五年前，楚驾着宝马，穿着最时尚的衣服，成为浦发行国际部大家眼眸的亮点。那时的她华美璀璨。
初夏的午后，窗外疏离的云层卷起柔和的阳光悠悠摇摇。无言的房间，我的身影不停地移晃，忙忙碌碌，把记忆和故土一件件打进漂泊的行李, 一心一意。沉默的风跟在旁边，无声地走来走去。临别的情绪，酸酸楚楚。
而对新世界莫名的兴致盎然的疾飞，打翻了缕缕微凉，不解的心情等待着漂泊的五月花。那时，我还很年轻。
楚明朗的笑容就在1999年那一个午后走出来，为赶路的我送行，遍溢的一幕动感而且恍惚，随着她披洒的长发滑下来漫延着。第二日的清晨，飞机发出轰鸣，我象鸟儿一样飞上天空，家乡在我的后面，香港将在前方出现。
隔了一年我得到楚赴港开会的电邮。下午茶的时间，在酒店咖啡吧一个临窗的台子，楚一袭白衣, 和着帘后蹑足飘来的阳光，沛然而下，笼罩了我的视野。
坐下寒暄了几句，才发现她的气韵不如以往充满活力，透着层苍白的弱倦。她说近来有些忙，只是感冒并无大碍。我问她带药了吗？临行前，我刚跟婆婆学会了自行臀部肌肉注射。她那温煦平和的话音悬浮着，白晰的手指抚着手中的茶杯，一片片绿茶撩着雾气幽雅曼舞。嘴角的弧线淡淡的微扬在如絮般的音乐里舒展。我的心猛地柔软了一下，半疼半惊的拨动着心弦。那一刻我静心的啜饮。
我佩服她的勇气。这种感受力扩展着，连续不断。
晚饭后，我们顺道晃了太古广场。楚的个子很高，五尺六吋。在一行行褐瘦的香港人里，楚高挑袅娜，神秘的白裙如天鹅的羽翼舞到黑夜缠绵的末梢，她的黑发散落如绸，挥之而过。脚踝盈盈纤纤,若藕。然楚的身段又丰润美妙的错落有致。人影，灯流，她总是使人眼前一霎就亮了。繁华落尽的夜色下她的步履轻健而决定。
后来，楚打电话来，告诉我她要去英国读MBA。
与一般美丽的女子不同的是，楚对求知永远热情洋溢，如同她对活着意义的渴求。那份热忱自然地在她身上充溢着。她殷实富有的先生赞助了她此次的追求。
又一年转角处，北京上空的白云和楚熟悉地打着照呼。她正在想，这次是不是要久住？她往前走着，和许多过去擦肩而过。。。。
再后来，据说，她受聘于一家德资公司，那家公司给她的待遇很好。然而，她是不能忍受机械性工作的奴役。拉着透明的旅行箱，她又一次开始了远怔。
尽管她的先生没有明言，对于她不停的飘呀飘，他饮下手中的苦咖啡，无力的无奈。
我在等着她的传说。。。。。。
楚的父亲，就职于一所大学的校长，这样家庭氛围的浸润，适宜楚沉思默想, 产生出人意料的举动。所以她命运的履印，预示着非凡。这一切让人感受到不惑之后有所暇想，再有所了悟
。。。。。。
伦敦的唐人街，一池纷乱纷呈的环境落户于人群的攘攘熙熙。来自五湖四海的中国旅人曾在此歇足。面对繁华景色的对立面。餐馆工灰暗而奔跑的影子呈现的却是又累又脏的另一群。它多为非法偷渡而来的人提供寻觅的机会。吵吵嚷嚷在袅袅的烟气里盘旋而上。在世界上的任何地方，唐人街莫不如此。这就是一种生活。
由于诸多原因，中国的知识精英在英国获得体面的Working Permit很难。
考取Chartered Accountant 证书是楚再度进入英伦的决策。这一次，她走得干干净净。
在后来的两年，在黄昏的灯红酒绿里，在黎明纷乱的尘世里，有人在唐人街看见楚越走越快，越来越瘦的背影。孤独的循环往复。两份唐人街的工作支付着楚考Chartered Accountant 的费用，支付着她在伦敦的一切。
楚曾经拥有很多。她本可以将闲适雅致的生活留存和延续。
对于这样的勇气，我想我会犹豫。尊崇的力量，将我从后面紧紧包裹，漂泊的人儿啊，不禁让我颤抖的泪湿眼睫。
后言：
最近，据说她已通过了Chartered Accountant 很多门考试，并且刚刚找到了一份会计事务所临时的工作。我为她祝福！永远。
Choice leaned against the back of chair, tranquil, motionless and meaningless. Here she stared immovably at the centre of her palm that now wrapped in the new callousness, a soft spot rooted on fire. The melancholy poured down and engulfed her against the different atmosphere —the noisy massive carriages in the London underground. The hurried wheels of the tube rushed towards the night as before which never ceases, with its rumbling wheeze which pulsed through its veins. Suddenly a rapid halt, those old fading recollections aroused, from the far buried depths stretching across the train-ful crowd, a few steps away, wafting and shifting, in the fluttering plume, onwards and upwards. The forgotten memories came alive, veiled as fog, lulling her thought into the vague vision, in a realm between a dream, and a reality.
5 years ago, at the time Choice drove her BMW, wore her stylish clothes, and kept the eye-charge and head-turn of her elegant gesture out there at Shanghai Pudong Development Bank – International Trade Department. She glowed glamorous radiance just then.
