The small room is located on the sixth floor in some mall in the center of Mongkok. No one can imagine how quiet and peaceful it is here. The sounds of streetcars on Nathan Road and Argyle Street do not come through the door of my room at all. All day, I cannot hear much noise of people talking either. Even though ‘Auntie Feng’, apparently a ‘working girl’, who has a job at the sauna downstairs, lived right next door, the sound of her heels on the floor, and the occasional sounds from the shower weren’t much different from the ordinary. Occasionally, people came and knocked on her door for quite a while, or even kicked it, but no one answered.  It didn’t take long for silence to be restored. Yet, when young poet friends visited me and learnt about this lady and her business, they would all clamor excitedly, saying they’d go and ‘visit’ her.  

“Don’t get in the way. She has to do business,” this was when I made any noise.

 

Sounds originate from us, and perhaps it’s also us, who cannot comprehend the logic of the world.  The first week I moved in, I went out to the corridor to dispose the trash.  I saw an old woman, thin as a toothpick, with a head of wispy hair, inching forward step by step along the corridor.  Her milky white skin wrapped around her wrist bone, like wrinkled fabric.

I asked politely, “Where should I leave the trash?”

She gave a very friendly smile, and kept inching forward step by step, maneuvered slowly past me, without

giving me directions.

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There are two jam-packed bookshelves in the small room. Visitors could never believe – the books are actually categorized. The top and the bottom shelves hold copies of opened magazines, journals and xeroxes.  The bookshelf on the left, closer to the door, is filled top to bottom with works by Foucault and Derrida, books about feminism and cultural criticism, selections of journals on Hong Kong culture and Chinese reviews, and theories of philosophy before structuralism, as well as social critiques.  In the bookcase on the right against the wall, the books lined neatly from pure literary theory, novels and essays, poems, to poetry commentaries. Books on theories are placed at more prominent places because I am supposed to write my research essays in the small room. The few pieces of literary works I keep with me, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salsa, The Rosary, and etc. are placed right behind where I sit because after all, we all need something to rely on. Leisure reading books, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat (which I have borrowed from Miss To, for five years), Cry • Don’t Cry, Fermat's Last Theorem, and etc. are high up in the corner. As for the books piling all over the floor that can probably fill another bookcase, most of them are theories on English that I have to read very soon. The Post-It’s that are stuck all over the walls are the skeletons of my paper. The only work desk is the computer desk, stacked full with CDs and VCDs that I never watch. Usually, I work at the computer desk, with a bookcase behind me, and the works of the writer Wang Xiaobo - who is the subject of my paper - placed slightly higher in front of me. Everything is set up in precise order, but I still haven’t been able to finish my paper. I have no excuse.

 

Two very familiar lines from Tao Qian’s poem Drinking go, “I locate my hut in the secular, yet you hear not traffic uproar.” I have wine in my small fridge. I am a hermit, secluded in the city. I feel complacent, slowly flipping my internal clock, getting to sleep at 7 in the morning, and getting up at 6 in the evening, taking full advantage of the silence to work. Slowly, I feel that I am beginning to suffer from insomnia. Even though the sunlight at 8 or 9 in the morning is blocked out entirely from the only small window in the room, I still toss and turn in my bed, without energy to read, my brain full of questions about different theories, people I dislike, things I shouldn’t say. I can lie in bed any time I want, but I cannot fall asleep any time I wish. If I can withstand poverty and not go to work , I can probably live this way. People say, only college students have the opportunity to live a schedule that goes against the rules of time. I still cannot accept this saying. I cannot accept that I can no more use time against its rules.  For this, people will accuse me of not understanding the logic of this world.

 

It is hard for me to imagine living with someone else after living in the small room by myself. I can alter my habits for the small room. In this space, no bigger than 200 square feet, it takes me about an hour to scrub the floor, leaving me panting afterwards because I have to keep moving my books. When it is hot out, I have to take two, three showers a day even if I don’t do anything all day, for the computer desk is a stuffy place. But I would be less willing to alter my habits for someone else. Even when I talk to people I like or admire, I can see a wide gap between us. Sometimes it makes me feel so disheartened that I fall silent. What is silence? It is like the blades of a pair of big scissors, cold; they change the colors of their surroundings. I used to think, silence is close to cruelty. And of course, one gets used to silence in the small room. I wouldn’t talk to myself unless it is necessary. But now I realize that when I find someone I can talk to, I tend to become attached quite easily. It is dangerous to get attached too easily, and I don’t think everyone can understand this kind of attachment. After all, not everyone lives in solitude in a small room. Also present in the small room are the longing for and disgust at the ringing of the telephone. Even my new telephone has learnt the magical skill of dropping the call on its own, not acting to my will. Perhaps because of that I am even more awkward and quirky.

