Currency

I opened an empty drawer and drew my nose close. The aroma of white peony root flooded my senses. I could see him delicately taking a handful, placing it on a scale he balanced between his fingers, adjusting it, then putting a piece back before tipping the scale’s contents onto a sheet of butcher paper laid out on the counter. I pushed the drawer back into place. Though the shop was now empty, a heavy scent lingered from years past—an earthy smell of herbs and roots with a hint of dried flowers and aged ginseng. This was the scent my father carried on his body ever since I was young, a scent I had tried so desperately to decipher, only to find myself comforted, years later, in the strange mixture of smells I would never fully know or understand.

My father was a Chinese herbal doctor. Having trained at the academy in Guangzhou, he fled to Hong Kong during the famine of Guangdong in the 1960s. After finding a job washing dishes at a restaurant in Wan Chai, he eventually saved enough money to marry my mother, a waitress at the restaurant, and to open his own clinic in North Point, known back then as Little Shanghai. Over the years, dispensing packets of herbs for patients in the neighbourhood, he became known affectionately as Long Hair, not only because his secret formula helped numerous clients regrow their hair, but also because he was never successful in regrowing his own hair, no matter how many packets he took himself. Funny isn’t it—the way Hong Kong people show affection.

The old rosewood furniture gave the room an archaic, other-worldly appearance. A traditional ink wash painting of a Buddhist temple in the mountains hung behind the massive desk where a brush and inkwell, paper, and my father’s name plate normally rested—now covered by a layer of dust. Lining the room was an endless wall of drawers, each meticulously labelled in brushstroke. An old-fashioned scale with a brass plate and counterweight lay on a long glass-topped counter in front of the drawers. I could almost feel his presence in the room, seated behind the desk, intently writing out a script for one of his patients.

My mother had given me detailed instructions about how to dispose of things in the shop. As I glanced over the list of items written in Chinese, there was a knock on the door.

“Simon,” she said, “you’re back.” It was the lady who owned the seafood restaurant down the street. I didn't remember her name and it was years too late to ask.

“Auntie, long time no see.”

“Come to the restaurant when you’re finished. Everyone will be there.”

“See you then.”

As she turned to leave, she quickly remarked, “The older you get, the more you look like him.”

I closed the door and couldn't help but let out a deep sigh. I’m not sure when I started doing it, but my wife had commented on it when we first met. “You sigh like those old shopkeepers in Chinatown on Canal Street,” she had said, laughing. “The curse of being Chinese,” I had replied.

The shop was situated on a small side street parallel to King’s Road, the main road running across the eastern part of Hong Kong Island. Called Seven Sisters Street in Chinese, it was named after the village of Hakka people that once occupied the land. Legend has it, there were seven friends, girls, who made a promise to each other to never marry, tying their hair into buns representing their vow of chastity. Soon after their vow, one of the girls was betrothed by her family to a boy. Though she didn’t want to proceed, she didn’t dare disobey her parents, so they went ahead with the preparations. The day before the wedding, the girl and her six friends decided to commit suicide together by the harbour in defiance. It was rumoured that the next day, seven rocks appeared where they had killed themselves. News spread to the surrounding towns, who from then on referred to the village as the Seven Sisters. The village was later demolished, and the area developed, but the street remains.

My father, having considered numerous locations on the Island for his shop, decided on Seven Sisters Street solely due to its lower price, as did the rest of the shopkeepers who had settled on the street. Over the years, they built up a camaraderie that carried them through the numerous changes Hong Kong went through in the following decades. My father, the oldest of them all, became the de facto chief of the street, if you could call him that—settling disputes between shopkeepers, helping landlords deal with unruly tenants, protesting against redevelopment. Their gatherings centered on a weekly evening meal hosted by my father—the shop transformed into a dining hall with folding tables and stools while my mother cooked up a feast in the back, and I, along with a few of the other kids played in the storeroom. My father being the oldest, happened also to be the first to pass away, and the second oldest shopkeeper—the owner of the seafood restaurant—had taken up the role after he died.

