The Train to Lo Wu by Jess Row
Image not found: https://arb.techsimba.in/new/covers/9780385337908.jpg
Jess Row’s The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories about Hong Kong, leaves me almost speechless. That makes it hard to review, but I’ll try. If I fail, suffice it to say that if you are a current or former Hong Kong resident and read only one book this season, let it be this one. You may very find yourself, as I did, going right back and re-reading the stories for a second time.
Everything that is right about this collection is in illustrated in the lead-off story, “The Secret of Bats”, about a girl in a local secondary school and her teacher who explore the blindness of bats in at attempt to locate the girl’s mother, dead from suicide. The premise is both interesting and gripping, the locale and characters recognizable, the story itself touching and the writing, well, you’ll have to experience it for yourself.
Many writers have managed to describe Hong Kong, but few have as a deft a touch with the Hong Kong people, real people, with the cadences of Hong Kong English, with the gestures, body language and internal contradictions of the people of this place, as Row. “Sound of lightbulb—low like bees hum,” the student writes in her journal. “So hard to listen!”
There is no condescension or mockery in this slightly fractured grammar. Whether writing about a high school student, a hostess from Shenzhen, a blind masseur, a Hong Kong businessman, or expats from lawyers to artists, Row writes with sympathy and, one suspects, affection.
The other stories touch on the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, cross-border romance, eastern religions and the contradictions of the expat existence, whether senior law partner or backpacker.
Hong Kong, in Row’s hands at any rate, seems to lend itself to the short story. People come and go, relationships blossom and fade, people meet and then go their own way, with the city and its rhythms and demands behind them all. Row, who taught at Chinese University from 1997 to 1999, seems to have captured in this short time what it is about Hong Kong that makes Hong Kong so frustrating, yet also so hard for so many of us to leave.
Indeed, one wonders what people who have never been to Hong Kong make of the stories. Row litters the dialogue with snatches of Cantonese, easy enough for even short-time residents to follow, but he rarely bothers to explain it, nor to explain where exotically named Cheung Sha Wan or Lamma might be.
Read the stories, re-read them and then remember. You will be richer for it.