 

Before I turned 22, I imagined my ideal house to be located in a cool and breezy forest. My friend and I would live ten minutes apart in separate houses, just out of sight from each other. My friend and I are living pretty close to each other now actually. But it is only later have we learnt of this logic: The act of not seeing each other even though living close to each other is complex. It involves friendship, security, and the security of friendship, and the correlation and non-correlation of them all. When I decided to live in Mongkok, I once thought my home would be a place for friends to stop by. (In fact, “A friend’s unlocked house” was once a warm image in someone’s poem.) But after my living in it for a while, the place seems to have become a bit unpleasant.

 

On another occasion, I saw a woman in the corridor who was then nursing the old lady who didn’t speak. The woman was also skinny as a toothpick, with dark yellow skin and a head of permed hair. From behind, her hair reminded me of the cheap wigs actors wear on TV to pretend to be foreigners (usually a music conductor). Looking in the front, one would see her extremely crossed eyes, her mouth in a rounded ‘o’ shape,

“Isn’t it nice to come outside and walk a little!”

“Yes -” the old lady whom I thought couldn’t speak could actually answer, softly.

Her voice matched her friendly smile. As they slowly made their way through the corridor, they repeated the same conversation. Perhaps this exchange, simpler than toddler’s talk, contained something important - I wondered about the logic within as I dumped the trash.

 

I’ve lived in the small room for over 300 days. The weather is getting hotter and hotter; it is getting more and more complicated; productivity is getting harder and harder to control. The AC is on the brink of dying, and I wish these were all the reasons for my irritation. I have no problem remembering every house I lived in, even the shady hotels I stayed in during my travels, but I try not to remember the influence my family has on me. It affects me like an inherited disease.  I have eight ashtrays in my small room, and there is no place for them because I can’t bring myself to use them openly. When I lived in a house where I was not allowed to smoke, I got in the habit of wrapping my cigarette buds in small plastic bags. The way that I hold on to those bags now probably makes people think I am out of my mind. It’s possible that even though I hate my mother and have cut all ties with my family, all that I loathed and all that I wanted to escape from, will one day --- emerge within me. My mother hated my grandmother, but now, the way they act and behave is so very similar. If this is the logic of the world, I don’t know whether I am betraying it, or following it.

 

Living in the small room, I even avoid going downstairs, and I order delivery for my meals. I write my paper in my small room, but it does not mean I isolate myself from the outside world. I watch more TV and read more newspapers than before. Aside from binge watching TV dramas, I’ve formed the habit of watching the news every day, and watching Hong Kong Connection on Sundays. Sometimes the issues are straightforward, and at times even the news reports can get me to tears; sometimes there are no truths to things, and it makes one want to see the fruitlessness right from the start. In the times of chaos, worries and anxieties cannot and should not be avoided. I would call and chat with my friends about public affairs, though, I would keep in mind: Wang Xiaobo stayed clear-headed because he secluded himself from the crowd, but that’s not all there was to it. Complex logic lies behind how in July, crowds of people take to the streets, shouting slogans half-heartedly. (The 1st July is a public holiday in the city, celebrating the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, but since 2003 has become an annual day for protest and demonstration.)  It’s as difficult to differentiate between clear-headedness and cynicism as it is between the dozens of takeout menus I have; one needs to try many times to tell them apart.

 

I remember when I first moved in, I went out to buy food one midnight. When I returned to the tiny lobby to wait for the elevator, I saw there were all kinds of people under the white fluorescent light. There were tired office workers with weary faces; there was a housewife with a kind of fierceness hidden between her brows; there was a skinny young man in a black shirt showcasing the tattoos on his arms; there was a boy about ten years of age wearing a knock-off Pikachu t-shirt; and there was a prostitute dressing skimpily, with a head of dyed-blonde punk hairstyle and a thick gold chain around her neck. I didn’t dare squeeze myself into the elevator with them. I am not saying life is always this bizarre. Nor am I saying that I should accept easily the oddities of life. What I am saying is, since then I have never seen anything that shocks me as such. Perhaps it is because I no longer pay as much attention to people around me - the suspicious relationship between the distance I keep from people and the thorough understanding of things around me still gives me no relief.

 

First understand the different kinds of logics in the world, and then choose. I might not be able to type sentences of hope in my computer in my small room. Most probably, I guess, all the things I thought of and planned in the small room will be futile, untraceable, in the future. Or perhaps a worse outcome would be remembering only the silence of the small room. This is as frustrating as writing an emotional and sad ending for an essay, a possible cause and effect.

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