#10 The brown purse

Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition center is an opera looking building on a pimple of the island. You can easily find it and easily get lost inside. The main hall at all times is guarded by uniformed people with devices checking the badges. There’s no way around them. A woman in desperate need of money and things, anything really, is sniffing around trying to find a way in. She waits at the first entrance until the guards are distracted - no luck. The second one is another 15 minutes. The third one the guards are changing shifts just at the same time when a big group comes and she sneaks in undetected. Inside there are huge screens and bright stands, everything is shouting and singing. Everything is inviting to drown into the content. It takes strength to remember her mission. She wanders between the stands pretending to search for someone, many people around, all are busy. She is standing and watching some love series trailer in Mandarin that she understands remotely. Now she often hears it in her native HK though in her school years it was less common than Portuguese. A loud noise interrupts people at the table near to where she is standing. This noise apparently is produced by her stomach. She can’t remember when she ate. Some cold dumplings yesterday or was it the day before. A half eaten croissant is laying on the table, she grabs it. She’s chewing it too fast and it makes the sound even worse. At least now she can focus. She methodologically walks through stands and takes what she can, a gift bag on Taiwan stand, then the sweets from Thailand reception, a big exhibition magazin in hand to cover whatever underneath it. At one stand there’s a coat on the chair and a laptop. She checks the pockets and finds 400 HK dollars - that's more than she made last week. An angry woman at her dorm was right - this place is full of careless foreigners. The laptop she could take, but doesn’t know where to sell it or even how to charge. Walking along the rows of fancy stands and fancy people she starts to be extremely aware of her own clothes: old jeans and an even older sweatshirt that used to be purple and after a thousand washing became dusty lilac. All the nice clothes, shirts and sweaters that she got from her ma’am she had to trade during Covid for food or rent.

At the next empty stand she sees a shopping bag hanging on the chair. There must be some goodies inside. When she grabs it, there’s a smaller brown purse, trapped in the handles. She should take both and make it fast, before the people at stand across see her. Fast, she walks to the service backside. In the toilet cabin, she can open and see her catch. The shopping bag has some food: crackers, candies, the same sweets from Thailand, and a small white bottle. She reads the Cantonese price tag. Who on earth would spend HK$80 on a drink!? You could eat at least twice for this price! She opens and drinks it. It has a very strange, milky texture, the color of blueberry rice pudding but tasteless. Those strange foreign people! The little brown purse is much more interesting. Up close it was more gold than brown, but old, the fabric has worn out on the edges. Inside there was a lipstick, two tampons and a blue leather wallet, thick, but almost empty. Probably new, because a paper filing wasn’t even taken out yet. Only a 50 euro bill inside and a Visa card. Visas are useless here and can lead to arrest. It’s very dangerous! If you’re caught stealing, you’re sent to jail and the punishment is very strict. Thinking of that she regretted ever coming here. The fear was all over her! She would never be so ungrateful to the great country and the communist party that took such good care of them all and defeated the Covid. Before Covid she was a very good citizen, working in a good expat home with no kids. But during the Covid they left HK as many others like them. She couldn’t hold a job since. There was also a small black notebook with notes in an unknown language. Very strange letters and page orientation. These strange letters were grouped under numbers in a line up. But some pages were drawings of a curly headed Gweilo man. Page after page. She was peering in those curly letters for the answer who he was and why the owner of the brown purse drew him. Maybe it’s her lover who is married and thus had to leave her and she is drawing to keep the memories fresh. Or a man from her dreams that keeps visiting her, sitting by the bed while she sleeps. She is trying to capture his look to know him in the light of day but she only saw him in profile. All these thoughts took her away while eating a Thailandese sweets and looking through the notebook.

She took everything valuable, hid the rest in the cabin and went back to the exhibition. She made another round mainly to come by that stand where she found a bag. When she reached the row she saw that the owner of the brown bag was back. She was suddenly shy, she looked carefully at every picture on the posters and tried her best not to cross their eyes. This was extremely hard, because the stand host tried to catch it, inviting her to talk about whatever she was selling. She tried to keep the pace of her walking and finally passed the stand. She felt so bad and decided to return the new blue wallet. She crossed the hall and returned to the stand. She turned around the corner and saw that police were there. Two guards in blue and two in black and one policeman stood around the owner of the brown purse. Her heart started pounding. She tried to run but instead she froze. She could finally see the foreign girl’s face, who looked lost but kept a polite smile on her face answering questions of the guards and police. The girl saw her and probably recognised. She stopped in the middle of a sentence with a guard. The radiant blue wallet was right there in her hand. She stumbled and begged with her eyes for the girl not to give her away. Then turned away and walked as fast as she could without running until the next alley didn’t hide her. Only when she got out of the building did she take a breath. That was very scary and very close. If she got caught or even got as close as today… She decided to never ever repeat this. But still her heart, her guilt and her curiosity at the same time were pounding from her chest. She sat on the stairs opposite the main entrance to the Exhibition hall and decided to wait for the foreign girl. To apologize but also ask who that man is in her pictures. Maybe she tells the story of a long lost half brother that is the only thread to their father that she never saw. She did notice some similarities in their appearances. Or not. All Gweilos look painfully alike. Pickling in these thoughts she sat for a couple of hours until it was dark and streets of the island started pulsing with nightlife. She noticed that the flow of people from the exhibition center has dried up. She pulled up the door and it was closed. The next morning she came to the site. The doors were opened and no one checked the badges at the entrance. Inside the demolition was in full swing. After a few days she accepted this turn of fate, took out and started using the things from the bag. She carefully cut out the drawings of the man from the notebook and hung them on wall. From time to time she would look at it and think of other versions of how he might be related to the foreign girl with a brown purse.👜