Sour Sweet [antikvár]

ONE__ The Chens had been living in the UK for four years, which was long enough to have lost their place in the society from which they had emigrated but not long enough to feel comfortable in the new. They were no longer iTiissed; Lily had no living relatives anyway, apart from her sister Mui, and Chen had lost his claim to clan land in his ancestral village. He was remembered there in the shape of the money order he remitted to his father every month, and would truly have been remembered only if that order had failed to arrive. But in the UK, land of promise, Chen was still an interloper. He regarded himself as such. True, he paid reasonable rent to Brent Council for warm and comfortable accommodation, quarters which were positively palatial compared to those which his wife Lily had known in Hong Kong.That English people had competed for the flat which he now occupied made Chen feel more rather than less of a foreigner; it made him feel like a gate-crasher who had stayed too long and been identified. He had no tangible reason to feel like this. No one had yet assaulted, insulted, so much as looked twice at him. But Chen knew, felt it in his bones, could sense it between his shoulder-blades as he walked past emptying public houses on his day off; in the shrinking of his scalp as he heard bottles roUing in the gutter; in a descending silence at a dark bus stop and its subsequent lifting; in an unspoken complicity between himself and others like him, not necessarily of his race. A huge West Indian bus conductor regularly undercharged him on his morning journey to work. He knew because the English one charged him threepence more. Chen was sure the black man's mistake was deliberate. He put the threepences for luck in an outgrown sock of his litde son, Man Kee. Chen was not an especially superstitious man but there were times, he felt, when you needed all the luck you could lay your hands on. Chen's week had a certain stark simpHcity about it. He had once worked out the fractions on the back of his order-pad, dividing the hours of the week like a cake. He worked seventy-two hours at his restaurant, slept fifty-six, spent forty hours with his wife and child (more like thirty-two minus traveUing time, and, of course, Man Kee was often asleep when he was awake). This was on a rotation of six days a week at the restaurant with one off(Thursday). That day was spent in recuperation on his back on the sofa, generally with open