Chapter Eleven

Hazel barked at the approaching woman. She was carrying two schoolbags, and two primal-looking children who corresponded to each of those schoolbags orbitted around her like the toxic gaseous bodies that surrounded Saturn. But she wasn't the one drawing them in - they were the ones pulling her apart.

As the trio came closer to Terrence, he noticed that the woman was no more so than a girl. Her wrinkled face and calloused hands had made her seem aged in appearance, but when Terrence looked into her eyes he was able to detect an undeniable presence of youth behind her worn exterior. But the look on her eyes wasn't one of hopes and dreams, nor was it one of dalliance and flirtation. No. The look on her eyes was one of anguish and despair, an expression of solitude and hopelessness that transcended colour or creed, wealth or status.

The sadness was not the result of a singular incident, rather, it was caused by a slow and painful acceptance of the banality of life. The earth on the fields which had once embraced her feet as she frolicked in the poverty of the third world have now been replaced by emotionless stone monuments and skyscrapers that looked down on her with patronizing stares. What was once her innocence and aspirations were now found only in the offspring of her wealthy patrons, and even that small privilege of nurturing an infant into an adult would be brutally stripped from her in due time, and she would once again find herself pierced by the bleakness of life, with no preoccupation or destination, an adopted family from which her services have been discharged and a blood family that recognizes not her face but only the monthly alimony that she sends home.

She would then find solace in the only way she can, by reapplying for domestic employment through local agencies that charged outsized commissions, to work for miserly yet demanding households who could afford her no room nor bed, with ailing seniors, or rascal children who would seem to have an unyielding determination to make life even harder for her than it already was.

Terrence had seen such episodes many times in the short while that he had been back in Hong Kong. That is to say, it wasn't the length of time there that gave rise to the exposure, but merely the startling frequency with which it occured. A society that had given capitalism its highest praise had now successfully undermined the self-evident truths, and the unalienable rights of mankind. Religions that touted the sanctity of life now sported members who excercised condescension and even abuse towards their domestic helpers, as if they themselves were somehow transcendant, or "more equal" than their comparable counterparts from the Philippines.

Terrence felt his heart cringe. She looked at him again with another fleeting glance, as if in search of a glimpse of hope, a floating device to desparately cling onto in the midst of crashing waves.

When they finally crossed paths, Terrence let her pet his dog.