But the Chinese were good enough to shovel coal into the boilers and grease the gears.
Steam rose around me as I ducked into the engine room. After five years, I knew the rhythmic rumbling of the pistons and the staccato grinding of the gears as well as I knew my own breath and heartbeat. There was a kind of music to their orderly cacophony that moved me, like the clashing of cymbals and gongs at the start of a folk opera. I checked the pressure, applied sealant on the gaskets, tightened the flanges, replaced the worn-down gears in the backup cable assembly. I lost myself in the work, which was hard and satisfying.
By the end of my shift, it was dark. I stepped outside the engine room and saw a full moon in the sky as another tram filled with passengers was pulled up the side of the mountain, powered by my engine.
“Don’t let the Chinese ghosts get you,” a woman with bright blonde hair said in the tram, and her companions laughed.
It was the night of Yulan, I realized, the Ghost Festival. I should get something for my father, maybe pick up some paper money at Mongkok.
“How can you be done for the day when we still want you?” a man’s voice came to me.
“Girls like you shouldn’t tease,” another man said, and laughed.
I looked in the direction of the voices and saw a Chinese woman standing in the shadows just outside the tram station. Her tight western-style cheongsam and the garish makeup told me her profession. Two Englishmen blocked her path. One tried to put his arms around her, and she backed out of the way.
“Please. I’m very tired,” she said in English. “Maybe next time.”
“Now, don’t be stupid,” ?the first man said, his voice hardening. “This isn’t a discussion. Come along now and do what you’re supposed to.”
I walked up to them. “Hey.”
The men turned around and looked at me.
“What seems to be the problem?”
“None of your business.”
“Well, I think it is my business,” I said, “seeing as how you’re talking to my sister.”
I doubt either of them believed me. But five years of wrangling heavy machinery had given me a muscular frame, and they took a look at my face and hands, grimy with engine grease, and probably decided that it wasn’t worth it to get into a public tussle with a lowly Chinese engineer.
The two men stepped away to get in line for the Peak Tram, muttering curses.
“Thank you,” she said.
“It’s been a long time,” I said, looking at her. I swallowed the you look good. She didn’t. She looked tired and thin and brittle. And the pungent perfume she wore assaulted my nose.
But I did not think of her harshly. Judging was the luxury of those who did not need to survive.
“It’s the night of the Ghost Festival,” she said. “I didn’t want to work anymore. I wanted to think about my mother.”
“Why don’t we go get some offerings together?” I asked.
We took the ferry over to Kowloon, and the breeze over the water revived her a bit. She wet a towel with the hot water from the teapot on the ferry and wiped off her makeup. I caught a faint trace of her natural scent, fresh and lovely as always.
“You look good,” I said, and meant it.
On the streets of Kowloon, we bought pastries and fruits and cold dumplings and a steamed chicken and incense and paper money, and caught up on each other’s lives.
“How’s hunting?” I asked. We both laughed.
“I miss being a fox,” she said. She nibbled on a chicken wing absentmindedly. “One day, shortly after that last time we talked, I felt the last bit of magic leave me. I could no longer transform.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, unable to offer anything else.
“My mother taught me to like human things: food, clothes, folk opera, old stories. But she was never dependent on them. When she wanted, she could always turn into her true form and hunt. But now, in this form, what can I do? I don’t have claws. I don’t have sharp teeth. I can’t even run very fast. All I have is my beauty, the same thing that your father and you killed my mother for. So now I live by the very thing that you once falsely accused my mother of doing: I lure men for money.”
“My father is dead too.”
Hearing this seemed to drain some of the bitterness out of her. “What happened?”
“He felt the magic leave us, much as you. He couldn’t bear it.”
“I’m sorry.” And I knew that she didn’t know what else to say either.
“You told me once that the only thing we can do is to survive. I have to thank you for that. It probably saved my life.”
“Then we’re even,” she said, smiling. “But let us not speak of ourselves anymore. Tonight is reserved for the ghosts.”
We went down to the harbor and placed our food next to the water, inviting all the ghosts we had loved to come and dine. Then we lit the incense and burned the paper money in a bucket.
She watched bits of burned paper being carried into the sky by the heat from the flames. They disappeared among the stars. “Do you think the gates to the underworld still open for the ghosts tonight, now that there is no magic left?”
I hesitated. When I was young I had been trained to hear the scratching of a ghost’s fingers against a paper window, to distinguish the voice of a spirit from the wind. But now I was used to enduring the thunderous pounding of pistons and the deafening hiss of high-pressured steam rushing through valves. I could no longer claim to be attuned to that vanished world of my childhood.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it’s the same with ghosts as with people. Some will figure out how to survive in a world diminished by iron roads and steam whistles, some will not.”
“But will any of them thrive?” she asked.
She could still surprise me.
“I mean,” she continued, “are you happy? Are you happy to keep an engine running all day, yourself like another cog? What do you dream of?”
I couldn’t remember any dreams. I had let myself become entranced by the movement of gears and levers, to let my mind grow to fit the gaps between the ceaseless clanging of metal on metal. It was a way to not have to think about my father, about a land that had lost so much.
“I dream of hunting in this jungle of metal and asphalt,” she said. “I dream of my true form leaping from beam to ledge to terrace to roof, until I am at the top of this island, until I can growl in the faces of all the men who believe they can own me.”
As I watched, her eyes, brightly lit for a moment, dimmed.
“In this new age of steam and electricity, in this great metropolis, except for those who live on the Peak, is anyone still in their true form?” she asked.
We sat together by the harbor and burned paper money all night, waiting for a sign that the ghosts were still with us.
? ? ?
Life in Hong Kong could be a strange experience: From day to day, things never seemed to change much. But if you compared things over a few years, it was almost like you lived in a different world.
By my thirtieth birthday, new designs for steam engines required less coal and delivered more power. They grew smaller and smaller. The streets filled with automatic rickshaws and horseless carriages, and most people who could afford them had machines that kept the air cool in houses and the food cold in boxes in the kitchen—all powered by steam.
I went into stores and endured the ire of the clerks as I studied the components of new display models. I devoured every book on the principle and operation of the steam engine I could find. I tried to apply those principles to improve the machines I was in charge of: trying out new firing cycles, testing new kinds of lubricants for the pistons, adjusting the gear ratios. I found a measure of satisfaction in the way I came to understand the magic of the machines.
One morning, as I repaired a broken governor—a delicate bit of work—two pairs of polished shoes stopped on the platform above me.
I looked up. Two men looked down at me.
“This is the one,” said my shift supervisor.