Hong Kong Assignment (2)
7:00 a.m.
It looked as if a brief shower had passed during the night; puddles gathered here and there in the street. Through the damp air, a savory smell suddenly cut through and struck my nose. Across the way, steam was rising in lazy curls from the dumpling shop on the first floor of the building opposite.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t eaten anything since leaving Korea yesterday.
I was just wondering whether to grab a dumpling or two when a familiar Toyota sedan pulled up in front of the lodging.
Perfect timing.
Marcus rolled down the window and jerked his chin, telling me to get in.
When I settled into the passenger seat, a plastic bag flew into my lap.
“Breakfast.”
That was all he said.
Inside the bag was a bun and a paper cup. A pineapple bun, crisp on the outside with butter melted into the soft center, and a strong Hong Kong-style milk tea.
Did he buy this on purpose for me?
He was still as blunt as ever, but the fact that he’d brought something did catch me off guard a little.
I took a bite of the pineapple bun.
The crust was crunchy like a cookie, while the inside stayed soft. The milk tea was rich and sweet, as if condensed milk had been mixed in.
The car slipped out of Sham Shui Po’s narrow backstreets and joined the main road. Soon the entrance to the Western Harbour Tunnel came into view.
A tunnel running beneath the sea, connecting Kowloon to Hong Kong Island.
“Where we’re going is a district called Sheung Wan. Oldest neighborhood in Hong Kong,” Marcus said, turning the wheel.
“There’s a whole street lined with herbal medicine shops, but tourists don’t usually come here. The smell’s pretty awful.”
He didn’t seem to care much whether I was listening or not.
His tone was less like an explanation than like he was talking to himself.
Once we came out of the tunnel, the scenery changed.
Unlike the wide boulevards of Kowloon, here the alleys themselves were the city. Old three- and four-story buildings crowded tightly on both sides of the narrow streets, and the ground floors were lined with shops piled high with medicinal goods.
Bundles of dried herbs in burlap sacks spilled out onto the sidewalks, and traditional medicine shops with wall-to-wall wooden drawers filled every alley.
When I got out of the car, a strange smell hit me.
Thick, heavy, unmistakable—the scent of a traditional apothecary.
“Danggui, astragalus... and this one’s chuanxiong, maybe,” I muttered before I could stop myself.
Just from the smell, I could tell what herbs they were.
I’d inhaled this scent until I was sick of it in med school, and in my previous life I’d handled these herbs even more.
Marcus stopped and looked back at me.
“Didn’t expect that. You know your herbs.”
“I am a Korean medicine doctor, after all.”
At that, Marcus’s expression shifted in a subtle way.
He looked me over again, then gave the faintest nod.
“...Could be useful.”
Then he turned and kept walking.
I followed without a word.
Marcus moved through Sheung Wan’s alleys like they were the living room of his own home. He knew exactly where to turn, which lane dead-ended, and where the shortcuts were. He moved as if he’d never once needed to check a map.
After a while, he slowed in front of a medicinal goods warehouse.
It was a place with a rusted metal shutter half lowered. Through the opening, I could just make out workers inside shifting sacks of herbs.
Marcus kept his eyes on the warehouse while scanning the surrounding alley layout. He didn’t say a word to me, but the look in his eyes was enough.
So this is the meeting place.
I casually swept my gaze around the area too.
Two entrances—one in front, one through the alley on the left. The lane was narrow enough that two adults walking side by side would brush shoulders. A way to the back required slipping through a tight gap between buildings, then climbing a stairway to the road above.
Without even trying, I was already filing the information away in my head one piece at a time.
It was almost funny, really. All of it was familiar to me.
Only the era and the place had changed.
At its core, this was the same kind of work I’d done in my previous life.
Only now, people used guns instead of swords, and cars instead of light-footwork.
Of course, there’s a lot more I have to pay attention to than before.
Still, that turned out to be no problem either.
Blind spots in the alley. The number of entrances to a building. Which direction the shop’s CCTV cameras were pointing.
The way Marcus moved was practically a living textbook for me.
