactly what to do with it.

“So what are your plans?” Iris asked her while stirring foam in her cappuccino.

“Plans? “ Barbara said, “I have no plans, I have just arrived. Since when are you concerned with…plans?”

“You need a job Barb, unless you came into money and didn’t tell me, you know you can’t afford living here without one.”

“That’s so grown up of you, lady!” Barbara said. She looked outside the coffee shop window. She barely recognized the neighborhood.“Hey, do you remember how much fun we had? Don’t you miss those times?”

“I sure do but those days are long gone Barb.”

“Do you remember being only the two of us walking home at five in the morning and stopping at the seven eleven for those hideous hot dogs, and Mr Chen’s face when he had to open for us and…”

“Barb,” Iris interrupted her, “these are not the eighties anymore, Hong Kong is not the same. I am making plans. I wanna be prepared. Have been looking into Thailand.”

“What, to move there?”

“Not now. They have amazing nursing homes there, incredible facilities. I read an article about it on the Post.We’re on our own darling, the sooner you realize this the better.”

Barbara rolled her eyes and looked outside again, hoping to find something or someone to rescue her from her friend's talk of retirement plans.

Across the street, a tall, skinny man opened the Japanese restaurant for the night. It had no name. How strange, Barbara thought.

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