The Globe

It occurred to Ting on the Millennium Bridge that she once walked across the same place with her mother in breeze and sunshine that resembled those of this day. Two decades ago, Ting was still a student, and her mother an ordinary tourist, eager to visit the bridge owing to a report on its reopen after the wobbling first attempt. The journey became her last visit at the city, even if she managed to travel elsewhere. Her second visit was postponed, rescheduled, and then cancelled because the chaos sweeping the external world eventually deprived her opportunity to explore the perishing land that once glimmered in her memory.

It had been years since Ting herself became a mother. She held the little hand of her daughter, Anne, towards the southern bank because she wished to visit Shakespeare’s Globe in preparation for a school assignment. Anne hadn’t met her father for years, though they often chatted online. His plan for leaving Hong Kong was postponed by a wound given by a faceless policeman, rescheduled by the lockdown triggered by a nameless disease, and then cancelled by a law established by a faithless authority.

“Have you been there, Mom?” Anne asked.

“You mean the Globe Theatre? Once. Very long time ago.”

“How about Dad?”

“I’m not sure, but probably not.”

She had little knowledge in the details of his past traces, perhaps even less than those faceless men — those who stood behind every truncheon and bullet from which they had suffered. Anne’s father had always known that the authority knew him better than himself did, though Ting denied the fact simply owing to the incapability of imagining what could possibly go on within the running machine of that very regime. Perhaps it was such ignorance that eventually led her to the way of escape. Those who stepped deeper in the games of business, politics, and power were doomed to trap themselves eternally within.

Eleven months ago, when Ting led Anne across their own history and arrived at their current neighbourhood, a comrade held a feast in celebration of their survival because every story deserves remembrance by the livings. Or the survivors. By then Ting thought they were merely the leftovers in the dust of the desolation, and all their journeys but an endless odyssey since they lost their destination. At first she couldn’t let go of the so-called home — the one concept that remained uninterpretable however she meditated. The sense of belonging. How could she put the phrase into practice in a city to which she hadn’t and wouldn’t ever belong?

Bearing the question, she sent Anne to school. Her daytime grew longer by hours. Every night on the dining table Anne chronicled her day: the games, the lessons, laughter and dispute she shared with her peers. Ting was surprised by how Anne’s English improved. Merely a few months ago, she spoke like an East Asian child who happened to born in a rather wealthy family and therefore started acquiring a foreign language at a rather young age. Now she became local in accent, quoting the phrases that Ting used to recognise only in Netflix series. Ting couldn’t help imagining someday Anne would introduce the foreign land to her as though she once did to her mother, back to when the nation appeared entirely different.

Nation was but another relative concept. At times she tried to convince herself that she would get used to it. The process might take long as years or even decades, but she would, in the future, accept the foreign land as her home. Anne would be her role model in this aspect. She showed her how fast preschool kids could possibly adapt to a new environment through teaching her mother whatever she learned from school, such as oceanic climate, the Queen’s dogs, and the great Shakespeare. Ting never thought of entitling him in such way. He was but another author of the plays she read in an English literature class in college. The author is dead. And greatness shall belong only to the livings.

“Which plays did you say you were introduced to?” She asked Anne.

“Hamlet. And A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Ting nodded in approval, as they reached the entrance. Although it took them a few moments to queue, Anne behaved well throughout the wait. Ting, instead, almost ran out of patience. She never enjoyed staying among a crowd.

“Would you like a photo to share with your classmates?” Ting suggested, as they finally passed through.

“Sure. Are you coming with me?”

“I can’t. There would be no one to hold the camera.”

“Why not ask a random lad to help?”

Ting waved the question away with a smile. She dared not award trust to a random stranger as Anne did. Sometimes such confidence seemed to her as if an ability that one is doomed to lose as one grows up. She felt awkward in front of Anne’s innocence whenever encountering similar questions, to which she never managed to come up with an appropriate answer. To be appropriate meant to be understandable for a child who still holds a positive belief to the world. At least Ting believed Anne to be one.

Like everyone, Ting never meant to be disappointed in all the desolations in her eyes. But the more she saw, the world seemed more likely to fall into pieces in terms of family, society, future, and even self. Fragmentation fits postmodernism so well, she would mock, as though linking the two concepts would most efficiently summarise the post-millennium decades which appeared to her as a reality based on her own experience, even though reality is in fact a labyrinth that leads to countless paths and thereby chaos. Chaos that can be fixed by no one. Recognising such disorder somehow reminded her of the long lost memories of reading Shakespeare in college. She seldom read nowadays. Reading is an entertainment too extravagant to enjoy.