***
By noon, Marcus walked into a shabby little restaurant tucked deep in the alley.
It didn’t even have a sign. The metal shutter was half open, and the smell of oil and seafood drifted out from inside. It was the kind of place only a local would know to find.
“Neih hou, A-Jeong!”
The auntie behind the counter beamed the moment she saw Marcus and greeted him in Cantonese.
A-Jeong. The Cantonese way of addressing Marcus by his surname, Cheung.
Marcus ordered something in Cantonese, then pointed at me and added another sentence.
The auntie looked at me and smiled. I didn’t catch what she said, but judging by the mood, Marcus had introduced me as someone who’d come with him.
When we sat down, steaming bowls of congee and dim sum were brought out.
Har gow with whole shrimp showing through the translucent skin, char siu bao stuffed full of barbecued pork, and century egg with lean pork congee.
The sesame oil rising off the congee smelled pretty good.
“Is this place famous?” I asked.
“If it were famous, I wouldn’t come. I come because it isn’t.”
Marcus answered briefly and started eating the congee.
Just then, the man sitting at the table behind us leaned casually toward Marcus and began speaking to him in a low voice in Cantonese.
I couldn’t understand the content.
Still, there was enough to read. The man’s fingers tapped the tabletop anxiously. Marcus’s eyes narrowed, and I could see his jaw tighten by a fraction.
Apparently it wasn’t good news.
When the conversation ended, the man left first.
No payment, no goodbye—just as if nothing had happened, the way he’d come.
It was a short meeting that was hard to tell apart from a meal. Nothing unfamiliar about that scene.
“Triad business is getting a little noisy,” Marcus said lightly as he spooned up another mouthful of congee.
“The internal situation seems messy. Nothing that should affect us, though.”
His expression, however, was anything but light.
I didn’t ask further and instead picked up a har gow.
As we were leaving after the meal, Marcus said, “If you’re eating in this district, come here. It’s cheap, and the food’s decent too.”
Was he telling me where to meet informants, or sincerely recommending a good local restaurant?
I got the feeling it was probably both.
***
In the afternoon, we walked from Sheung Wan toward Central.
Maybe because it was April, a brief shower came down again. The damp humidity mixed with the heat rising from the asphalt until it felt hard to breathe.
“...This is awful.”
“You’re a bit dramatic for this level of weather. Be glad you didn’t come during the rainy season.”
Marcus kept stopping at shops along the way.
He bought a bag of tangerines from a fruit stand while exchanging a few words with the owner, then passed by a barber shop in an alley and lifted a hand to the old man inside. At a minibus stop, he gave the driver a brief nod.
Shop owner, barber, bus driver.
These were the people he’d sunk roots into the city with and built up over twelve years.
I couldn’t tell who was an informant and who was just an acquaintance. Marcus himself had probably blurred that line on purpose.
We climbed the steep steps of Pottinger Street.
Old buildings stood packed tightly on both sides, and laundry hung on lines stretched between them. A cat wandered lazily through the alleys where antique shops, neighborhood groceries, and hardware stores blended together. Just then, the smell of incense from a small shrine halfway up the stairs drifted on the wind.
It was nothing like the flashy Hong Kong people usually came to see on vacation.
This was what life actually looked like for the people who lived here.
Even while moving, Marcus kept stopping in front of shop windows now and then. He’d pretend to inspect the merchandise while checking the street reflected in the glass behind him.
He never went anywhere in a straight line, and he kept scanning his surroundings.
It felt like those habits had been drilled into his body over years.
Then, when we got onto the Central Mid-Levels Escalator, Marcus suddenly stopped and looked down below.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“A habit.”
Leaning an arm on the escalator rail, Marcus swept his gaze over the alleyways below. The escalator stretched nearly eight hundred meters up Central’s hillside, and from here the crowds moving through the streets beneath us were all visible at a glance.
“When you look from above, you can see the whole flow. Who goes where, which paths get blocked.”
He muttered it as if it were nothing, but I nodded.
