Links

By Dewi Anggraeni

"You cannot speak Cantonese, ah? How come?" was one of the questions frequently thrown at Dinah whenever she was in Hong Kong.

She had tried to explain that she was Indonesian and had yet to learn Chinese.

"Ha, you Chinese, but no speak Chinese!" was the usual reply, loaded with accusation, completely ignoring her explanation. Some even went as far as pointing out how remiss her parents had been.

To more sympathetic interlocutors she sometimes revealed that she had mixed parentage, and that her mother was of Chinese descent, but to those who reacted aggressively to her inability to speak Cantonese, she would just raise her eyebrows and shrug off the tension with whatever sense of humor she had left.

In reality, Dinah had tried to learn Mandarin. Her teacher had praised her for her unusual flair for language. She had absorbed the lessons with ease and had had no problems with diction.

Dinah could utter a phrase almost faultlessly even without understanding the meaning. At home she would often bore and irritate her brothers uttering words and occasionally coughing in Mandarin, when she wanted to disguise the fact that she had exhausted her vocabulary.

That was before her first visit to Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong she soon discovered that the ability to say words in Mandarin with near-perfect diction, backed up by a vocabulary easily fitted into a matchbox, posed unexpected problems for her.

As soon as she asked a well-rehearsed question, instead of giving the prescribed short and definite reply, her interlocutor would immediately regale her, it seemed, with the Sam Pek Eng Tay saga, leaving her shrinking smaller and smaller into a tight ball, completely paralyzed with guilt and embarrassment for her inability to understand what was said.

Then she was faced with a dilemma. Should she confess that she did not understand a word said, she would be taken for a slow- witted nut. If she pretended that she understood every word, the lie would soon be discovered when she could not react according to the instructions presumably given.

In any case the result would be just as humiliating.

Dinah knew that her only saving grace would be to learn Mandarin or Cantonese super fast, in order to speak like a native speaker, as she would be expected to be. However this option was impracticable because she did not have the time to do just that, so she gave up completely and resorted to speaking only English when she was in Hong Kong.

This time she was in Hong Kong with some Australian friends. They agreed that they should visit Shenzhen on the South China border.

They asked the hotel concierge for advice, and were told that the visa application in town would take at least 24 hours to process.

"On the other hand," the concierge added, "if you only want to go for the day, you may want to apply on the border, which is what many day tourists do."

The following day they left the hotel relatively early and took a taxi to Hong Hum station. As soon as they stepped into the building they felt handicapped for not speaking Cantonese or understanding Chinese characters.

At this stage the only phrases Dinah could remember were, "My left eye is stinging. Do you have a useful ointment for it?" in Mandarin, so she humbly asked her Australian friends to conduct all enquiries necessary while she looked on, a distance away, literally playing a dumb brunette.

After several wrong moves to inappropriate counters, they finally bought tickets to Lo Wu.

It was nearly eleven o'clock when they reached Lo Wu. The force of the stampede pushed everyone in one direction only: forward. Then luck, no doubt, allowed them to veer to the line in front of the counter with the word "FOREIGN VISITORS" above it.

After queuing for what seemed an inordinate length of time, they reached the counter, only to be told that they needed to obtain a visa first.

"You don't issue visas here?" they asked, astonished.

"Not here. Upstairs."

Upstairs, they quickly found the appropriate office but queues were moving very slowly. Some people were busy looking for pens to borrow, because there were none available on the table near the door where forms were to be filled out.

Noon came and went and Dinah and her friends were still in the queue.

Finally they arrived at the counter. Her friends went first, and each was given a visa almost immediately. But when Dinah's turn came, the official looked at her application form then pointed to the corner where she had written down her usual occupation.

"What this?" he asked stiffly.

"Writer," Dinah replied.

He appeared to mumble the word after her, then rose to speak to another official. They were immediately absorbed in a sotto voce but animated exchange, then the other official spoke to Dinah in Mandarin.

When he saw that Dinah was unable to respond in the language, he looked slightly annoyed. He said something to the one holding her form and passport, who promptly disappeared from view, leaving her aghast at seeing her passport taken away.

They tried to work out what had caused the official alarm.

The Chinese had a thing about writers? Surely not. Didn't they want their tourist areas written about? Didn't they want to show the world they were now discarding their iron curtains? Were they annoyed she would not speak Chinese? Surely she had not been the only Chinese-looking person unable to speak the language.

Some twenty minutes later a woman official appeared with Dinah's form and passport.

"We cannot give you a visa here," she said officiously,

"You must go back to Hong Kong and apply there!"

When asked why, she said, "To apply for a visa here, you need to have a Hong Kong ID, and you do not have one!" she said, in a curiously accusing tone.

None of her friends had any Hong Kong ID either. One of them came to the counter and said, "Wait a minute. I was given a visa, yet I don't have a Hong Kong ID. Why the difference?"

The woman official turned to him, and with a glare and a raised voice, announced, "We don't have to tell you the reason. You just have to go back to Hong Kong and apply there!"

To which her friend said, "I already got a visa, we're talking about my companion here. And you told us just now she couldn't get a visa because she didn't have a Hong Kong ID, which is not a real reason."

The woman official became vicious. Her eyes turned red, and she repeated angrily, "We do not have to tell you the reason!"

Then probably for good measure, she added, "Many Chinese people are refused visa to go to Australia, are they told the reasons?"

Dinah wanted to say they were not immigration officials so no use asking them, when suddenly the absurdity of the whole thing hit her. It was common knowledge that some countries were wary of mainland Chinese applying for tourist visas, because a great number of them would quickly go underground and become illegal immigrants, causing social and political headaches for the respective country's authorities. Did they seriously believe that Dinah would overstay her visa and become an illegal immigrant in mainland China?

At this stage her friends had become so annoyed by the official's arrogance and rudeness that they decided to cancel their trip to China despite having obtained their visas.

"What about the hundred dollar fees that you've paid? Couldn't you have them reimbursed?" Dinah asked her friends, feeling guilty for being the cause of the problem.

"Arh! If I spend another minute here I'm going to be sick!" one of them said angrily, then taking her by the arm, marched out of the office, followed by the others.

Dinah followed her friends unthinkingly, to one office after another, to gain re-entry to Hong Kong. She was still deciding what she was feeling, apart from extreme annoyance and frustration.

When a uniformed official stopped them at a gate where they were going, Dinah replied, still angry, "Out! What d'you think?"

The official asked to see their passports.

Dinah whipped out her passport from her bag, saying, "Here! Have a good look at it! I've been refused a visa and told a lie as well!"

The official looked pointedly at her, then said, "Madam, don't be angry with me. You were refused a visa and told a lie in China. You are now back in Hong Kong. Not the same."

As if choreographed, Dinah and her friends turned around, trying to spot the invisible border behind them.

On the train back to Hong Hum, Dinah turned to her friends and said, "That's it. I've drawn the curtain shut."

Seeing incomprehension on her friends' faces, she continued, "If I had felt any links at all to China, I've lost them. I don't want to be associated with that stupid arrogant immigration official! You yourself said that the whole thing made you sick."

"Gosh, don't over-react, Dinah,' her friends tried to calm her, "she was only a stupid, petty official, who hides her pettiness behind her uniform. China is a great deal more than that twit!"

Dinah did not answer. She knew her friends were right, but deep down she also felt that it would be a long time before she would feel the desire to try again, to visit China. Would she feel differently if she had no connections at all with China? Did she feel, even very slightly, a rejection beyond the bureaucratic kind? She did not know the answer.