Before I realized, it had gotten dark. His library was packed into boxes and the rest of his belongings were sorted. The only task remaining was to go through binders of remedies he had prescribed for his patients over the years. I locked up and stepped out onto the street. Though it was as quiet as it had always been in the evenings, the new development on the hill behind was ominous, suggesting the same fate for the street.

Situated on the corner with large windows spanning its façade, the restaurant’s sign was unchanged. Its name, once in a bold red font on a white background, was now faded, the background marked with water stains. Underneath, the number ‘2’ was printed in a different font next to its original phone number from before the government introduced eight-digit numbers. Large decals of soda and beer products—no longer available—covered a pair of frosted glass doors. There weren’t many of these types of places around anymore, and the ones that remained were on streets like this.

“Simon,” the owner exclaimed when I entered.

A few tables by the window were occupied by older couples. The rest of the place was empty except for a large round table by the corner—the best table. She motioned for me to come over, and everyone else got up. “Simon, how long has it been?” one of them said, gripping my hand without letting go. The rest of the group reached across the table, smiling, shaking my hand, one by one. The restaurant owner ushered me to a seat towards the interior. It was the type of welcome typically shown to someone important. I sat down, took a deep breath, and forced a smile.

The dishes began to come out. First, the appetizers—slices of marinated pork, pieces of stewed beef shank, shredded bean curd, and pickled jellyfish. I was chewing on a piece of tough jellyfish when one of the shopkeepers across the table spoke up.

“Simon, how is your mother?” The table stilled, all eyes on me.

“Eating well. Keeping herself busy,” I said, swallowing the remainder of what was in my mouth.

The group smiled and nodded silently for what felt a bit too long. Expecting another question, I picked up a piece of bean curd, but when I placed it into my bowl, I understood—they wanted to talk about my father, not my mother.

“It’d be a lot louder in here if my father was around,” I said.

They laughed, relieved at the permission to speak. “He was a good man,” the restaurant owner said.

“If it weren’t for Long Hair, I might not be here. He stopped me from going to the ’67 riots where my friend was killed by a ‘pineapple’ bomb. I was young and stupid back then,” one of them added.

Someone else nodded. “I was at the bank watching the Hang Seng Index tumble on Black Monday in ’87 when Long Hair walked in to deposit cash from his shop. I would’ve lost my business if he hadn’t handed me the stack of cash.”

The seafood restaurant owner cleared her throat. “My daughter’s family was living in Amoy Gardens where there was an outbreak during SARS. Long Hair gave them two boxes of masks; their neighbours caught the virus, but her family never did—he saved their lives,” she said, voice quivering. The table was solemn until the waiter brought over the next few dishes—chicken with lightly fried skin, scallops on a bed of colourful greens, and shrimp stir fried with caramelized walnuts. The sound of chopsticks relieved the tension in the air. Though my appetite had now disappeared, I picked up a piece of shrimp.

I had heard these stories countless times growing up—sacrifices my father made that earned him respect from the neighbourhood. You’d see him stroll down the street a few times a day and neighbours would cross the street just to greet him, offering him freshly baked egg tarts or vinegared pork knuckles and ginger they’d made the night before. Occasionally, he’d be chatting to a shopkeeper for a long time about something you knew was important. He’d often be home late and at the dinner table would retell his latest encounters on the street like a child, proud of what he’d accomplished that day at school. It was during those years when I learned that honour was the highest form of currency one could ever possess, something that our family needed to preserve at all costs.

As we finished off the remaining dishes, the waiter brought out a massive oval plate with a large lobster on top of a bed of braised noodles. The conversation died down and we all watched as he set the plate down in the centre of the table alongside a number of stainless-steel lobster crackers and picks. With her chopsticks, the restaurant owner skillfully picked up a bundle of noodles before motioning for me to pass her my bowl. Instinctively, I refused and attempted to reach for the bowl of the gentleman seated next to me, but he quickly slapped my hand away and took mine. Resigned, I watched the owner place an enormous amount of noodles into the bowl, topped off with the most desired part of the lobster—the tail.

“Thank you, Auntie,” I said.

“You’re our guest.” She smiled.