Yet she missed reading, particularly after realising that words may enable her travel farther than any vehicle would. When she first came to England to study, she considered herself holding the world as if a protagonist in its own narrative. The direct flight had brought her far enough from East Asia, and she would thereby capable of moving any further to wherever she intended to visit. But the semester simply began and ended. And another semester. She left England only once — to Paris under her high school friend’s invitation. She never headed to Edinburgh or Glasgow. Before finally returning to Hong Kong, her mother came visiting her. It was by that time did she realise England was but another break during her destined timeless drift.

The drift is a privilege of the era. For the tragic heroes that Shakespeare dignify, a birthplace makes an entire world. Everyone nowadays is encouraged to explore beyond homeland, and everyone is said to be capable of pursuing a better future, as if there’s no such thing as chance or luck. Ting clearly knew she arrived England by accident. Otherwise Anne’s father would have arrived earlier. When he found all his efforts on escaping in vain and wished to marry her for a resident permit, they had already been parted by an entire continent.

The width of the continent never seemed so broad. Ting had taken the compressed sense of distance for granted for so many years that she didn’t bid a proper farewell before the last departure. The following online messages kept reminding her of how precious the one-third of each day the two places share awake had grown. She considered time zone a rather modern concept — as least for most of the population that don’t necessarily travel around the world. Without all the activities running internationally, time zone wouldn’t even matter. Ironically, being trapped in their respective cities, time became the only Ting and Anne’s father had in common.

“Shouldn’t the tour begin in two minutes?” Anne asked, looking at her watch. It was a gift for her sixth birthday. Ting looked around and yet found no sign for an upcoming event.

“The guide might be late. Do you need the toilet before the tour?”

Anne shook her head.

“Stay here for a moment then,” Ting commanded, looking around again. “Don’t run away.”

Anne nodded obediently. Ting entered the toilet. The floor was a little damp; as she walked by, the moist ground made each of her footstep louder.

It took her a few steps to pass the water. After those splashes, the surrounding went peculiarly quiet, as if an entire afternoon could be squandered in the compartment of two and a half square meters. It was unusual to occupy an entire lavatory alone at such a popular tourist attraction.

Ting didn’t notice anything while locking the door of the toilet compartment. But as she sat down, the quietness heated up, summoning in her mind a familiar sense of silence, in which she mustn’t make any sound lest anyone should find her. She remembered that very evening — distant as it may appear — when she hid herself in a subway toilet to avoid the riot. It was merely three years ago, and Hong Kong merely stepped from the age of phoney peace into the revolution. That night, when she finally found the courage for leaving the compartment, she dared not return home and wandered from block to block, until a comrade pick her up with her black van and sent her to an Airbnb long occupied by a couple distributing supplies.

What happened outside during the hours she stayed in the compartment? She knew she ran away from the platform and into the toilet under the sudden attack launched by a group of men in white. But then in her memory remained only fragmented scream, cries, and beats — the repetitive sounds echoing every night throughout an entire year in which the city burned. Before that very evening, she had witnessed tear gas, bullets, and blood, but at that moment seeing nothing gave her even more fright. Facing the trucks and guns, she could at least figure out a direction to escape; instead, there was no exit in a toilet.

All she could do was to wait. Either for the riot to end or her destiny to come.

She didn’t even lock the door, for it was too simple to block anything and would nevertheless attract unnecessary attention. The atmosphere in the compartment remained fresh in spite of the odour of sweat and rust lingering on the platform and through the hallways. When her heartbeat finally slowed down, the noise seemed to subside. She had the time on the watch, but there was no clue how long she had stayed at the same place.

Then she heard footsteps.

She prayed that it belonged to a passerby, but it came louder, as if chasing after her. Murphy’s law, she cursed. They know I’m here. They’ve always known. The footsteps punched on the ground yet to grow dry completely. Then the tap was turned on. The falling water was interrupted by some object and became once again fluent. Tap off. Footsteps. Heartbeat became the only noise remaining in the compartment.

She looked at her watch again. The screen showed the exact same time as she checked it previously.

