Pag.123
BREAKING
IN
And so for the
first time in my life, I found myself alone—and free. I was seventeen years
old, in the prime of my youth. I was determined to make a life for myself, and
a name, and maybe even fame, in the wild, beautiful city of Hong Kong.
But first I had
to deal with some loose ends.
You see, when I
was thinking of leaving the school, I’d called my parents, to tell them that my
ten-year contract with Master was ending soon. My father immediately told me I
should join him and my mother down under.
Well, I’d lived
under the eyes of adults all my life, and I wasn’t going to pass up the chance
to finally kick up some dust.
“Kong-sang, you
will like it here,” said my father, his gruff voice broken by the static of a
bad international connection. “I’m sure we will be able to find you a job, and
of course you can stay with us until a flat is available.”
“I can’t hear
you, Dad,” I said, even though I could hear him quite well.
“Kong-sang?” he
shouted. I held the phone away from my ear and winced.
“Dad, I’m not
going.”
“The line is
bad; I thought I heard you say you are not coming.”
“I’m not.”
“You certainly
are,” he said, his voice taking on a familiar edge. “Your contract is up, there
is no more opera company for you to join, and you are old enough to begin
earning a living for yourself. There are many jobs here in Australia, much
opportunity.”
“I’m working
already, Dad,” I retorted. “I’m doing movies. I’m a stuntman.”
“How much do you
think you can make doing movies?” he said.
I realized that
I had absolutely no idea. All of my movie fees went directly to Master, and the
amount he gave us as our spending money was barely enough for snacks. Could I
live on a stuntman’s pay? Maybe I was
crazy.
“There is no way
you can survive,” said my father, breaking into my thoughts.
Pag.124
Nothing makes me
more determined to succeed than someone telling me something’s impossible.
“Of course I
can, Dad!” I said. “In fact—”
I gulped,
because I suddenly knew exactly what would force my father to let me to stay,
if that was what I really wanted. And it was. Right?
“In fact, the
reason I have to stay in Hong Kong is that I’ve signed a contract with a movie
studio. I’ll be working for them all the time now. A contract,” I said.
There was
silence on the other end of the line. I mentioned before that my father is from
Shandong. Well, the people of Shandong are known for two things: they always
face death without fear, and they always live up to their word. A contract,
even a verbal agreement, is unbreakable, no matter how unfair it is, or how
terrible the price of keeping it. That’s why my father had kept me in the
school, even though he could have afforded to bring me to Australia years
earlier. No matter what happened to me, even if I’d been crippled or worse, I
was committed to stay there by the contract he’d signed with Master—and if I’d
run away and somehow managed to join them in Australia, well, he might have
killed me himself. No son of Shandong could live with such humiliation, and no
Shandong father could bear to have such a cowardly son.
So if I’d signed
a contract, I was untouchable. I was bound to fulfill its terms.
“How long is the
contract for, Kong-sang?” said my father, after a long pause.
I told him the
first number that came to mind. “Two years, Dad.”
“And where will
you live for these two years?”
“I—uh…”
He had me three.
I couldn’t stay at the school, and with most of its students leaving or already
gone, the school wouldn’t be around much longer anyway. We’d often overheard
Master discussing the possibility of leaving Hong Kong, to start over in a
place so culturally backward it had barely even been exposed to Chinese opera:
Los Angeles, in the United States.
“Kong-sang, it
would be shameful for you to dishonor an agreement that you have already made,”
he said. “But it would be even more shameful for a son of mine to be living on
the streets.”
I knew it. He
was going to demand that I give up Hong Kong and my last chance at freedom.
“I suppose,” he
continued, “that I have no choice but to buy you an apartment.”
“But Dad, if I
go to Australia—what?” I reevaluated what he’d just said through the static.
“I’m sorry, the line is bad…. I thought I just heard you say you were going to
buy me an apartment.”
Pag.125
“I did,” he
said.
“You aren’t!”
“I certainly
am,” he said, and I swear I could hear him smiling. “You may consider it a
graduation gift.”
So on the day
when I finally walked out the door of the academy, I had somewhere to go: my
own apartment. It was very small, and not in very good shape, but it was mine,
and it was home. My first home. I’d
spent my entire life in other people’s houses, and while I lived under their
roof I had to obey their rules. But in my tiny seventeenth-floor flat on Xing
Pu Jiang, I was the king, and I could stay up as long as I wanted, and sleep as
late as I chose.
That apartment
cost my father HK$40,000—a huge amount for him to spend at the time. It’s the
nicest thing he’s ever done for me, and something I can never forget.
In fact, I still
own the place. I’ve thought about selling it, but my father told me that the feng shui of the place must be very
good, since I’ve had so much luck since then. Maybe he’s right, maybe he isn’t.
I’m not a very sentimental or superstitious person, so even though I never went
through with a deal, I had a real estate agent come and look at the flat. She
said that if I sold it, I could get more than HK$3 million. Which should tell you something about how much Hong Kong
has changed over the past three decades.
(It’s gotten a
lot more expensive, for one thing.)
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