Ouyang Feng
/ Bruce Lim 欧阳枫

Ouyang Feng was born on July 1st, 1997 — the night Hong Kong was handed back to China. His father, Ouyang Ze, drove a taxi on the night shift. His mother worked at a cha chaan teng in Mong Kok. They lived in a subdivided flat in Kowloon that was too small for three people and exactly right for the version of childhood Feng would spend the rest of his life trying to recover.

His father came home smelling of cigarettes and exhaustion and always brought something — a toy, a snack, a willingness to sit in front of the TV and watch old Hong Kong films until one of them fell asleep. He made Feng's favorite: cart noodles with sausage and egg. These are the details Feng has kept the most carefully, because they are all he has left.

In 2008, Ouyang Ze vanished. The neighborhood said he had borrowed money from the wrong people and run to the mainland. Feng was eleven. He stopped talking much and started getting into fights at school. His mother, unable to bear the gossip and the weight of everything the neighborhood thought it knew, eventually told Feng they were leaving. She had met someone — a businessman from Macau, surname Lim. They moved. Feng's passport was reissued under the name Bruce Lim. His father's name was no longer on any of his documents.

The new stepfather was decent. He treated Feng well, invested in his future, expected nothing unreasonable in return. Feng was aware of this. It didn't help.

On a rainy Christmas night, before the move, Feng was in a street fight in Mong Kok when a red taxi pulled up to the curb. His father stepped out. He pulled Feng away from the fight and drove him home through streets that didn't look right — the Kowloon Walled City, demolished fifteen years earlier, was standing again, the roads bending into configurations that made no sense. His father looked wrong. Hollowed out. He told Feng there were things in the world that people couldn't see, and that he wanted Feng to stay far away from all of it.

Then a figure in a black suit came out of the rain and took his father back into it.

Feng woke up at a crash site. His father was unconscious in the driver's seat. The police found alcohol in Ouyang Ze's system and called it a drunk driving accident. His father was taken to hospital, where he remained in a coma. Visiting hours came and went. Eventually his mother paid the bills and they left.

Feng was the only person who knew what had actually happened. He remained the only person who remembered his father as anything other than a cautionary story, and he carried that the way you carry something you cannot put down in public.

At Stanford on a full scholarship — his grades had been the one thing he consistently weaponized his anger into — he spent his free hours training. Boxing, kendo, anything that let him convert what he was feeling into something with a use. He researched. He looked for what had walked out of the rain that night. He found nothing, until his third year, when a Korean woman named Park Ji-hee appeared and told him his father had been involved with something called Paradise.

He didn't believe her. She offered to fight him for it. She put him on the ground before he understood what had happened.

He signed the contract. He joined the GIA Asia Division. Ji-hee became his mentor, corrected his technique, and taught him how to operate in a world that had always been larger and stranger than the one he'd grown up in. They became partners and have been working the Paradise case together since.

He still plays guitar alone when the work is done. He still watches the old Hong Kong films his father loved. He still eats cart noodles, and occasionally bubble tea, which he has been told is Ji-hee's preference and has quietly made his own.

He believes he will find his way back to that rainy night. He intends to bring his father home from wherever the black suit took him.