[FICTION] “To Happy Valley” by Alexandre Sadeghi
Alexandre Sadeghi on “To Happy Valley”:
We’re all just bits and pieces.
The idea of being from a place obsesses me. It is an open-ended question for so many of those in between, of the diaspora, but not only, who come from here and there at once. For me, over here, I am the kid from Hong Kong, and over here, the kid from Switzerland. From both, and neither.
The first time I remember visiting Hong Kong was in 2006. I stayed with my grandparents, Hong Kongers through and through, at their flat in the oddly named Happy Valley, a name whose meaning I never wondered about until much later.
Over the years, as I reconnected with my roots through work and language learning, I became the family’s designated traveller, making the journey from Switzerland to check on my grandparents. I’d bring news, family photos of my siblings, cookies and chocolate. I’d meet relatives and friends, attend ballroom dancing galas for retirees, and splurge at their favourite restaurants. It gave me the chance to wander through this city, unlike any I had known in “little” Switzerland, and one that, somehow, was also mine.
And I learned that people make places. Since losing my grandparents, I’ve returned to Hong Kong on occasion, landing like a rudderless ship. A few relatives remain, but there are no more ballroom dances. Now, I can only wander the streets and remember.
I always thought that the tale of the wayward descendant returning to the home country was a cliché, written and rewritten by so many, until it happened to me. We leave so many traces, after all, each one as specific and seemingly unimportant as the last: street addresses, knick-knacks, sounds and smells. But they remain, and they do mean something.
When I sat down to write “To Happy Valley”, I wasn’t sure where I was going. I knew it would be dedicated to that place with the odd name and my layered memories of it. The title also contains direction, movement, and the hope of a return. If anything, it’s about what changes and what stays, in concrete and asphalt, cardboard and ceramic, in jacket pockets, and inside us. Just bits and pieces.
“Happy Valley Towers” © Alexandre Sadeghi
To Happy Valley
And she returns,
more of a ghost than ever before.
Alice isn’t sure where, even when she is. Meandering streets into the milky fog spilling between the towers, rising and falling. Sinuous walls of stone or concrete run alongside and hold back the mountains. The air is thick. Roaring cars and AC exhaust. Dense greenery crinkles in the breeze on the steep flanks above. She walks on, hugged by the moist atmosphere. The first time, she was stepping out of the air-conditioned airport. Twenty years ago.
Lost and hungry. Her nose tingles, chest tightens. Feels like rain.
Over there, the turn is familiar, and the way the smaller street meets the wider one, its traffic rivulets flowing into a furious stream. There’s a sign, thank goodness: Wong Nai Chung Road. Its pavements are abuzz, lined with colourful shopfronts whose names she can only half-decipher. For a moment, she stands by the crossing, immobile, lulled by the click-click-click of the pedestrian signal. An old café seems to stare back at her, from across the road. Faded, purplish signage. Windows cloudy as the glass of an antique aquarium. It must be the spot. Where else could it be?
The door handle is cold and thin as a cleaver blade. She hesitates, breathes in, and enters. Down two steps into thick smells she knows but cannot name. Packed bodies to squeeze through. She lowers herself onto a stool in the corner. Barely the time to glance in panic at the menu printed on the placemat. No English. The server materialises by the table, tall and lanky, matching tea towels slung over his shoulder and spilling from his pockets.
She recognises him, pictures him standing at the door to the flat, putting heavy plastic bags into her grandparents’ hands with a smile, and then a deep bow, sliding the generously stuffed red pocket into his trousers. Grandpa always tipped in red pockets.
Thankfully, some dishes are depicted in faded photographs. She points to the one smothered in cheese, hoping it’s the one she’s looking for. A grunt and the server steps away. When he returns with a sizzling plate, the smell pulls her back to the small guest room in the apartment. Her grandfather coming in, asking what she wanted for dinner, if she wanted baked pork chop rice, because he was getting one, and that she should get one, and he’d just get one for her, that she’d like it.
And with each bite, she feels a little more here,
if not entirely now.
❧
Porcelain teacups with dolphins for handles. A jade pendant. Fake Gucci leather wallets. Incontinence pads. Sets of silk pyjamas. Dark blue. A drawer of cufflinks, never worn. The smell of mothballs in every closet, behind every door. A mug stained with decades of concentrated Titgunyam. The tiny plastic bottle spinning on the Lazy Susan. Crusts of evaporated milk at the bottom, layers and layers and layers, as if someone’s cut into the Earth and revealed strata of yellow-white bittersweetness.
