Where? Where?

Heading out of the SAR now.  I’m leaving Tsing Yi station and I’m reminded of these woods off to right, below the train, as we ride away from the elevated station.  Was it ten years ago?  With my daughters in-tow.  Hong Kong with its mountain, after mountain, they’re all inhabited, you know . . . by fairy people.  Down there’s where the fairy with the goat lives.  You see that one area there with that hut.  See that house, that’s where they live.  “Where?”  “Where?”   “We can head there and see them if you like.                                                                                            

And it all fills out then, how I’d tell my older daughter that there were magic princesses that lived in the woods up above Pok Fu Lam, and over near the reservoir near Stanley.  Each location would have its own princess.  I named the first one after my travel agent at the time, a remarkable lady named Ethel.  I would say Ethel lives in those woods.  Right up there.  Ethel would call me quickly on my phone and say she was nearby and wished my daughter well, but once again, she had to go.  She might say that up ahead on the walk I’d left a sign for you.   “There!  That’s the red ribbon she said was going to be in the road!”

Ethel had a very bad brother with whom she did not get along.  He wasn’t a positive guy.  You had to keep an eye out for him.  But Ethel knew how to keep him in check.  And he was named . . . The echo is too distant.  I can’t remember. Edger?  Eddie?  All the other princesses were also given names that began with “E.”  We had an Esther, an Elkie and an Esmerelda, as I recall.   They each occupied different parts of the city’s mountainous space.

And it stopped I think, when we left Hong Kong.  I never bothered to populate the sparse uninhabited spaces of our neighborhood in Shunyi.  Hong Kong was crowded, but Hong Kong had vast tracks of protected parkland.  You need that for there to be fairies.