She spoke up again as I chewed on a portion of noodles. “Ah Shun.” My Chinese name. It had been years since someone other than my mother called me by that name. I braced myself.

“You know how much this street meant to your father,” she said. The rest of the group looked on, unsurprised.

“He dedicated his life to it—none of us would be here without him.”

I nodded.

“We know you and your mother have finally decided to sell the shop, but your father would’ve wanted it to go to someone he knew.”

“Not some mainland buyer,” someone else said.

The restaurant owner looked around the table, then back at me, and asked, “Will you sell it to one of us?”

As I swallowed, I felt the noodles coat my oesophagus with oil on their way down.

A few months before my father died, he called. He never called. Usually, I was the one who called him during the New Year or Mid-Autumn Festival. Other times, my mother, who by that time had decided to split her time between Hong Kong and New York, would be the one passing me the phone after talking to him, so when he called, I thought something must’ve been wrong.

“Ah Shun,” he said.

“Ba, what’s wrong?”

“Is that the way you greet your father?”

“You haven’t called in a long time. That’s all.”

“I have some time before dinner with the shopkeepers.”

“Mmm,” I replied.

“Your mother said you’ll be in China next month.”

“Yes, Shenzhen. Just a few days.”

“Business?”

“Visiting a few factories.”

“If you’re free, come down to Seven Sisters for yum cha.”

“Not this time, Ba. I’ll be busy.”

“Fine. Next time, then?”

“Next time.” We hung up. And though I thought nothing of it at the time, looking back, I should’ve known.

A few months later, my mother, in the middle of a six-month stay with me, received a call from the restaurant owner, who told her that my father had fainted on the street and was admitted to the hospital. It was cancer. He had apparently been treating himself with herbal medicine for months, telling the others not to let me or my mother know. He died that same week and left the shop to my mother in his will.

I had never seen my mother wail until the funeral. In the presence of an unending stream of people there to pay their respects, her loud groans and cries echoed through the hall and out the doors of the funeral parlour we had walked past countless times. She had remained calm all the way up to the funeral, but on that day, it was as if her emotions welled up to a point where she was able to channel all the sorrow and agony of the neighbourhood, and mourn on their behalf.

The restaurant quieted down after the last diners finished their meal. Some of the shopkeepers said goodbye and shook my hand on their way out, telling me to send their regards to my mother while handing me bags of gifts for her, overflowing with dried shiitake mushrooms and their intense fragrance wafting out of their plastic wrappers. Before leaving, I headed to the bathroom, the heavy MSG not sitting well with my stomach. As I was coming back out, I heard the restaurant owner talking with two others. I waited behind a traditional partition separating us.

“Ten million?”

“That’s a bit low. The new development on the hill has driven prices up.”

“We can try.”

“You think he feels guilty for emigrating?”

“Look at Hong Kong now. You can’t blame him.”

“Could’ve at least come back to visit more.”

“No wonder Long Hair got sick.”

“Ah Lan should’ve come back.”

“Can’t blame her for wanting to be close to her only son.”

I had forgotten that this was the way people in Hong Kong communicated—with whispers, in shadows. I cleared my throat and walked back into the dining room. The restaurant owner shoved the others towards the door before turning to me.

“Talk to your mother about it, Simon,” she said.

“I will.”

“For your father.”

“For my father,” I said as I exited the restaurant.

Neatly arranged on three large bookshelves behind my father’s desk were binders full of remedies he had prescribed since the shop’s opening. Organized by each Chinese character’s stroke-count, they were sorted by family name, then by each patient’s given name. My father’s handwriting, consistent throughout the years, was bold yet intricate, exuding a sense of mysteriousness common to herbal doctors. When I was young, I once asked my mother why he wrote that way. She passed me a prescription and asked me to read it. “I can’t,” I said, unable to make out his handwriting. With a smile, she took the prescription back and said, “Exactly.” My mother understood that it was his way of protecting his trade and craft, revealed only to those whom he absolutely trusted. In the following years with my mother’s help, I slowly learned to decode the characters I watched him pen each day seated behind his immovable desk. I wanted to know him, and it made sense to me that the way to do so was to decipher something he knew so intimately, something that felt so hidden from me. Over the years, the once mysterious characters that looked more like the doodling of a child than the calligraphy of an accomplished doctor gradually unveiled themselves, first as words representing roots, insects, animal parts, then as formulas targeting imbalances in the body that impeded health.

