#i hated every minute of it but submitting my dissertation was the greatest day of my life at the time. bc i worked so fucking hard

[lazylittledragon]

i will never have this attitude to anything else in any part of life but i did not down monster and coffee and sit in my university library all night and experience rollercoaster level anxiety on the countdown to last submissions just so people can write their essays with chatgpt

[frangrantharborthoughts-blog]

Short Story: The Cloudy Eye

This is a short story I submitted to a local writing contest. It didn’t win but I liked it and want to publish it here.

The Cloudy Eye

 “It’s just your imagination. Hong Kong is one of the safest cities on earth.  When was the last time you heard about something bad happening to someone? Especially to a foreigner?”

Lena, laying on her back in the double bed that took up most of the tiny, Sai Ying Pun bedroom, didn’t look at John.  As her boyfriend, he was usually sweet, supportive, and empathetic, but he refused to accept any hearsay when it came to his hometown.

Yet, Lena hadn’t been able to quell the anxious feeling that someone was following her.  Her skin prickled as she waited at the bus stop, wove in and out of crowded streets, and dutifully stood firm on the escalators. She navigated the city in a daze, colliding head on with other pedestrians while crossing the bridge over Connaught Road and tripping over her feet as she jogged the trails in Pokfulam.  The charming characters she passed in the village on her way home from the ferry—the old man in the round glasses doing tai chi, the tan fishermen and their mountains of beer cans, the waiters tending to green, murky fish tanks, the retired British teachers nursing their weeknight cocktails, and the tiny grandmothers peddling skinny, white flours and fat, brown bananas—were ominous to her. Her hands trembled when she tried to eat.  The summer was brutally hot, but she shivered.

A few weeks ago, at the beginning of the summer, she had been browsing the news on her phone as she usually did in the mornings when an article caught her eye.  It had taken place at her alma mater in the US, a school where she’d spent four of the greatest years of her life.  A Chinese PhD student named Li Yuchen had gone missing. She’d been kidnapped, and still, weeks later, hadn’t been found.  She was presumed dead.

She had originally browsed the story with a frown.  How sad, she thought.  How unfortunate.

Then, the text ended. Instead of seeing a picture of the missing woman, she was looking into the strangest mirror.  She squinted at her reflection, her opposite, distorted slightly but still recognizably her.  There was the picture of an aspiring biologist, excitedly pursuing her education in a faraway land where everyone looked different, spoke a foreign language, and followed strange customs.  There was a woman who moved where she didn’t know anyone to the opposite side of the world, taking a huge risk for her passion.

Lena blinked.

This wasn’t her reflection. This was a photograph of a Chinese woman whom she’d never met whose life happened to have some similarities to hers. They didn’t resemble each other at all in appearance, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were twins in spirit.  Two halves of a same whole.

“You’re just tired.” John had explained, the first time she’d confessed the feeling to him over drinks at the new, trendy craft beer joint that had opened in between auto-repair and noodle shops around the corner from his apartment.  He sipped a sour beer inspired by salty limes.  Her stomach did flip flops.  She couldn’t drink her pale ale and hadn’t even touched the bowl of peanuts she usually devoured.

She had been a little overworked, she admitted silently.  She had volunteered to tutor in a summer science camp for high schoolers in addition to her usual lab work, research assistant duties, and writing.  Her thesis was due at the end of the year and although she excelled at analyzing bacterial samples, she was a slow writer. Every time she sat in front of her laptop to write, she thought of something else she would rather be doing and most of the time she got up and did it.  Like the half marathon in the mountains of northern Vietnam she’d seen advertised online.  She had to sign up and train for that.  Spending her evenings trail-running would get her blood flowing and help her think and come up with ideas for when she did, eventually, try to write.

I am exhausted, she thought as she watched the bubbles float to the top of her bright, yellow beer as songs from her middle school days blared in the background.  Good Charlotte and Blink-182 filled the emptiness in her failure to reply.

What she had wanted to say was that a few years ago, during another hot summer like this one, she remembered reading in the news about some boys who had been murdered in Israel. Then, some other boys had been murdered in response.  This chain of events stood out to her because she was supposed to have travelled to Israel that summer but couldn’t because of the sudden violence.  She thought about the boys and the murders and wondered if someone, somewhere, was stewing with resentment towards Americans who could come to Asia to study and live, unmolested and unafraid.

After John had finished his drink and polished off hers, they’d walked back to his apartment.  Lena held his arm tightly and tried to act casual even though everyone was looking at them—at her.  She who was so foreign that passersby on the street wrenched their eyes from their phones or their newspapers to glower until she turned the corner and was out of sight.  Then, new eyes pored over her, examining her for weak spots, for an opening to strike, for a reason to chase her back to where she came from.  For a way to get even.

She’d lain awake that night, in the double bed that barely fit, thinking about the dissertation she needed to write, the Israeli boys, Li Yuchen, and how little anything that could be seen without the use of a microscope made sense to her.  