From high up, you could read the movement of people and understand the structure of the streets. I genuinely understood what he meant. It didn’t need any more explanation than that.
...
Marcus turned his head slightly and looked at me. His face was still his usual bored, unimpressed self, but there was a flicker of something in his eyes.
“...Well, at least you’ve got basic sense.”
It was a quiet remark, more an observation than praise.
I didn’t respond. I just let the escalator carry me upward at its own pace.
***
The sun went down.
We settled at a dai pai dong near the Sham Shui Po lodging.
An open-air food stall spread out beneath the streetlights. Red plastic chairs and folding tables were scattered all over the sidewalk, and strings of red bulbs hung overhead. The sound of a wok never stopped—something was always being stir-fried, deep-fried, or grilled.
At the next table, middle-aged men clinked beer bottles and talked loudly.
I could see why Marcus had chosen this place.
In a place like this, any conversation would be easily swallowed by the noise.
“Here.”
Marcus ordered in fluent Cantonese.
Soon, soy sauce fried noodles, rice topped with char siu, and two bottles of beer were brought out.
...
...
As expected, an awkward silence settled between us.
We just ate in silence, using our chopsticks and nothing more.
It was Marcus who spoke first.
“...You said you were a Korean medicine doctor. Why does a doctor do this kind of work?”
He asked it after taking a swallow of beer.
“The terms were good.”
That wasn’t a lie.
I left out the military part, but in the end, I’d signed because the terms were good.
“Straightforward.” Marcus snorted.
But it didn’t sound negative.
“Yeah, that’s reason enough. If you walk into this business with some grand sense of mission, you won’t last long.”
“What about you, Marcus? Twelve years is a pretty long time.”
Marcus fell silent for a moment.
He slowly rolled the beer bottle between his fingers, then spoke.
“Hm... at first, I was pretty much the same. Born in the States, but half Hong Kong anyway. I wanted to do something meaningful here.”
Marcus scraped at the bottle label with his thumb as he talked.
I’d tossed out the question without expecting much, but surprisingly, he kept talking.
Maybe he just hadn’t had anyone to say this to in a long time.
“But after about twelve years on the job, the guys I worked with started disappearing one by one.”
Marcus went on.
“Some got arrested, some betrayed us, and some got crushed in the political games at headquarters and quit. This year, after the new director came in, everything blew up all at once.”
For the first time, emotion seeped into Marcus’s voice.
But it was closer to exhaustion than anger.
He tipped back the beer and let out a dry laugh.
“Right now, I’m the only operational asset still moving properly in Hong Kong.”
That one line said everything about how he felt.
“Sometimes I wonder who the hell I’m doing this for. Headquarters? Have you seen what a mess headquarters is now?”
“...Then you could always find another job, couldn’t you? There are plenty of better things to do than this.”
At my words, he set the empty bottle down on the table with a clack.
Then, in an unexpectedly calm voice, he answered, “Because there are people here who help me.”
Marcus picked up a mouthful of fried noodles with his chopsticks and continued.
“The people who bring me information. And the people who use my information. We all know exactly what’s going on, and yet this balance somehow keeps holding. If I disappear, that balance collapses. The people helping me would be in danger too.”
I just listened to him over my beer.
And though I didn’t say it out loud, I understood him to some degree.
Yeah.
I’d once been in the same place.
Of course, that was a story far removed from the life I was living now.
Just when the mood was about to grow heavy, Marcus changed the subject first.
“Tomorrow we’re meeting the other side. The ones who have the item.”
He pushed the empty beer bottle to the edge of the table as he spoke.
“You should come with me.”
I nodded and picked up the last piece of char siu with my chopsticks.
Across the alley, an elderly couple walked slowly past arm in arm. Somewhere, a cat let out a small cry, and a drunk somewhere off to the side hummed a tune at his own pace.
As I watched them, Marcus rustled through the bag of tangerines he’d bought earlier.
Then he pulled one out and held it out to me.
“Digestive medicine.”
I gave a snort of laughter and took the tangerine from him.
Under the red bulbs of the food stall, the night of Sham Shui Po drifted on.
---