At the bottom of the shelf was a binder containing prescriptions for our family, and my mother was first. After many years, the ink had mostly faded, but I could make out just enough to know that the first prescription was for a wind-type cold, confirmed by the date scribbled on the top—the day after Christmas. Herbs of the warm variety that would expel wind from her body—ginger, Chinese cinnamon, dried tangerine peels, perilla leaf—were listed from the top to the bottom of the page. The second component of the remedy was written on the side—three bowls of water reduced to one bowl of liquid. It was a simple prescription, one he had written thousands of times, but perhaps the most important, addressing the most common illness of all—instilling warmth into a body that could not produce its own.

I continued to flip through, tracing a record of my mother’s health through the years, when I noticed that the prescriptions became more frequent and more complex, beyond my basic knowledge of the craft. Some had multiple revisions, which meant that the initial prescription had not worked, or was perhaps unbalanced, causing other issues. Some of the herbs listed were potent and rare—red ginseng root, ginkgo biloba, and caterpillar fungus, the most expensive of them all, sourced from the mountains of Tibet, known for its tremendous ability to bring balance to the yin and yang within the body. As far as I could remember, my mother had always been in good health, rarely susceptible to illnesses even when everyone around her was sick, but the prescriptions told a different story. I set the binder down and wondered how much I really knew my parents, or rather, how much they had allowed me to know.

The phone rang.

“How was dinner?” my mother asked. The morning rumble of Chinatown oceans away echoed in the background.

“Long,” I replied.

“That’s the way it is with us old people.”

I laughed.

“Are you still at the shop?”

“Yes, just the prescriptions left—”

“Just a moment,” she interrupted. I overheard her ordering an iced latte in heavily accented English.

“Where are you?”

After what sounded like her exiting a coffee shop, she replied, “Walking to English class.”

“You’re busy.”

“I’m almost there.”

I hesitated, but thought it was best to tell her as soon as possible. “Ma,” I said, “they want to buy the shop.”

“Who?” she asked.

“The shopkeepers.”

She paused. The sound of her shoes and jingle of her purse stilled against the unceasing roar of the city behind.

“I think they’re trying to lowball us. The market—” I began to say.

“Sell it to them,” she replied with an unexpected decisiveness.

“Ma, we can get so much more for it. The street is getting redeveloped soon.”

“Money doesn’t matter.”

“Why? Father worked so hard for it.”

“It’s what he would’ve wanted.”

“How do you know?”

“Ah Shun,” she said, “there’s a lot about your father that you’ll never understand.”

I remained silent. I knew what that meant—it wasn’t that I wouldn’t understand. She knew that I understood and have always understood, but there had always been something more important.

After a long pause, she said, “I’m late to class.”

“Sorry, Ma.”

“Come back quickly.”

The sparseness of the shop felt foreign—the shelves cleared, drawers emptied. Things that once felt so permanent and unmovable, things I was told never to touch when I was young, were now vanishing before my eyes. I turned to the section in the binder with my father’s prescriptions for himself. Unlike his other scripts, they were written in shorthand, unintelligible to everyone else, including my mother. Though I couldn’t read them, I remembered the excitement he’d conveyed discovering a long-lost formula for hair growth in a textbook, the confidence he had in treating himself when he had the flu, the apprehension when he had tried to heal his stomach ulcers. I flipped to the last few pages—the prescriptions for the cancer that would claim his life. I wasn’t sure whether it was a sign of mastery or just of his old age, but his writing had become even more difficult to read. I touched the prescription and felt the brittle texture of the paper, the coarseness of the ink. I traced my finger along each stroke, visualizing the energy, wisdom, and confidence behind the brush of a master. This was who he was, and this was how he wanted to be remembered.

Against my advice, my mother sold the shop to the shopkeepers for the exact price they asked for. When I called the real estate agent to tell her the news, she was shocked.

