Page 22 of The Girl with a Thousand Faces
She starts knocking on doors, approaching strangers. How else could one ask for a job? Few people talk to her, most can’t help her. They have no need of messages or packages sent at night. After the thirtieth attempt, though, she finds an elderly woman running a shoe shop who suggests seeking out a man called Lau Yik. No family name, and his address is a cha chaan teng eatery, only a few streets over.
“Who is he?” Mei Chi asks. “What does he do?”
“He is the man who knows everyone. I think he will find a use for your ghost-talking.” The shopkeeper refuses to say anything more about it, and shoos her away.
Bloodstained, barefoot, starving, and broke, Mei Chi stumbles into a room full of smoking, dour men, asking to meet Lau Yik. And claiming she can navigate the streets of Kowloon at night, no less.
One of them comes forward. He is lean and slight of build, with intelligent eyes and greasy hair. “Who the hell are you?”
“Just a refugee,” she says, tiredly. “Please, I was told you could give me work. I can walk the streets safely at night.”
He frowns. “Do you even know what we do here?”
“I don’t care,” she says. “I only want to eat, to live. To survive the occupation.”
“We all want that,” he says, annoyed. “We are part of the resistance, girl. Do you understand what that means?”
“People who fight the soldiers.” She adds, because she is afraid he will think she is a collaborator, “The Japanese chased me into this district. They make everything unsafe.”
He spits. “I want the Japanese out of my city, like we all do, and I work towardthat goal with many others. I admit it is difficult to organize at night, but trusting my messages to a homeless beggar is ludicrous.”
“I can do it,” she insists, standing before him in her tattered clothes, her tear-streaked face and shivering limbs. “Try me, pay nothing upfront. You lose nothing if I fail. If I succeed, pay me after!”
Instead of answering, he says, “What’s that accent? Where are you from?”
“The islands, I think,” she says, taken aback.
“You speak Hakka, then?” he says, and she is startled to realize that not only has he changed language, but she can understand what he’s saying, mostly. His language is not quite the same as hers, but it’s close.
“Yes,” she says, cautiously. Trying to hide her shock. “Is that good?”
“Hmm. Maybe. There are not many Hakka speakers around, and the Japanese can’t make head or tail of it. Let me think about it.”
He scratches his cheek, paces a little, talks to his colleagues in a low voice.
She waits.
After a while, he comes back and says, “We will do a test. No letters, nothing written. I will give you a message in Hakka to remember, and at sundown you will go out at night and deliver it. The person you are supposed to meet will be expecting you, and will know what you are meant to say. If you get it wrong or do not turn up, no more chances.”
“I am listening,” she says, ears open and alert.
That night will live in her memory forever: a harrowing few hours of running, dodging, gasping. Every few steps she stops and whispers the message to herself again, because she doesn’t want to survive this horseshit only to forget the actual words.
Many ghosts ignore her, while some try to talk back when she speaks to them. She is clumsy in her dealings with them, but it is a start. And for the ones who do attack, Bao deals with them savagely. It works, more or less.
Somehow, she doesn’t die. Step by step, navigating across an unfamiliar neighborhood, Mei Chi staggers and stumbles her way to the designated house, repeating a nonsense message in Hakka to a baffled—and thoroughly amazed—woman at the other end.
When she returns back to Lau Yik’s at dawn, trembling yet utterly triumphant, he pays up and gives her an approving nod.
She dines well that night, on a whole roasted fish. No part of it goes towaste: she eats the skin, head, tail, and the juicy little eyes. The flesh is rich and soft, the skin crisp and dripping with grease. She drinks the juices and licks her fingers afterward.
She piles the bones on a shrine for the ghost cat to eat. He can kill, but he cannot eat her food for sustenance if she does not mark it for the dead, and he needs feeding if she wants him to stick around. Ghosts linger longer if fed, and she likes having him for companionship. As well, she needs his help.
Afterward, when they are both done, she curls in the corner of the room. Resistance fighters come and go, talking among themselves.
“Fighters” is an optimistic description. They are men and women who object to the Japanese occupation, but few are military trained, and even fewer are truly fighting. Instead, led by Lau Yik—a former schoolteacher, Mei Chi gathers—they pass along crucial information, and sometimes supplies, using Kowloon like a conduit for the handful of scattered resistance forces which still hold out in isolated pockets. Most of the guerilla groups seem to be out in Sai Kung somewhere, which is not far from where she first came ashore.
As the night wears on, and the alcohol-induced moroseness kicks in, the mood drops slowly. One particularly inebriated young man with scars across his face tries to sit down on a nearby chair. He misses his seat and ends up slumped on the floor next to Mei Chi, staring unfocused at the ceiling above them.
