Eight p.m. the day after I’d slept with the Lawyer (sleeping with is such a strange and inadequate euphemism for the forceful, if not cruel acts that seem to inevitably happen under the umbrella of ‘sex’), I went out for drinks with Reina, my oldest friend in the world. We’d gone to kindergarten, then primary school, then secondary school together and had a loving and competitive relationship growing up, the kind that I imagine exists between sisters close in age. I say imagine, because both of us are only children, only daughters. Although we had drifted apart a little since university (my fault, of course, for drifting away, across the English Channel in the first place), whenever we did meet up we always managed to love and to understand each other all over again, if only imperfectly. Reina was one of the few people on this Earth who still knew and called me by my full Cantonese name.
I cannot for the life of me remember why we’d decided to come to Lan Kwai Fong, famed for its gweilo brawls and other drunken, senseless goings-on that, having been brought up in local, middle-class, fundamentally boring households, neither of us could actually name. Really, a nightcap at a Starbucks or PCC on either side of the Victoria Harbour would’ve suited us much better than this rather sad, rather ludicrous collective of tacky but overpriced bars and clubs. But how anticlimactic would it be for me to debut the findings of my experiment drinking an iced tall matcha latte (with soy milk please)? Anyway, we were twenty-three and we could go anywhere we well fucking pleased, which was why we finally settled in a chocolate-themed bar which served suspiciously thick and mud-coloured cocktails.
So I started telling Reina about my date with the Lawyer cheerfully, barring all insignificant details which might arouse un-cheerfulness, like jokes about Cambridge-educated murderers, ambiguous sexual boundaries, the lack of protection. ‘The sex was…meh, but hey, what an experience,’ I concluded, taking a sip of my chocolate orange cocktail that tasted less like Terry’s chocolate and more like a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
‘Did you use a condom?’ was the first thing she said.
Is it really that obvious I lied by omission? An inexpert liar to start with, I could never withhold the truth when questioned point-blank. ‘No, but…it’s nothing, really,’ I said with a shrug.
She peered at me doubtfully over her glass of mint chocolate mojito (a tautology, surely). ‘But what are you going to do about it?’
‘Do what about what?’ Like a toddler with her chubby fingers closed over her eyes in a game of hide-and-seek: if I can’t see you, you can’t see me.
‘The fact that you might be pregnant!’ …Okay, I guess I can’t unsee it now.
‘He didn’t come inside me,’ I said, then immediately added when I saw her face, ‘Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s safe but, I don’t know, surely I would feel something if I were pregnant?’ Even as I said the words I knew full well how absolutely insane and inane they sounded.
She shook her head firmly at me. ‘This is crazy, you know that. And you’re completely in denial.’ Reina was a yoga instructor and also a huge advocate of wellness, empowerment, and avocado-based cuisine. This, along with sisterly tough love, was the tone she had taken with me and my antics since we were four.
‘Fine, I guess I am,’ I gave in under her intense gaze and after gulping down half my toddler drink. ‘Look, I’m not going to get a pregnancy test or anything, not until I feel anything weird, okay? It’s too…real. I can’t be that unlucky. Honestly, if it were you, what would you do?’
She sighed and her sharp little face, unchanged since childhood, softened. ‘I don’t know, but then I would never have sex with anyone without a condom in the first place. Actually, I would never have sex with anyone on a first date either.’
‘No, of course you wouldn’t,’ I said, a little resentfully. If she picked up on it she didn’t let it show. ‘Rei, I don’t really want to think about this anymore. Can we please just keep drinking and talk about something else? For example, how went that hike to Suicide Cliff with the tall, dark, and handsome student from your Sunday class? Show me his Instagram again.’
We ordered some (cocoa-free) tequila shots and downed them between stories. Then we got some more. Two women who looked like they could be us in twenty-five years sat down next to our table in the grimy bar and started chatting with us, telling us that ‘Lan Kwai Fong isn’t what it used to be’, that ‘twenty years ago men were much more chivalrous’, and that ‘nowadays you really have to avoid the shadier corners here’. We didn’t ask them what ‘chivalrous’ meant, where the ‘shady corners’ were, or what would actually happen if we did end up in one of them. One of them (the louder one with badly dyed maroon hair, most certainly the Cat of the pair) shot a penetrating glance at me and said, ‘You look mighty drunk as well, young lady. Are you going to be all right tonight?’
