Fiction series: Sailing (p.3)

A short story-2020

This story was written in 2020 during my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Hong Kong. I am re-publishing it in three installments under the Fiction section of my publication.This is the third and final part.It’s the story of Barbara, a middle aged woman who goes back to Hong Kong to rebuild her life after the separation from her long time partner. An unexpected encounter, will spark a new trajectory for her life. The character of Harukichi is inspired by a real person, a restaurant owner I met in Shenzhen, China and whose kindness I still remember.

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.