Relicts & Revenants: Monsters of the Week II

Break the Melons, Sink the Plums

It would have been easier and righter to just not do it. Not see the sign, not raise the camera, not press the button. Just to do that: entirely get out of "be conscious of other people", "how are you behaving as a tourist", "keep your head on a swivel at all times, even just in the bus stop side of the Star Ferry terminal where nothing will happen". It's always easier to not do the thing. You can try and justify it with "what did you come here for if not to do the thing and/or take pictures to preserve your memories", or, blindly "tourists should get a pass, they get a pass on other stuff, most of the time", but: there are accepted and expected ways for everything, and if you decide to duck under the rope, decide to bend the rules this one time, you're responsible for everything that happens to you while you stray from the path, because it would be easier to not do it. Once done, it's too late.

See the bloody ribspreader pictures on the Falun Gong protest poster; no, don't see it. Ignore it and keep going to the ferry queue. Phone out of your pocket to memorialize it; no, don't do that. Stop to center it and press the button: no. Tourists will get a pass, or nobody will care because nobody does care in a city, constantly in motion: not so. This is a trap laid for you – not you, Michael Rowland specifically, you the white tourist generally – and you are currently falling into the pit.

I'd barely gotten my phone away when the monk was on top of me – sudden, noiseless, like one of the fogs blowing out of the harbor. I'd – I thought, for sure, that I'd checked around while I was pulling out the phone and made sure that there wasn't anyone who might take exception, but I somehow missed this one, and now I was in the soup. People kept flowing around us, bus to ferry to subway or over onto the promenades, not seeing, not noticing, not helping: easiest and best to not do the thing, and if someone didn't and got caught, it was their own fault, their own problem.

"Here," he said, grabbing my hand in his and pushing back from out of his sleeve with the other, the cheapest possible plastic Buddhist rosary transferred over to my wrist. "You'll take it, won't you? Here. For you." – and I shouldn't've, I should have pushed back harder, pushed back a little, but the sudden intrusion got the better of me. Something in how different his hands were, how disconnected they felt from the rest of him; something in the way his rolling, staring eyes fit and didn't fit into a wide shovel-face, suggestions of movement against the harbor breeze in his gray bean-sprout whiskers, uneven tendrils from the corners of his mouth. He let go and my hand was free and I'd signed a contract I never meant to.

"Then – here. Here. Your prayer. It's required. Required donation." A crumpled notebook out of nowhere inside his fog-gray robe – and wasn't it supposed to be saffron, supposed to be maroon or something? – and into my face, crabbed lines of pressured scrawl and notes of $50, $100: even if and I supposed he might be writing that up after, adding zeros like the world's simplest forger, this was getting too rich for my blood and I hadn't wanted the thing in the first place. "No," I said, backing up. "I didn't – you didn't let me – you can't force me into this." He kept coming and I kept backing up because the illusion was gone: if I hit him it would be all around the other way and I'd have the law all over me – did they still cane people here like in Singapore? If it was a hundred years ago and I had a stick I wouldn't – but no, that's not right, I wouldn't, even if it was now and I knew enough Cantonese to tell him where to jump I wouldn't lash out like that, stomping and throwing the rosary after him. I couldn't – I didn't – there wasn't anything I could do about this. I could only keep backing up, hope he lost interest, figured out he was losing time for cheap random dollar coins chasing a $20 he wouldn't get in exchange for this fifty-cent bungee of plastic beads.

"No," the monk said again, still pressing – we were out of the bus curve and over in the promenade, away from the Star Ferry and heading for Olympic, drawing looks from all around, horrified: what on earth had I done? "You will make it right: you know what you need to do." – and that stopped me, that did, because here with the space and the detachment and the consciousness that neither of us fit in here, the things wrong with the monk became more salient, and I could realize he was speaking English (he was speaking it or I was hearing it and at the time that didn't even register as a distinction), not the pidgin people like him (what he presented himself as) would put on for tourists or even HK English as English-speaking HK people spoke and understood it, but English as I expected it, heard and didn't identify as foreign.