Blumberg-Kason - Good Chinese Wife A Love Affaire With China Gone Wrong

The Chinese University of Hong Kong sits atop a mountain, north of Hong Kong Island and twenty minutes south of the mainland China border. When I arrived on campus in 1990 for a college exchange year, I had imagined Hong Kong would be a city of skyscrapers and neon. But the only lights around the campus came from the occasional barge or leisure boat in otherwise quiet Tolo Harbour. On the weekends, the campus was almost deserted. Local students returned home to their families, and the few overseas students studying abroad left for the bustling expat areas of Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.

Upon my return for graduate school years later, new residential skyscrapers had popped up across the harbor. The campus was beginning to look like what Id first imagined. But the most significant change on campus was that the mainland Chinese population had blossomed from a handful of people to about two hundred graduate students. I was fascinated by these newcomers and their alluringly mysterious culture, so utterly different from my own.

On one of those still-quiet Saturday nights, a month after I started graduate school, I locked myself out of my dorm room. I was on my way to call a friend, using the hall phone around the corner, and as soon as I closed my door, I knew I had left my key on my desk. My roommate, Na Wei, hailed from Harbin in northeast China, but she slept in her boyfriends single room most nights and only returned to our room during the day when she needed a change of clothes or a short nap. So no luck there.

Then it hit me. The guard downstairs kept spare keys. I could borrow one from him.

My stomach fell when the elevator opened on the ground floor. The lobby was empty. I inched over to the guards desk to read a tattered white sign perched upon it. Although I couldnt speak the local Cantonese dialect, I had studied Mandarin, the official language in mainland China. With five years of Mandarin behind me, I could almost make out the meaning of the Chinese characters on the sign: if , need , something , and return . But one character came up as a blank. If you need something, I will return blank .

If only I could read the one character describing when the guard would return. I usually got around Hong Kong without having to resort to my little, red Chinese-English dictionary. Now, the one time I needed it, it was locked away in my room, not far from my coveted key.

I decided to take a seat on a vinyl bench near the front door in case someone came by who could translate that mysterious character. Worst case, I would have to stay up all night until the daytime guard arrived.