The warm afternoon of that early summer, the windows fronted upon the clouds cradling the soft weakening rays of sun, leisurely scurried before me. Inside, the still room, I packed the past , and then the native land of its youthful memories into the drifting baggage, a swift shadow keen to absorb the atmosphere. The unspoken wind on my side watched over me, hush, to and fro. The woe of the farewell prodded, with small soft fits of sullenness, sadness and slow sorrow swirls of coldness, flush after flush, throughout my body.
But all stopping, in an inexplicable boisterousness flapped in, which came over my face facing upon the unknown world before, a sudden wild mood - somehow bewildering- with great rapidity, to drag me out of the extending cooling stir and force a halt. The confused feelings now awaited the adventure of Mayflower. At that time I was still young.
Choice’s smile came out at that afternoon, fluid and obscure, sheeting down along her long black hair, waving for my departure.
The following morning I soared into the sky as a bird; in a moment the homeland was many thousands of miles away, ahead of me was Hong Kong marching on. My fate was written in the skies.
In the summer of 2000 an email from Choice slipped in. She would pop into Hong Kong for an international conference. Soon, at the teatime, Choice, who wore in white dress, was just sitting in a table next to the window. It was a coffee bar at the hotel, there sneaked in the dappling sunshine, her shadow all but covering the curtains behind, enveloping all my eyes and moods, like a smile.
I walked towards Choice, too soon, our glances met, and smiled at each other.
I sat down opposite her and we were soon slipping into our warm-up conversation.
The scene went on, passing on from word to word, smile to smile. But she looked not as her old self full of radiance of intrinsic vitality with a lick of pale fragility across her face, lacking her usual sheen and colour, slightly.
“ A little cough, nothing serious, just a sort of busy, recently.” Choice said, smiling calmly.
“Do you take medicine, Choice?” I asked, genuinely.
“ I have gained how to give myself an injection from my mother-in-law before departure,’ Choice kept her smile and peace, relieving my worries.
The tone she whispered calmly, her porcelain fingers caressing the cup, petals of green tea whirling its way in the clouds of tea – vapour, lapping the air. The arched lines around her lip corners sending up flickered through the bright leaping and swaying music. It was snug and softened in my heart on the spur of the moment, a blending of feeling with partial surprise, partial sympathy, plucked the stings of my heart. At the moment I smelt the aroma and savoured it in.
