Riding With Hong Kong Street Racers
This morning when I walked passed, I saw him and he saw me, and we both looked the other way. His existence makes three minutes of every day suck-on-the-back-of-tongue gross as there is about 50 meters between my place, to the shops or market to the bus that we both share. When I look in TW if he’s there, I don’t care who else is, I refuse to go in. I know no one likes him. They deal. But they are men. If I was one, I wouldn’t feel my stomach turn.
Someone once said, “If you like gambling, talking about women, and just complete bullshit. He’s a great guy.” Few people make my skin crawl literally but he is one.
He was the first person who talked to me. He said that he would let me film if I filmed his friends and him wake boarding I thought it was a deal. But he also lied about everything about him. Who he was, what he was doing there. That he was an apprentice, who swept the floors, that he was there to learn. He was one of those people who always made himself pathetic so you would feel bad for him. Always moaning about his life, and how it was terrible.
Now I have been around a while, I realized this was the way these men picked up girls. “Oh, this and this and this! I am so bad! This is so awful! I am so poor, so sad.” I think the idea is that a woman would feel like they can save them. Get the girl to look after them, make them feel special. As I said, before when a lot of people here don’t have much in life, they look to different ways to bulk up their esteem, and since women aren’t allowed to do anything on their own, I suppose standing by a man, can be a very attractive proposition. Even if financially, they have to help.
The first step to my total avoidance was he call me up at four in the morning and say, “You’re so sexy. I think you’re so hot.” I kept him on the phone a little bit just to try to work out his voice. I even admitted I recognized his voice and didn’t know who he was. He went on to feel insulted.
I know he got my number because someone left in on the table. Later I confronted him, he said it wasn’t him. Then he let it slip it was. I can let someone off for being drunk.
But then I received random calls in the middle of the night. Then I would wake up and listen to the sound of people having sex on the other end of the phone. Probably from having the phone placed next to a porno. It scared me at first, but I learnt to ignore it. I expect someone in their mid twenties to not play pranks like that. It’s stopped now.
It’s odd to know the other women didn’t find it strange. Just “Mo Liu” as in “Nothing Stir,” I think things like that happen a lot in this world.
But then whenever I was around, he would ask me where I lived. Eventually he worked out which apartment it was. It’s not hard to see me walk home. Then the assault of where I lived and how rich I was started, “Oh you are so lucky, you have money.” “Do you live by yourself?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Poor people like me have to walk up our dirty apartments.” “Can I come up and see you?” “You have to introduce me to your gwiemui friends.” “I bet you have electricity” (He does too, please!) “Why don’t you ever introduce me to women?” “Some people don’t understand what life is like, I wish I was with you.”
When the assaulted film star spread (read on post below) was going on. He tried to make me look at it. I told him I didn’t want to. I said it made me sick. And he just commented on how prude I was, how if I couldn’t look at a naked women, how would I get a boyfriend? And that he thought that I was a “gwei mui” I would be really “hoi fong” (open and extraverted) and that is why no man wanted me.
After a while, I think he forgot I was a person, and he just straight up stared at my breasts, making snarky comments about my figure. He kept trying to find out which floor and apartment I was on. “So are you in Blah blah or blah blah?” “Tell me if you have a view?” “Where does your window look to?” “Is it high or low?” “So it’s in between which floor and which floor?” I never answered any of them, and eventually I didn’t even talk to him.
He would come up and say, “Oh, isn’t life good for people like you.” While I would walk by. And once, he said, “Who is that Ms Chan? I called her today. She’s real rich. I wish I can have some of that.” When he is commenting on my family, that’s crossing the line.
That’s just with me.
Now let’s talk about watching him gamble if I was in the shop. All he does in the weekends is sit at the TV and bet on horses. Call up the bookies, call up his friends, read the paper. Sucked in. “I have no money left. FUCK YOU for the bad tip on the dick of horse. I just lost my last suck dick $3000.” And then call the bookie and make another $6000 bet.
It would be fine if it was his money. But it isn’t. He stole from the shop to pay his gambling debts, he took money of both his girlfriends to do this. He lived off one, and had one at home.
He’s a terrible mechanic. I saw him place the alternator in backwards. You can’t really make that mistake after 15 years working with cars. He lives off gambling. It’s his way to make a living. I am pretty sure that he was trying to get it on with me, as another stream of income for his games.
I never met his girlfriend who lives at home with his mother, father and brother. She’s not allowed to come down to the shop. Fai has to lend him his car if he wants to do anything with her, because the car he owns is a present from his other girlfriend. She just sits at home and waits for him. If he comes home that is.
The reason is his other girlfriend G, lives and work in the neighborhood, and used to come by the shop frequently. I liked her, she was always nice to me and we went out sometimes, but eventually she broke up with him, found someone else and I never saw her again. She had her own Business and I was able to speak to her about some of the things I saw. But I could never understand why she spent so many years with this sleazy man. She said, he would get up every morning and make her breakfast. That he was attentive to her. I think she wanted out of the live she was in though. I will talk about her in the next post. She was well off, and he mooched off her all the time. I hate men who do that.
At least he wasn’t a illegal car racer and didn’t have to come racing with us. He was just a mechanic and a partner of TW. Eventually they split. Fai didn’t tell me, but my guess is he took a whole lot of money in the books again and that was that. He would never pay it back, justifying it’s his money too. So the garage is now split into two. Alec’s customers and Fai’s Customers. I don’t know how he survives. He can’t fix cars.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 