‘Oh, it’s just my flush, it’s nothing,’ I brushed it off. ‘I’m used to it. I used to drink a great deal when I studied in London.’ As if.
Although Reina had had the exact same amount of alcohol as I did, she seemed a good deal steadier on her feet. It must be all the yoga and kombucha, I thought in my sugary-boozy daze. She took me home on the MTR while I dozed my way through, occasionally waking up to make a somewhat remorseful comment about Jamie (the man I’d recently broken up with) or send voice messages to Conor (the man I’d recently rekindled a long-distance friend/situationship with) which were all different versions of ‘I’m never fucking drinking again’. He replied, saying, ‘You don’t sound very convincing at all, Cathy.’ Why do you have to sound so serious and rational and English all the fucking time? I held the cracked screen of my iPhone 6 to one ear and tried not to cry.
When we finally made it to my stop, I ran to the nearest bin and threw up. Reina held my hair back until my retching and tears stopped.
I should probably have stayed in bed and slept through the next day, but I’d made plans to have lunch with Nat, Lili, and Monica—my amigas from the weekend Spanish class I was taking who had somehow become my major social and moral support in the past year—and I felt that seeing them, in broad daylight and without any alcoholic influence, would surely help me break out of the vicious cycle of pathetic drunkenness I had found myself in. They were all a good few years older than me, in their late twenties, which they lovingly joked about all the time. I often thought they were more generous to me than women my age usually were because of the age gap, but it was probably just them. For some reason most of the class were office workers in their thirties to fifties with elderly parents and young kids to take care of and mortgages to pay off, so naturally we formed a little clique of our own, always going for bubble tea or tong sui or even pottery-making after our Saturday class. Nat worked in higher ed, like me, while both Monica and Lili worked mysterious corporate jobs that I will forever struggle to describe. Since my break-up with Jamie and the beginning of my feminist experiment I’d often turned to them for guidance and comfort.
We were leaving the ramen joint where we’d had lunch (‘Carbs are good for hangovers’, Lili had said) to go for a walk around the block when the conversation finally turned on me—I had refrained from talking about the thing in the rather crowded restaurant. It turned out Nat had already told the other two everything because, much unbeknownst to myself, I’d called her after getting home that night, hunched over the sink and trying to power-wash the terrible rich-people smell out of my hair.
‘Yeah, I mean, it wasn’t so bad really,’ I started. I could already hear Reina’s guru voice in my head, saying, Catherine, you are in denial. ‘I have always wanted to fuck someone rich and powerful and smart, and now I have, haven’t I? And I got a good meal out of it, I’m not ashamed to say.’ Not like you were sober or cultured enough to enjoy it.
‘I don’t know, he does sound kind of sleazy to me,’ said Monica. ‘Maybe you should stop seeing him.’ I didn’t tell her that I had heard nothing from the Lawyer since that night and probably never will. [Editor’s note: I was wrong. Two years after this I received a LinkedIn friend request, accompanied by a double-spaced message from the Lawyer which read, Saw your new article in the ____ Journal. Still in town?]
‘Babes, I have been with the exact same type of man before,’ said Lili, ‘Arrogant, entitled, thinks he can do whatever the fuck he wants to you just because he has money.’
The notion that I might have been ‘bought’ by a man without my unequivocal consent or so much as knowledge of all the terms and conditions involved was greatly distressing to me. ‘But—you see, I would never let a guy my age buy me dinner or drinks, but I thought, since he was much older and obviously made more money than I did, surely it was only a fair redistribution of wealth?’ I put forth my faux-socialist-feminist ruminations tentatively.
Nat shook her head. I could see in her dark brown eyes that she was working up to a state of passion, but I wasn’t sure what about. ‘Well, are you okay with what happened?’ she asked finally.
I don’t think I had really asked myself that question up until this point. ‘No, but I also didn’t say no or push him off exactly, and it was a bit like, I kind of expected the night to come to that anyway…?’ The more accurate version of what was going through my head was, I had set myself out to conduct an experiment as a completely free agent, and this was the result. I have no one to blame but myself.
‘Cathy, you’re a very smart girl, we all know that, but you have to consider the possibility that you may be too smart for your own good sometimes. Just because you think you’re a free woman it doesn’t mean all the decisions you make are free.’
‘…What?’ I let out a nervous chuckle, not because I necessarily object to what she was saying, but because no one had ever said anything like that to me before.
