Lamma Island, 10:21AM – Pouring.
Entry 88
Two people won’t look at me whenever I pass them on the hill. Such a simple act can leave quite the impression. One is a black man who pushes an old Chinese grandpa with no teeth in a wheelchair wherever he goes. The other is an older French woman who wears her hair in a chignon and dresses like a small girl but looks like a mouse. I have never said a word to either of them.
When you live in the same village you see people enough, during errands and walks, and so eventually you come up with your own story. It’s part of the fun, I suppose.
To avoid looking at me, the black man simply averts his eyes, while the French woman must hold something directly in front of her face, a folded newspaper, a bag of vegetables, an umbrella. This seems to be her weakness because I have seen her jump up a random staircase when her hands were empty. She is quite a gymnast considering her age. One neighbor tells me she’s seen the French woman climbing fences at night all alone.
The black man is the Chinese grandpa’s caretaker, who is not a small man. I can’t imagine what that work is like especially when the air is thicker than Vaseline and your charge lives in an old stone house that predates the war. I walk by once, the front door wide open. Sitting on a cot is the black man, fanning himself, right below an elaborate family altar decked out with huge floral arrangements and blown-up black and white funerary portraits. Faces of the dead unimpressed and living large. It is eerie and possibly the only time our eyes meet. Perhaps looking is my weakness.