Red Phoenix

everything turned out for all of us,’ April said. ‘We’ll all be happy married women.’
    I really did feel the need to bang my head on the table.
    I tapped on John’s office door and opened it a crack. ‘Free to talk?’
    ‘Just let me save this file,’ he said, studying the computer, then turned and leaned his elbows on the pile of papers on his desk. ‘What?’
    ‘It’s May fifth. The festival’s started. And you haven’t done anything.’
    ‘ Aiya ,’ he said, and I giggled. ‘What?’
    ‘That’s an extremely Cantonese sound coming from you,’ I said, still smiling.
    ‘I’ve heard you say it too. You can pick people who have lived in Hong Kong for any length of time, even expats. They all say it.’
    ‘Cheung Chau,’ I said, bringing him back to the point.
    ‘ Aiya ,’ he said again. ‘It’s already started?’ ‘The buns are up, John. The three effigies have already been built.’ ‘When’s the big day?’
    ‘Three days from now. May eighth.’ I sighed with exasperation. ‘Why don’t you ever look in your diary?’
    ‘I have a secretary and I have you,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to.’
    ‘You forgot your own birthday, Pak Tai.’
    ‘You know it’s not my birthday,’ he said impatiently. ‘It’s the Buddha’s birthday. They just lumped me into the holiday because it was convenient.’
    ‘Did you know him?’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘The Sakyamuni Buddha.’
    He hesitated, watching me, then, ‘No.’
    ‘What about the teachings?’
    ‘What about them?’
    ‘Are they true? The Buddhist Precepts?’
    He sighed. ‘You know better than to ask me that, Emma. You know you have to find your own way.’
    I shrugged it off, it was worth a try. ‘Okay, so when’s your birthday?’
    ‘You know I have no idea,’ he said. ‘After four and a half thousand years I’d challenge anybody to have an idea. I doubt if I was ever actually born, anyway. I just am.’
    ‘Well then, Eighth Day of the Fourth Moon it is. May eighth this year. Three days from now. Thursday.’
    He leaned back and retied his hair. ‘ Aiya .’
    ‘I’ve already cancelled all your classes, and booked the boat to take us over. We leave at ten in the morning. Okay?’
    He grinned broadly. ‘You already arranged it?’ ‘Of course I did. You don’t think I’d leave it to you, do you?’
    Cheung Chau was a dumbbell-shaped island about an hour’s boat ride from Central Pier. The island was only three hundred metres wide at its narrowest point and hardly any height above sea level. The two ‘weights’ on the dumbbell stretched to either side, and were slightly higher.
    The island was completely packed with people for the festival. John carried Simone so that she wouldn’t be crushed.
    The air was full of the noise of shouting, drums and gongs, and the smells of food and sweat. A thick pall of incense smoke hung over the entire island.
    We stopped for lunch at one of the small restaurants near the pier before we went anywhere. The restaurants usually specialised in live seafood, held in tanks next to the kitchen. Diners could select exactly which fish and shellfish they wanted, how they wanted them served, and the restaurant would oblige. But for the week ofthe Bun Festival the entire island of Cheung Chau went vegetarian in Pak Tai’s honour. The butcher shops closed for the holidays.
    After lunch we wandered through the packed streets to the Pak Tai temple. The bun towers stood proudly outside the temple, enormous ten-metre-high bamboo cones held by a bamboo scaffold. The buns were strung around the outside of the cones.
    The tradition was that at the end of the festival, after midnight on the final day, young men would climb the towers to retrieve the buns for the crowd; a good-luck race. But in 1978, one of the towers had collapsed and some of the bun racers had been killed. Since then the buns had been distributed to the island’s residents by the clergy of the temple.
    John wouldn’t talk about what had happened in ‘78. Apparently he hadn’t been present that year; normally he would have been there to make sure that nobody was injured. But in ‘78 he hadn’t been able to make it, and wouldn’t say why. It may have had something to do with him losing the Serpent about that time, but with a creature as strange as him it was impossible to tell.
    Three enormous effigies had been constructed out of bamboo and brightly coloured paper, about five metres tall. They were of a black-skinned