Mass Transit Railway

Something like my age (though with Chinese women
It’s hard to tell), her black hair still silky
And tied in a bun from which every luxury
Had been wrung. But her hands, small and rubbed raw,
Told me that her age were better measured
Not in years lived but in decades of labour.
She wore her clothes like a road-cleaner
Who sweats freely beneath his overalls:
The pullover hanging from her shoulders
Several sizes too big; her shapeless
Black trousers and tiny trainers chosen
With a carelessness bordering on care.
And in her unblinking eyes, which stared into
The middle-distance of the train carriage
With an intensity without object or scope,
There was not the least glimmer of hope
For a future that had never emerged
From the everyday of her present.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX And yet,
The face that framed her blank stare, exhausted,
Crushed like a flower between the pages
Of her life, withered into gentleness,
Was one I could have looked at forever.
For in every woman there is something
Of beauty, and in her more than in most.
(And in her there was more than in most.)
And in its presence, her stooped frame and gait
Were as graceful as a ballet dancer’s;
Her lank hair glossy as a beauty queen’s;
Her ugly clothes hung as elegantly
As those on a fashion model, and her
Eyes sparkled like a movie star’s.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX But that
Was all in my eyes as I gazed at her,
Unseen by her as she was to herself,
Her secret hidden from her as from
Everybody else on the Mass Transit
Railway. Or so it seemed, to my eyes.

The train stopped and we both alighted,
She to her exit, heading down the hill,
Me to mine, taking the escalator
To the hotel I have come to call home
On the street she will clean as I sleep
Tonight, anonymous under her mask,
High-viz vest and bright-blue uniform.

— Hong Kong, November 2024

• • • • •

The MTR was extended to Sai Ying Pun, where I live in Hong Kong and where this woman alighted, in 2015, as part of the planned gentrification of the area by the combined actions of the Urban Renewal Authority and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department. It was still morning when I saw her on the Island Line, and from her exhaustion I guessed she had come off a nightshift, perhaps as one of the female workers who clean the spotless streets of Hong Kong Island every night with high-powered jets of water.