❧
There’s less sky, here. Across from the café, the Municipal Services Building blots out much of it. Grandma called it the “sandwich”, and Alice has only just understood why. Layers, tightly stacked, slid in between the towers. Meeting rooms. Sports halls. The wet and dry markets, of course. She would follow Grandma between the stands, holding bags full of fragrant mangoes, slices of winter melon, lotus seeds and gutted fish that often still wiggled.
It’s some other day. On the top floor, her cousin, Jammy, sits in the cooked food centre. Kind but terse, with an unknown face that makes every familiar detail inescapable. The shape of her jaw and her eyes, the way she fiercely contains something that seems to want to burst out. Jammy goes to order from the stalls. As Alice waits, she watches a nearby table, where groups of English-speaking westerners laugh and cheer around the remnants of a feast. An overwhelming, unexplainable feeling of envy grips her. She doesn’t look over at them again.
She takes refuge in the black bean clams and fried rice noodles. Meanwhile, Jammy cites all that’s done, and all that still must be. The will, bank accounts, safety deposit boxes, temple offerings, house cleanings… She goes on and on. Then, when she’s exhausted everything official, she becomes a tour guide, telling anecdotes like Alice hasn’t been here every year for the past twenty.
“The name of this area is another unfunny British joke,” Jammy explains. “Back then, they buried malaria victims here by the hundreds, maybe thousands. They must have found it hilarious to call it a ‘happy’ place…”
She pauses to watch Alice chew.
“The apartment should also be put up for sale, unless… you want to keep it?”
“No, I don’t think so…”
Her cousin’s lips tighten into a line. Shoulders rise and fall, revealing the hidden sigh. It isn’t the first time; it won’t be the last. Living a thousand miles away from family. Speaking hardly any Cantonese. Not understanding how things work here, on this other side of the world. And now, tossing good investments out of the window. Alice doesn’t belong. Oh, how she knows it.
Jammy’s silence is funereal. A cool wind blows in, lifting napkins and plastic straws. If Alice had wings, she would ride it and flutter away. She can only fade a little more, turning translucid as cloudy glass.
❧
The room at the home in Pok Fu Lam had the whole sky. It also had the sea, steel grey, broken up by long, dark hulls of container ships, past the terrace where residents did their rounds. Grandma would squint at Alice most days, wondering what this stranger was doing by her bedside. On other visits, she might call Alice by her mother’s name, or that of one of the many, many aunties (usually number three, the lawyer, or number five, Jammy’s mum). Grandma would occasionally mistake her for a famous actress or singer. On those days, they would laugh like before.
Grandma never recognised Alice as herself. As life trickled outwards, bits and pieces were washed out, never to return to shore. Away, sinking to wherever memories go when no one is left to remember them. Some deep trench, somewhere far below the waves.
A valley.
❧
The shrine, red-painted wood. The Buddha. A neat pile of old, fragrant ashes from years of burned incense. And the vitrine. Three Happiness Gods. A cabbage made of jade. The twelve animals, gilded. The three wise monkeys carved from sandalwood, in the palm of your hand. Hands on your ears. Hands on your eyes. Hands on your mouth. You can’t hear, can’t see, can’t speak, can’t feel.
Why are you even here?
❧
The apartment is almost empty, though some boxes remain in what used to be the living room. Alice spends an afternoon sifting through everything, pretending to know what to keep and what to toss, what’s important and what isn’t. Jammy’s nearby, making sure she does this, at least, after sitting with an utterly blank expression through all the meetings with officials, consultants, helpers and family members.
Cross-legged on the floor, Alice digs through the containers, inspecting each meaningless knick-knack and souvenir. She barely perceives what she’s looking at. Her mind is drifting to memories of this room in a different state. Her grandparents lounging on the flower-patterned sofa in their pyjamas, sipping tea and munching on biscuits. And the maddening, looping part of the Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major by Mozart that plays on that stock market channel, which they insisted on keeping on all day long.
“Wait.”
Alice nearly jumps. Jammy stands behind her, reaching inside. She pulls out one of the teacups with the dolphin-shaped handle. She holds it delicately, turning it in her hands. Her face softens, and Alice wants to ask, but doesn’t. Before she can, Jammy has gently replaced the cup in the box, to be carried away with the rest.
“It’s alright,” she says, stepping back. “It’s alright.”
Alice nods and continues. She’s nearing the bottom of the final cardboard, filled with many stacks of photographs. She clenches her teeth. Just this, and there’ll be one last thing to do.
❧
The digital photo frame you bought them, but they never used. Black and sprinkled with fine dust. Next to a photograph of you at the Peak, taken by one of those souvenir-photo guys that prowled there until they were chased away. The cheesy lettering, red and gold. Hello from Hong Kong! The blue sky. The towers, thin and sharp as knives. Your dumb smile. Your dumb face.
