When the Hong Kong police stormed the universities, she and her family just sat here in New York on their lilac leather couch and watched on their computers. But she liked her short-short hair and her cheery cashmere hoodies, and look how she could just push her oversized sunglasses up onto her head-no puffy eyes to hide. A little plump, it was true she did not like her chin joining up with her neck, as if they just needed to be together. Now, in the gilt lobby mirror by the striped chairs, she looked happier to herself. Which was why, after five years, Betty and her family had moved from Vancouver to New York, where all anybody said was “We are so happy you are willing to chip in for the new elevator” and “Did you know the building needs a new roof?”
“When people want to yell, all they can hear is what they want to yell,” Tina liked to say. And, by the way, tear gas wasn’t so great for the baby they’d adopted during the 2012 unrest, either.īut a Chinese was a Chinese was a Chinese to them. And then what? Then he would get teargassed, that’s what. If she were the sort of Chinese who wanted to buy in Vancouver but not live in Vancouver, if she were the sort of Chinese responsible for Vancouver’s empty houses and empty apartments, she wouldn’t be standing right there for them to yell at, right? And she was not an invader, by the way, she was a parent who had worried that her eleven-year-old would go out protesting on the street with his friends. “The Chinese are buying up everything.” That was when they weren’t yelling, “Go back to where you came from!” Betty had tried to reason with them. “The Chinese are taking over,” they said. In Vancouver, her neighbors had complained about her.
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“We are not buying any more.” And, when he continued arguing, she shrank him down from full screen to half. “Three apartments for four people is enough,” Betty told Johnson now, smiling but firm. “Maybe.” Quentin seemed to be considering this seriously.īut never mind. “Does that mean there’ll be a ghost town for us?” “ ‘Now people who don’t like where they live can move somewhere else. “Every time he says, ‘Too many people in China,’ I can hear his pitch,” Quentin said, with a hint of awe in his voice he did think Johnson a genius. “Buy the whole floor!” Johnson, who had always loved acquisition, had recently started a list called “Ghost Towns of the World.” One of these days, Betty’s husband, Quentin, said, Johnson was going to buy them all up. “Buy another one!” Betty’s father, Johnson, bellowed over FaceTime from Arizona. They figured they’d turn the extra kitchens into bathrooms. She and her husband and the boys just moved into her sister’s old place, which they liked so much that they bought the apartment next door, and then the apartment on the other side, too. In New York, she didn’t even have to buy an apartment. It was convenient to be rich, you had to say. And that was how it was, too, that when racism took over Vancouver she could up and move to New York. And that was how it was that when umbrellas took over Hong Kong she had a nice place in Vancouver.