I, too, admired her bravery, her daring. The power of this sense seeped through, incessantly, on and on。。。。
We went down to Pacific Place, Admiralty, after dinner. Choice was very tall, in her five foot six height, her limb of soft and slender contrasted with the brown slim Hongkongers. The mysterious white long dress, like plumage of swan, reeling down, past the twisting shadows of the crowded, over the winding streams of lights, whirling the tips of lingering nights, there was Choice’s black long hair, lustrous as a fleeting silk, descending down.
Her ankle was slim and delicate, just as lotus roots, while Choice was charming, in her buxom figure, well-proportioned line and graceful movements.
Choice always lightened up public eyes in amazement at the split, her beaming opened, under a veil of evening in after a bustling emptiness, where she moved energetically and determinedly.
“I would head for England on the MBA course,” Choice told me in her call the next year.
As with other beauties, Choice could be distinguished by her constantly passionate yearning for the acquisition of knowledge as her yearning for understanding the meaning of existence. This time her wealthy husband had supported her pursuit.
At the turning of the following year, the realm of the clouds floating in the Beijing skies, upon Choice, with her and greeted her back. Now finally she was home, having made her journey back.
Choice stared forward, she did not know how long she would stay this moment. It could be lifetime settle, or it could be short. As she marched on, watching the array of the old scenes go by, shoulder by shoulder.
After a while it was said that she was employed in a Germanic company, working at a glamorous position with well-paid salaries.
These, ultimately she abandoned, abandoned herself into the punctuated routine work and took the transparent suitcase into re-entry where now awaited her.
Choice departure for the new advance moving on brought her husband unspeakable torment. At last he did not put it into speech. He drank down the cup of bitter coffee, a rush of disturbing frustration of her restless obsession of drifts sprang up, a film of woe on his throat on his strained tolerance. It was kept bitter and chilly in the wind’s sad sighing.
I was waiting for her legendary voyage within a dynamic path before.
Choice was born of a family of what her father occupation as the chancellor of a university, immersed in the values of the spiritual life - meditative and pondered exercises, as befitted Choice’s thought, where she breathed, struggled, reflected, grew and marched on the tracks in her brain– in which the footprint of her life depended upon, which intended audience could not fail to understand how she had become, and finally the vision would crack up
。。。。。。
The China town, London is a poor filling up a bustling and thriving air where visitors of Chinese from the world has halted and relaxed in. In the circumstances opposite, the faces and shadows of wait staff, kitchen-hand, drifted, rushed, and buffeted, with prosperity of the town outside their minds and their visions, who gave this place another character: soiled and exhausted. It was supposed to offer jobs for illegal immigrants on the hard-earned wages. The voices and faces of people lifted in wreaths of palish smoke.
That was what it was like, the China town, as all the world was.
It was the whole expression of certain sort of life.
The Chinese elite, for various reasons, are not able to obtain the similar decent occupations by working permit constrains, which they used to have in China. The pattern of occupational choices does reflect the world of reality.
Arriving at London to conquer the certificate of the Chartered Accountant was Choice’s determination and decision for re-entry. She headed on and
and the minute she did not ask any compassion. She left with nothing, the sole journey of excruciating but brilliant exercise, of body and mind.
In a scant two year, in the streaming emerald wine and sparkling blaze of lights in the dusk, in the flood of the crowd heading on work elbowing each other at dawn, Choice was among.
The shadow, a shadow of solitary hovered around, restless.
She has changed, not only the pace faster and faster, but the body, much thinner now. The wages of two part-time manual jobs in China Town contained her fees of the Chartered Accountant, her fees of everything.
Once Choice possessed a lot, in any case, the fineness and cosiness of her life would retain, and would endure in prolonged time. But now she withdrew, and put it behind her, in a big way.
In such a decision which Choice made, I would vacillating and therefore the force of admiration and respect rose up to thrust upon me and hold me tightly. Drifting people
drifting way in so foreign a place, a time. For a while, those thoughts drown me trembling, the tears was filling up, on the eyes, on the throat and on the heart.
Note:
Recently, it was said that Choice has conquered the successive Chartered Accountant exams and was beginning to practice in an accounting film, working at a part-time day job.
With love and God bless her lots
≠Paleink
2005-07-18
