field notes
It is a crisp summer morning and out at the back of the house, Max and Oliver are building a table for the garden. Last week, we cleared the debris dumped by the builders and cultivated the soil, and now Bridget’s tomato seedlings are resting snugly beneath the soft earth. Max tells me to pull out the lilac wildflowers growing on the lawn so we have more space to plant courgettes. They’re just weeds, he says, but I’m partial to things that are this stubborn in their refusal to yield, and I leave them alone.
Are you going later then, I ask A.
Of course, he texts back, I am very subversive.
At a house next to the cemetery, T says she thinks I should reconsider my trip home next month. I tell her I’m sure I’ll be fine and she says, 唔怕一萬，只怕萬一; better safe than sorry. Everybody is constantly assessing my risk on my behalf and, depending on who you ask, I am either overly anxious or too reckless. Cooper, the springer spaniel, wriggles under the table, on high alert for any crumbs from our lunch of overpriced Gail’s quiches and sandwiches. He rests his head on my foot, then shamelessly flips over for a belly rub, but when I point the camera at him he turns away. He doesn’t like being photographed.
S tells me, if you have to go at least wear a mask. One photograph and you’re done for.
I’m supposed to be writing my novel, but I keep getting distracted by the tabs open on my browser: “Surviving the Atro-city” and “Hong Kong businesses mark Tiananmen anniversary in face of pressures” and “The Bark Psychosis Appreciation Page”. I consider taking a walk through Waterlow Park, but it’ll be teeming with families cooking sausages on their barbecue grills. I call Hannah while my laundry churns in the communal machine. Hannah lives in Margate, and I ask her how the sea is doing. Too windy to walk along the coast, she reports back. I miss typhoons in Hong Kong and my twee ritual of making a playlist every time a warning signal is hoisted. I can’t survive another winter in London alone, I tell Hannah. Sometimes I feel like a ghost.
At Portland Place, the sun casts an oblong of light on the pale exterior of the Royal Institute of British Architecture building. Max is drinking a beer in the garden and texts to ask if I want to join for fresh air; I reply with a photograph of a crowd dressed in black, holding little plastic candles and signs that say We Will Never Forget. The event is an accidental gathering of old university friends, former colleagues, and reporters and activists I had met during what now feels like a distant past life. Things I thought I’d forgotten: the scent of my stale breath inside my mask, the familiar motion of arriving at a rally and scanning for some elevated platform from which I could take photographs to send back to the newsroom, the way my back hurts after sitting on the hard ground at Victoria Park for hours just to sing 自由花. Tonight the occasion is solemn but the mood jovial: we know nobody will be arrested or tear-gassed here. Afterwards my friends and I go to a tacky bar, the only place within a ten-minute radius that serves food and is still open on a Sunday, and we eat buffalo wings underneath fairy lights. At home, as I wait for water to boil, I watch the video of Sanmu again: a pack of police and a defiant artist at its centre, shouting like a mantra don’t be afraid don’t be afraid. Tomorrow the varnish on the table will dry and the tomatoes will grow a little more and another day will pass, and so long as we are still here—
How to cite: Cheung, Karen. “Just Another Day: Karen Cheung.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/karen-cheung.
Karen Cheung is a writer and editor. She is the author of The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir. [Karen Cheung and chajournal.blog.]
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