Nat pursed her lips together for a moment, and then spoke, clearly and slowly, though without any trace of condescension. ‘You think that you can always have everything and everyone under control, but you can’t. Sometimes you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Look—you were in the apartment of a man who is a decade older than you, bought you dinner, made you feel special, made you feel like you had to be nice to him, and then pressured you into doing something you didn’t really want to do. Do you really think if you’d asked him to put on a condom, he would’ve done it or made it easy for you? I don’t think so. If he had cared about what you thought or felt at all, he would’ve asked you in the first place. Could you have been more careful with the people you choose to be intimate with? Yes, I suppose so, but then we can always be as careful as we want, and bad things will still happen simply because people do them.’
We were all silent for a moment. At length, I said, rather inadequately, ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right. Thanks, Nat.’ I understood everything she said, and I had the feeling that, if it had been anyone else, I would’ve told them the exact same thing (okay, maybe not nearly as eloquently). I had thought that I would be immune to, even above, power, that I would never fall prey to structures that had been in place for much, much longer than I had been alive, simply because I had read a lot of feminist theory at university and did research on sexual assault and domestic violence laws for a living. And the truth was, I could scarcely recognise power when it was served to me in a silver goblet of vino tinto. It was, to say the least, a painful lesson I realised I had to learn through living and not reading.
But that was enough reflection on something so deeply unpleasant on a scorching hot day in Mongkok. And there was one more thing. ‘Well, do you girls really think I should uh…get a pregnancy test done or something?’ I tried to sound as nonchalant as possible.
‘Oh, mi gatita,’ said Lili, looking at me with a kind of feminine solidarity I only ever felt from older girlfriends, the kind that said I have been there before too, and I know you’ll be just fine. She put an arm around my waist and perked up, ‘You know, it is actually really difficult to get pregnant in Hong Kong. The air is polluted as hell and we’re all so stressed all the time. But, if you really want, we can always go to a pharmacy and get you a Plan-B.’
‘Wouldn’t I need some kind of doctor’s prescription?’ I had, of course, read up on everything online at my first moment of sobriety in those three days. ‘Also, it’s probably a bit too late for that.’ I’d also learnt, from my research, that free contraceptives are not available to unmarried women under the age of twenty-six in Hong Kong.
‘Trust me, I’ve done it before—the Chinese pharmacy ah-suks don’t give a shit,’ she continued with unwavering confidence. ‘But, like I said, you probably don’t need it anyway.’
‘Hey,’ piped up Monica suddenly, as we walked past the colourful stalls selling everything from contraband Lego to stinky tofu and tortoise jelly on the busy Mongkok street. One of these was a fruit juice stall staffed by an old lady in a rather out-of-place teddy bear apron. ‘Did you girls know that ginger and carrot can seriously mess up fertilisation as well?’
We paused in the middle of the street as I tried to recall reading anything about ginger or carrot in my highly unscientific research to no avail. But then I had also always trusted the wisdom of older women and the simple magic in their words. ‘Well, should I…?’ I said uncertainly, unsure if the whole thing was starting to seem a bit too silly.
‘All right then, come on, let’s all get something to drink in this ridiculous heat,’ said Lili before anyone could raise any more questions, resolutely approaching the por-por behind the counter.
‘Could we please get a ginger and carrot juice, a watermelon juice, and…’ she turned to look at the others.
‘A papaya milk for me, please,’ said Monica.
‘Another watermelon for me,’ said Nat.
While the por-por swiftly poured out our drinks from the various dispensers behind her, I tried to read up on the benefits of all these different concoctions on the banner above her head as quickly as possible. Contraception was, unsurprisingly, not mentioned in any of them. She put the colourful plastic cups on the counter and Monica counted out coins to pay for everyone. As we picked up our drinks, the por-por said with professional gusto, ‘Leng nui, watermelon and papaya are great for the skin, and carrot does wonders for the eyes!’
My friends, my wonderful, grown-up friends, all turned to me. ‘Oh god, yes, por-por, you are so right,’ Lili replied in her exaggerated, old-timey manner, ‘This one definitely needs to get her eyes checked out.’
I smiled, really smiled for the first time in three days.
P.S. Thank the NHS for free, accessible contraceptive care in this otherwise messed up country.
P.P.S. Get tested (for everything), kids.