Ringo and I were sitting on squat, plastic stools in a noisy fish restaurant down a back street in Causeway Bay when the waiter came with two plates, two bowls, two cups, two spoons, two sets of chopsticks, a pot of tea, a jug of hot water and a small, red basin. Ringo loaded the crockery and the chopsticks into the basin, poured tea over them and washed them, rinsing them in hot water before placing them back on the table.
“This is the feng shui, it’s very important to us. First you wash, then you eat,” he said.
For many people in Hong Kong, washing dishes at the table before eating is a matter of hygiene rather than superstition but I knew that Ringo put great store by traditional custom and practice. So I asked him what he was doing on Friday for Qing Ming, the tomb-sweeping festival when Chinese people traditionally return to their home towns to visit family graves.
He said he had already been to Guangzhou, across the boundary in Mainland China, a few weeks earlier to pay his respects with his extended family.
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“We do it between Chinese New Year and Qing Ming and it’s more important than the New Year for us. Everyone comes home, even the cousins who are in the United States and Canada,” he said.
Ringo was born and grew up in Hong Kong, as was his mother but her grandfather was from Guangzhou and as child and a teenager in the 1980s, she spent a lot of time there. A girl she met there became her best friend and they would tell each other everything, especially about the boys they liked.
In her late teens, she met a young man in Guangzhou who was a year or two older and they started seeing one another despite her parents’ disapproval on account of the fact that he was poor and from a disreputable family. When she was in the city, Ringo’s mother would ride her bicycle for an hour to where he worked to bring him soup and spend a few minutes with him before cycling all the way back.
One day, she learned that he had been called up and deployed with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to another part of China. She had no way of getting in touch with him, and she didn’t know where he had gone to or for how long he would be away.
In the meantime, Ringo’s father, who also lived in Guangzhou, started pursuing her and although she was not interested in him, her friend was and she wrote him a letter telling him so. But when he read the letter, he thought it came from Ringo’s mother and he doubled down on his wooing, finally wearing her down to the point where she agreed to marry him.
A few months later, her former lover returned from the army and when he found out what had happened, he was hurt and angry that she had not waited for him. I asked Ringo if his mother and father were happy after they got married.
“Yes, at the beginning,” he said.
They had two children, Ringo and his brother Bingo who is four years younger, and Ringo’s father appeared to be doing well in business. But things began to go wrong, his debts mounted and business associates he had once regarded as friends turned away from him.
In desperation, he went to Macau to try his luck at the gambling tables but he returned in deeper trouble than before. In the end, Ringo said, it all became too much for him.
“He killed himself,” he said.
Ringo was 14 and his brother was 10 and his mother was working two jobs to support them, spending all her spare time with her sons. So when her former lover got in touch to offer his condolences and suggested they meet, she ignored him.
But a few years later, the man contacted Ringo and asked to meet him in Guangzhou where he had become a rich and powerful figure with a family of his own. He told Ringo that he had never stopped thinking about his mother and that he had never loved anyone else, including his wife.
“He said he couldn’t forget how he felt when he saw her arriving with the soup, knowing she made a two-hour trip to bring it and that the feeling burned inside him still,” he said.
Ringo went back to his mother and told her he knew her story and that the man still loved her and she agreed to get in touch with him. Since then, they have spoken on the phone every day but the man is still with his family and Ringo’s mother remains in Hong Kong.
“She met him when we were in Guangzhou a few weeks ago,” Ringo told me.
“I don’t know what they did. I think maybe the mental connection is enough, for my mother anyway.”
