Pollen is in the air. Pollen the color of pollution. It carpets the path down the hill. Dead yellow. There is a lot going on. People are sniffling. Mornings are humid. Evenings are cold. Sometimes it rains. My neighbor told me he used to be a monk. A friend told me the pollen comes from the mimosa tree. Never has there been so much content for small talk. But when I google the mimosa tree that’s not the one I see flowering all over our village.
I am leaving Lamma with the daytrippers. A mass exodus, my mother would have said. Noah’s Ark vibes. As soon as I sit down, I just know I am going to get after someone. And there she is. A middle-aged mainlander heading for main-er land. She shouts to her friends a few aisles ahead. She shouts into her phone. People shift in their seats. I am in awe of a behavior that must have emerged from who knows what sort of need. I imagine her standing at one end of a field, alone, and her husband at another. Shouting. Who wouldn’t shout at their husband across a field? Maybe he is about to do something dangerous or stupid. Maybe she wants in on a joke he is having with someone else in the far field. How should I know? I’m just on a boat with her.
That does not stop me from shouting, one seat away, telling her to shut up. Actually I say, “You talk so loud? You always talk like this?” My Cantonese is so perfect that nobody smiles. The irony is lost on the woman. She apologizes quickly and then keeps her back to me for the rest of the ride. Her husband, having missed everything, appears from below deck to join her. He looks confused. So somber? People, other tourists, steal glances at me. None of them are from Lamma. Learn this: ferry rides should be sacred. And anyway I don’t really care because I am reading a book about a couple going through a hard time, a hard time which is needlessly hard because neither of them will just say what they mean and so, instead, it’s like a competition for best retort, which means basically you’re stuck witnessing a kind of nowhere that you just can’t wait to see go somewhere, anywhere, which is infuriating because that is perhaps precisely what the author intends me to feel. Well, it feels cheap. Like the tour group that woman is part of. They all wear the same red caps. It all has me in a tetchy mood. I don’t believe in war, but I do believe the two main characters could stand to be sent off to one. Then they’d at least be justified in their defensiveness, their I’ve-seen-it-all-and-nothing-surprises-me-ness. (They’re like 21 years old). I put my book down. I want to ask my neighbor why he became a monk.