“You sold it for how much?”

“It’s what my mother wanted,” I replied.

~

A few months after I returned to New York, I caught a cold. It wasn’t serious, but after a round of decongestants and painkillers I picked up from Duane Reade, I felt and sounded worse. After an extended coughing fit early one morning, I got out of bed.

“Not feeling any better?” my wife asked, half awake.

“It’s worse when I lie down,” I said.

“Poor thing.”

“Go back to sleep. I’ll be in the living room.”

She yawned. “Maybe you can try one of your dad’s prescriptions,” she said, pulling the blanket over her face.

The apartment was quiet. The gentle glow of dawn and the faint rumble of the city were heralds of the day that had just begun. The binder sat in the corner of the room among other items I had brought back. I fingered through the pages of the last section, the one with my name on it, containing prescriptions for illnesses I had when I was young—asthma I eventually grew out of, eczema that would flare up every winter even to this day—until I found a prescription my father had written for a common cold. I took it out.

The small lane off Canal Street was lined with fire escapes hanging from the sides of old tenement buildings. The sound of businesses beginning their day as their owners greeted each other on the street in Hakka and Taishan-accented Cantonese felt similar enough to be comforting. The storefront was much wider and taller than my father’s shop. An English name, vaguely similar-sounding to the shop’s Chinese name, was prominent in gold letters above the doorway. I stepped inside to a familiar scent.

An older man in a lab coat came out from the back. “Good morning,” he said in English.

“Good morning,” I replied in Cantonese.

“How can I help?” he said, switching to our language.

I handed him the prescription. He put on a pair of glasses and scanned the page.

“Can you read it?” I asked.

“Of course,” he replied.

“You can? It took me years to read my father’s handwriting,” I asked, surprised at his response.

He looked up. “This is your father’s?”

“It is.”

After examining the prescription a little longer, he set it on the counter.

“Your father was a serious man, wasn’t he?” he asked.

“How do you know?” I replied.

He took off his glasses. “Many people see Chinese medicine as an alternative to Western medicine, but it is fundamentally a different way of understanding the world. The world is guided by the continuous flow and rebalancing of two energies—yin and yang: the cold of winter yields to the warmth of spring and summer before returning to the cold, the energy of a storm clears the heat and humidity of a summer day.”

I nodded. These were things I knew.

“But Chinese doctors are people too, with our own preferences and tendencies, and what that means is we don’t all understand and interact with the world in the same way. Do you know how to tell?”

“I don’t,” I said. It was not something I had ever thought about.

“By our prescriptions,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“This is a prescription for a wind-type cold. Some doctors would prescribe herbs that immediately target the problem—quick and easy—but your father’s prescription addresses an imbalance in the body that made it susceptible to the cold in the first place.”

“I remember it took a long time before I got better.”

“Yes, it’s much easier to treat a cold, but much more difficult to correct the underlying imbalance.”

“What’s better, then?”

He laughed. “There is no such thing as better. Each doctor chooses a unique path for their patient, and your father has chosen the long and difficult road for you,” he said. “It’s up to you whether you choose to follow and drink the medicine.”

As I poured the medicine into a bowl, the pungent scent enveloped the apartment like a heavy blanket. It had been years since I’d had Chinese medicine. Thick, dark, and ominous, the small bowl of liquid felt just as threatening as I remembered it to be. I unwrapped a piece of candied winter melon the shopkeeper had included, ready for when I finished. I knew that the longer I waited, the colder the medicine would get and the harder it would be to drink, so I raised the bowl to my lips and tilted it until I tasted the first drop. It was as bitter as I remembered. I held my nose and continued to let the medicine flow into my mouth. After a few large gulps, I put the empty bowl down. Just as I was about to reach for the piece of winter melon to wash the taste away, I thought of my father. I imagined him carefully lifting the hot ceramic pot by its handle with a wet towel, skillfully pouring the viscous liquid into a white porcelain bowl, and then as he closed his eyes, inhaling the pungent scent into his lungs, smiling. I set the winter melon down, letting the bitterness linger in my mouth, and waited for the sweetness that was not yet there, but I knew would soon come.