Walking through soup, that’s what the past two days have been like. Grey miso, just transparent enough so you can see the silhouette of Tai Mo Shan across the harbor like a doorway at the back of a smoke-filled bar. It’s almost as if COVID never happened and the factories up the Pearl River are working away as usual. The concerns people used to air about purifiers and home filtration systems, before we had to wear them on our faces, seem silly now.
This evening, I return to Lamma for a break from the impostor-apartment but the soup shows no sign of thinning as I make my way up the hill to my village. I stop at the village shop to buy four cans of soda water and a rectangle of dark chocolate. I know exactly where everything is. A breath of fresh air. No soup. “It’s going to storm,” the shopkeeper says as she rings up my things. “It’s the weather,” she concludes. She’s not wrong. It is the weather.
Late Spring was good, by the way. Hara Setsuko is impeccable. I try not to imitate her way of walking as I carry my shopping bag home. She would have looked good even in soup.