No other photos of you. Only people you don’t know.
Some might be them.
❧
All the roads lead upwards. So steep that her thighs begin to ache and her breath shortens. The fog follows her up from the valley, lifting only as she presses on. Everything else is done, as done as it can be.
She stops for a moment by the door of an old wonton noodle restaurant. There’s something about it…
The wind blows again. The rain still hasn’t come. When will it?
She continues.
The temple sits lazily against the hill. Its many curved rooftops rise interwoven, breaking up the featureless facades that line the street. She tries several entrances before finding the correct one, where golden statues and colourful decorations welcome her. The smell of incense mingles with that of cleaning products. A bewildering sequence of chambers. She’s been here before, but she needs to ask for help. The front desk gives her directions to a room upstairs.
In there, behind the altar and glass panels, hundreds of names. They’re all handwritten on small cards, neatly lined up one next to the other. Wisps of white smoke curl in the cool air from stubs of incense.
Alice is alone now. She realises she didn’t bring incense sticks. Worse, she cannot read. The last time she was here, there was an empty spot beside him. A space kept for her. It made him easy to identify. Not any more.
They’re together, so she can no longer find them. She can’t believe herself. She should have prepared, asked someone to write their names down, at least. Or maybe she should have just sat down and learned the language. Perhaps she shouldn’t have stayed so far away, for so long, only to return now that it’s too late, and that there’s nothing left.
Her throat constricts. Her nails dig into soft palms. Her gaze desperately searches for a familiar character. Anything. All she can recognise is the last name, Chan 陳, but there are so many. Which one?
She lets out a trembling breath. Shuts her eyes, pressing out the tears.
“Need help?”
The woman from the front desk who guided her to this room approaches. Concerned look, kind smile. Alice can only blubber meaningless syllables, waving vaguely at the wall of names. Somehow, the woman understands.
She steps in and hands Alice three sticks of incense.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “They’ll know.”
❧
The restaurant’s name, forgotten. The one along the street, with the dark wooden doorway. Inside, braised pork knuckles and wonton noodles. Two bowls. And one of fish congee with century egg. Joking around with the waiters, all known by their given names. Red pockets to each of them. Servers, cooks, managers, cleaners. Her, scowling at him over the edge of her congee bowl. Him, noticing and patting her shoulder gently as she recoils with a loud, theatrical “aiya”.
Him, breaking into song. Nat King Cole. “(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons”. And her, feigning embarrassment, looking away and grumbling, fighting back the smile tugging at the corners of her lips, squeezing her eyes, darkening the crow’s feet with happy shadows. They used to ballroom dance. You saw them once, years ago.
They don’t dance any more,
but they laugh just as loud.
❧
Away. The taxi glides along Wong Nai Chung Road. To her right, an artificial day cast by spotlights spills onto the racecourse. To her left, cemeteries in shadow cover the lower hillsides in countless terraces. She pictures the ghosts sitting up to watch the horses, debating whether Golden Warrior is faster than Bubble Turbo or Lucky Thousand. Every faith, side by side, on and on, forever and ever.
And she departs, again. The rain never came. Night now drinks away the fog. In the rear-view mirror, the city reveals itself against the darkening sky. The blocky hospital where her mother was born. The hotel she stayed at on her second visit. The station where she’d sometimes hop on the tram and ride it to the end and back before bedtime, lulled by the glow.
Mozart. Baked pork chop rice. Mothballs. Fish congee. Nat King Cole. Red pockets. A text from Jammy. Safe trip, Cousin. Laughter. And the photograph taken at the Peak, in your jacket pocket.
So much fades and drifts away. Some of it stays. Parts of her. Bits and pieces, scattered in the narrow streets between the hills. She will find them again, sharp and dull alike. And again, when she returns
to Happy Valley.
How to cite: Sadeghi, Alexandre. “To Happy Valley.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 7 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/10/07/to-happy-valley.
Alexandre Sadeghi is a Swiss novelist and short-story writer. He writes in French and English, drawing on his Hong Kong roots and several years spent in China to explore questions of identity, cultural inheritance and intersection. His short fiction has won prizes in Switzerland and received recognition abroad, including three shortlistings for the Margery Allingham Prize. His novels, published by Slatkine, are Le Sutra des Damnés (2024, finalist for the 2025 Swiss Crime Fiction Award) and La Voie des Maudits (2026). He was also selected in 2023 for the emerging writers programme of the Geneva International Book Fair. Visit his website for more information.