13th floor
A mother tucks two children into their shared bed and tells them to be gwai, not just for mama but for the gods who are always watching. If they are waai, they will be punished in life and death.
Omeitofat! Choi! her husband exclaims when the children start crying.
12th floor
Instead of caring for their good-for-nothing husbands, four women wash mahjong tiles under dangling lights that sway amid the loud clattering. With cigarettes pinched between their fingers, they compete over who is the poorest with the worst husband. Below their feet, a neighbor starts bickering like clockwork, and they stomp and shout, shut up! The argument below quiets, and the ladies continue to pong and soeng and trash-talk.
11th floor
The husband pounds the locked door of the shanty; his middle-aged wife shouts that he’s a cheating sei baat gung. He claims he had to get drinks with his boss; she says that he should’ve said no and come home early.
He does this so they can live a better life.
This is their life, and he needs to accept it.
10th floor
A young woman, frowning and rehearsing tears for the life insurance brokers tomorrow, carries a small, black plastic bag and intends to hide it in the mountains of trash on the level below. It is double-bagged, handles braided tightly like hair, to conceal the content from Heaven, Earth, and herself.
A crude graffiti of a cow and a horse oversees her descent down the staircase.
9th floor
The backed-up pipes on the ceiling pour gray rain over the narrow, unending streets; each water-logged step the woman takes splatters her pants darker with filth. Her clothes are soaked and cling to her like a wrinkled, ill-fitting second skin. She can’t find the trash heap or the stairs. Shivering, she wanders until a man, dressed in a clean, black samfu, asks what she is doing.
She replies she’s lost and doesn’t know why.
With a stretched smile, he explains she has simply gone the wrong way.
How, she asks him; she’s lived in this Walled City for years.
One damned decision, he says, and anyone, even himself, can lose their path. He offers to guide her to where she will stay.
She tightens the knot on her plastic bag and follows him.
8th floor
Curry fish balls and runoff waste overwhelm the senses. She and her husband ate here once at the hawkers’ stands, slurping noodles on one of the mismatched tables. Now, ghastly figures scoop ashes of half-burnt joss paper into their mouths from colored plastic stools.
She whispers she wants to go home, and he asks her, to whom?
Her husband, she insists.
His smile a mask, he continues down.
7th floor
She doesn’t recognize this floor. The littered streets are spiraling; a sickly, earthly smoke crawls on the ground. Around her, the almost-ghosts with skin draped over bones, the inside of their bodies rotted by aa pin, beg for their next life; she quickens to leave, and her bag grows heavier in her hand.
6th floor
They come across a dental office still open at this time of night. Just beyond the dirty glass door that greets customers with fun jing gwong lam, a patient’s clothes and a dentist’s scrubs are covered in blood; the patient is missing his tongue.
Her guide tells her that the tongueless man spread lies to steal his siblings’ inheritance, all for a house in Victoria.
She asks if he still has the house there.
5th floor
Around her, people are frozen in walk-in freezers next to wan tan and maan tau. In the corner of her eye, a young girl, encased in ice, smiles at dreams of a lavish future.
Then the ice shatters, destroying the hopeful smile; an empty freezer remains, its inside not much smaller than the shoddy house the woman lives in.
4th floor
Ghosts linger on the makeshift streets, and they ask, dim gaai, about their deaths.
Her husband’s voice is among the wispy choir.
His dim gaai is for her; she doesn’t answer.
3rd floor
The walls are plastered with red paper scrawled with: maan see yu yee.
May all your wishes come true.
On the ground: jan gwo bou jing.
Karmic retribution.
She repeats that she wants to go home; her guide informs her they don’t have much further to go.
2nd floor
Her husband’s voice screams for help: gau meng ah!
Her guide locks his cold fingers around her wrist, kindly telling her she is nearly there. His eyes fall on her painted nails stained with flakes of blood red, then on the plastic bag.
This bag is weighing her down, he says; she should leave it there.
He points at the corpse of her husband, missing its head.
At the sight, she tries to escape, bag clutched, still refusing to let go.
The guide drags her down the final staircase.
1st floor
This is where you’ll stay, he tells her.
The walls, floor, and ceiling are lined with mountains of knives, polished like mirrors, and reflect her holding her own knife, covered in greed.
She struggles for mercy, and the black plastic bag falls from her hands.
The missing head tumbles out and rolls until a knife impales its hollow eye socket; a pink kiss graces its forehead, gratitude for being worth more dead than alive.
From the ground, skeletal arms grab her and chop off her limbs and her head, still screaming; she’s heaved, in pieces, deeper into the city of darkness. Her wails, gau ngo, gau ngo, join the unliving, undying chorus trapped in incessant punishment.
By the doorway that reveals the lamp-lit, shining city outside, the guide, his smile gone, his work endless, basks briefly in his own bygone ambitions. With his back to the exit, he ascends the staircase, again, towards the next crime someone believed had gone unseen.
* * *
Ⓒ Crystal Leung