Except later that week, she sat in her lab, looking under her microscope and it didn’t make sense to her. Everything was all wrong.  Instead of her samples, carefully cultivated in a dish over the past few days, she saw an eye, eerily magnified, brown and cloudy.

Her eye stayed cloudy. Standing in front of her class, a gaggle of overeager sixteen-year olds from China’s best high schools, she couldn’t read her notes.  She couldn’t tell whether her stammering caused them to frown or their judgmental scowls had made her lose her train of thought.  Eighteen pairs of dark eyes watched her struggle, saying nothing, though thinking: this foreigner doesn’t belong here.

“They didn’t think that.” John assured her later as they sweated over bowls of wontons and noodles in the restaurant below his apartment.  She hated this place—the wontons were rubbery and the broth was bland.  Plus, who in their right mind eats soup in the summer? That was one custom she would never understand.

And maybe she shouldn’t. Maybe that was the sign that she should pack her bags and go back to where she belonged. Where soup was for cold, snowy Midwestern winter nights and noodles went with chicken not pork.

“You should probably get going soon.” John had said a few minutes ago.  Lena had protested.  He had launched into his reasons as to why she had nothing to worry about and she realized, bitterly, that he didn’t really understand.

“My roommate doesn’t want you staying over so much.” He added.  “You should leave now so you don’t miss the last ferry.”  

She rose, dressed, and trudged to the door.  She said goodbye tersely with a peck on the cheek and hoped he couldn’t feel her clammy lips trembling.

She was sure the night was muggy and warm but she had goosebumps.  At just after midnight, the city was unnaturally empty.  Her footsteps were loud, echoing off the buildings that stretched precariously up into the dark pinkish sky.  Drying clothes and bedsheets flapped above, independent of any breeze.  She noticed that she could hear them so clearly because there were no others sounds—no dogs barking, horns honking, phones ringing, shopkeepers shouting—all that she could hear were her steps, the laundry, and her heartbeat which was rapidly increasing.  The old cliché crept into her head, it was quiet…too quiet. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to stop walking and look around or sprint back to safety.  She was sure that something had to be up; positive that there was someone hiding in a shadow, just out of reach, biding their time until she was most vulnerable, until she least expected it.  They had been tailing her for weeks, probably, and watching and waiting for this grand opportunity to catch her and get even.  To get her cloudy eye for the clear eye that had been lost. Kidnapped. Murdered.

She was about to turn down a shortcut, when she finally heard a noise.  Her knees buckled and she stumbled, stretching a weak hand towards the grey apartment building for balance.  She could run a marathon usually, up mountains and over hills but that training was useless.  The blood drained from her face and her ankles broke out in sweat.  Was it the rustling of a rat or the heavy breathing of someone unfriendly…

Slowly, she peered around the corner.  

An old woman stood alone, balancing heavily on a cane.  She was brightly illuminated by street lights and framed by a haze rising up from the ground. For a moment, Lena imagined an absurd scenario straight out of an old kung-fu movie. The woman, revealing herself to be the young, beautiful, blind assassin, flew towards her with poisoned daggers ready.  But, the woman didn’t move.  She hunched over her walking stick, still as a statue.  

Lena breathed a sigh of relief and brushed past her, murmuring an mgoi, as she did.  The woman didn’t seem to notice which was strange, but not threatening.  Worriedly, she paused to glance over her shoulder. The woman was gone but mist continued to creep out the alleyway, filling her now unoccupied space.

She stared in front of her now, at High Street which was equally deserted, and wondered if she’d just hallucinated the old woman.  She really was exhausted, then irritated, as she inwardly chastened John for not letting her stay over and herself for not standing up to him more.  She resumed walking, though her legs still felt noodly.

The feeling of being watched hadn’t entirely dissipated but she took deep breaths to clear her head and not think about it.  She was being silly.  She just needed to sleep.  Everything would work itself out in the end: she would arrive home safe, she would finish her dissertation, they would find Li Yuchen alive and well.

She chuckled out loud to herself at the empty street.  How peaceful it was at night!  She loved this city.  How lucky she was to live here! She ambled along, her heart racing as her adrenaline turned to nervous glee.

At the entrance to the train station, an old woman sat.  Was it the same woman as before?

Lena wasn’t sure.  She waved and approached her, examining her face. It had been too dark in the alley. Now, in the bright white light of the station entrance, everything was clear.

The woman frowned at her. Her dark eyes set angrily in a brown, wrinkled face.  Her fuzzy grey hair messily tied back in a bun and her gnarled hands clasped her cane.

The feelings of relief drained so fast Lena felt dizzy.  The woman raised her cane with surprising agility.  Lena watched it, hypnotized, wondering what she was going to do.  She knew she should just walk by now, to go into the safety of the train station, the protective shell of the subway, and the assuring route towards her ferry and her home but she was rooted to the spot. The lights flickered.

“We’ve been following you, Lena.”

Lena turned slowly towards the voice.

An eye for an eye, she thought.