Mr Wong Goes West by Nury Vittachi Page A

and been sent in various directions, along eight streets, all of which looked exactly the same. Indeed, the eight streets could have been the same street eight times over and she would never have known. But she had faith in humanity and believed she was getting closer to her destination.
    At the next junction, she asked an elderly woman who was so tiny she barely reached Joyce’s chest. The woman stared at the piece of paper and pondered for a long time without saying anything. Joyce was getting frustrated. She was at a T-junction and assumed she needed to turn left or right.
    She tried out a bit of basic Cantonese to hurry things along. ‘
Jor-been? Ding hai yau-been
?’ Left-side or is it right-side?
    The woman thought for a moment longer and then pointed straight up. ‘
Gor do
,’ she said. Just there.
    Joyce followed the line made by the woman’s finger and looked to the top of the block right next to where they were standing. ‘Thanks, I mean,
mm-goi
.’
    Five minutes later, she emerged from an elevator on the forty-third floor of the building—was there anywhere else on earth where residential buildings could be sixty or seventy storeys high?—and started coughing. The air was full of smokeor dust or something. Was the building on fire? She detected no heat. Instead, Joyce heard a grating, whining noise, and realised that workmen were cutting or grinding something.
    The door of the apartment in front of her was open and she stepped in, her hand held over her mouth and nose. She waved her other hand in front of her eyes and eventually managed to get through the worst of the dust storm. In the small room there was nothing but a man at the top of a ladder, making a storm of powder, all of which was heading towards the front door because of the angle at which he was holding his tools.
    ‘
Mm-goi
,’ she said, grateful for the fact that ‘thank you’ in Cantonese was a useful portmanteau word that also meant ‘excuse me’, ‘please’, and so on.
    The man looked down from his perch.
    ‘Professor Man? I want to see Professor Man?’
    The worker just stared at her, saying nothing. She decided to try it in Chinese. ‘
Man Sin-Saang hai bin do
?’ Mr Man is where?
    The worker’s head changed angle but he still said nothing.
    Bother, thought Joyce. She recalled that many manual workers were mainland immigrants, legal or illegal, and spoke only Mandarin. How do you say Professor Man in Mandarin? ‘
Man Lau-sher?
’ she attempted.
    The worker put down his electric sander. ‘You’ve bravely attempted three languages. Out of the three of those, I think I prefer the English,’ he said. ‘The others were hopeless.’
    ‘Oh. You speak English.’
    ‘Just a bit.’
    ‘I’m looking for Professor Man? He’s a professor of law?’
    ‘You’re not.’
    ‘Yes, I am.’
    ‘No, you’re not.’
    ‘
Yes
, I am.’
    ‘You’re
not
looking for him. You were, but no longer. You have found him.’
    ‘Ah. Right. Doing some DIY?’
    The Professor laughed. ‘Certainly not. This isn’t my apartment. Wouldn’t catch me living in a small box at the top of a tower at cloud level.’
    ‘Oh. Helping out a friend?’
    ‘Goodness, you are polite, aren’t you?’ the Professor said, coming down the creaky ladder. ‘You cannot conceive that this sort of manual labour might be my actual job, can you?’
    Joyce merely smiled, not knowing how to respond.
    ‘I run a company called Fat Man Interiors—
Fat
being Chinese for “prosperous”, as I expect you know. This is my day job, so to speak.’
    ‘Oh. I thought you were a professor of law. That’s what Nina told…’
    ‘I am trained as a professor of law. Did that for some years. It doesn’t pay too well, so I starting doing a bit of construction and interior design on the side. I discovered that the whole builder thing works rather well. So I do rather more of that than the legal lecturing these days.’
    ‘But I thought lawyers were rich?’
    He pulled off his