“Not seeing danger doesn’t make you safe,” she would tell Anne, months after that very evening, in a foreign land they approached for avoiding danger only to feel unsafe as usual. Even though Ting could never know whether Anne noticed the signs of danger, she marked every stranger’s stare, wink, and smile as implications of, however impossible, herself being watched. Instead of coincidence, she would rather believe that she was luckily spared by the malicious stranger outside the door of that narrow subway toilet. Why else could lead someone run into a random place in presence of such a violent massacre?

That shaped — or shifted — Ting’s understanding of the world, of the dark side she had never explored before. She was convinced it was the reason why the bureaucracy rejected Anne’s father’s visa application, and how her mother lost her wallet at customs. She was the only person who made it this far in London owing to her ignorance.

And since now she had known, there would be no more fortune left for her.

She rushed out in search of Anne, but she wasn’t there. They have her. Ting’s sight became foggy. Those nameless men have come all the way here to find us. She took a step, but failed to make another because there was no destination. The hall was too broad for her to find a direction. So was the city. The nation. And the world.

“Mom!”

Anne’s call relieved Ting from the sudden tense raging in her imagination. She saw her at the end of a queue entering the theatre. Anne gestured to hurry her up.

Ting ran to her, not yet completely recovered from the terror. She put much effort in suppressing the impulse to shout at Anne even if she knew her emotions could be expressed in a gentler manner than scolding, which appeared too earthly to be adopted as a solution to whatever she could possibly encounter.

“Where did all these people come from?”

“The gathered all of a sudden when the guide appeared. He showed up right after you entered the toilet.”

Ting hesitated. “You could’ve come in and told me.”

“I didn’t expect you to be inside for long.”

Anne was right, Ting realised. She stayed there for no more than two minutes, but her fear managed to stretch how she perceived the flow of time. Once she became aware of such perplexity, her emotion was no longer justified; especially in public, where emotions are rarely allowed. The surveillance that her imagination exploited to her mind set up countless rules and restraints on her every single move under the name of social safety. The most valuable lesson from Anne was that socialisation takes place in a society, not a prison like her origin.

That made Anne very different from her, and she therefore saw hope on her daughter’s growing up. Ting once again thought of the distant afternoon in which she leaned against the railing on the Millennium Bridge along with her mother, in which she finally saw nuances in comparison to herself walking across the same place as Anne’s mother. She was, years ago, observing the skin of the metropolis as an outsider; now she was approaching whatever laying beneath the skin of civilisation. And it was Anne that brought her here.

“We’re now at the gallery,” the guide explained, as he led the tourists into the centre of the theatre. Ting saw actors rehearsing down at the pit. Next to them, the stage appeared bigger than depicted in all of its image she had ever seen.

“Which play are they doing?” Someone asked.

“I’m not sure,” the guide admitted. “Probably Hamlet, because they’re presenting it tonight.” He gestured to the tourists, appealing for a short stop to listen to the actor reading his lines.

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”

Ting found Anne as concentrating as herself, though she might be too young to understand the quote. Only when one realises one’s mind never grows mature enough for understanding great literature can one truly approach its essence.

Hamlet’s world is falling apart, Ting heard from the lines. And so is mine. Her home changed, her shelter unstable. The connections she once expected to last forever — with families, friends, and lover — were cut off all at once along with the termination of peace. Her world was of different size from Hamlet’s, of course, but she saw from the disorder at the moment the same sense of ending. Her knowledge could no longer explain whatever happened. Where reason was supposed to sustain remained only masks, dust, and silence.

In silence cities had fallen one after another. Hong Kong. Wuhan. Kiev. But people stood still, resisting and surrendering to times. Such insight came to her as Shakespeare’s lesson, through which she made a progress in exploring his greatness, according to Anne’s words. There would be more desolations to come, and she knew she was destined to coexist with the upcoming disturbance and pain, until witnessing, someday, the end of the uncertain age.

After all, such uncertainty was but a halt in the prosperity that remained longer than her entire youth and therefore had been given over-optimistic expectations in terms of how long it could possibly last.

Ting turned towards the stage, imagining those rehearsing actors staging in twilight, with the galleries and the pit fully occupied. “The stage roof is called heaven…,” she heard the guide introducing. She always liked that metaphor. All of a sudden her thought drifted back to those distant moments here and there — in which she walked across a bridge, took a ferry, sat in a classroom and learned about seemingly useless centuries-old words that they appreciated as literature — all glimmering in beams of innocence. Heaven. Hell. Lives float back and forth in between; between the two ends lay the so-called globe.