Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

We got on well. I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily impressed I was by it.

I’d been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault, and thought Hong Kong would help.

My TEFL school was in a pastel-towered commercial district. They only hired white people but made sure not to put that in writing. Like sharks’ teeth, teachers dropped out and were replaced.

I had no idea who I was, but doubted the Thais wo...

Our director, Benny, was forty and wore a baseball cap backwards, either to look like he loved working with kids or to stress that he was his own boss and dressed to please no one, not even himself.

Weeks of my life were in that savings account.

English was British.

He was good at engineering ambiguities. I was bad at avoiding them.

He’d said everything very slowly that night, so I’d assumed he was drunk—but he still did it sober, so I gathered he was rich.

He was too self-assured to notice when I criticized him. He registered that I’d said something, then continued a parallel conversation.

The dictionary would not equip these children for Dublin.

With my college brain on, I knew many more people lost their jobs when banks like Julian’s played subprime roulette—but the college brain came with a dial. I turned it up for people I hated, and down for people I liked.

I wished Julian were married. It would make me a powerful person who could ruin his life.

That hurt my ego. I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them.

I imagined her having me for dinner, just the two of us. I’d mispronounce “gnocchi” and she’d avoid saying it all evening so as not to embarrass me. I would meet her eye and think: in this way I could strip you of every word you know.

You had to pretend to feel sad if you’d been single too long.

Periodically she touched her Celine trapeze bag. I thought: it’s still there, Victoria. It’s not going anywhere. The cow’s dead.

My wanting to cry was a reflection mainly of my social conscience.

He’d been clear that he liked having me around but didn’t want anything serious. His honesty hurt my pride, so I told myself he was a liar.

My desire was for Julian’s feelings to be stronger than mine. No one would sympathize with that. I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.

It was the sort of theory I could form very easily about someone else: Ava is drawn to wealthy partners as a means of quieting her class anxieties.

That was what we did. We were the sum of the routines we’d built around each other.

His mouth said it was great to see another Mick out foreign, and his eyes said: don’t fuck this up for me.

Look, I’d say, it’s like English grammar. It doesn’t make sense but it’s too late to change it. When you buy me clothes it means you want to stroke my hair, so when you really stroke my hair it means you want me to move to Siberia and die.

You were supposed to find it endearing that children thought only of themselves. Especially if you were a woman, it was meant to make you want one of your own.

Julian often reminded me to eat. It made him feel better about liking that I was thin.

The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me.

The English taught us English to teach us they were right. I was teaching my students the same about white people.

On days off it was illegal for helpers to stay in the house. This was so the government knew they were really getting a holiday. They didn’t have the money to go other places indoors, so they sat on cardboard boxes in parks and on walkways.

We branded a mistake any usage that might hint a Hongkonger was from Hong Kong.

Parents couldn’t change society, so they aimed for its inequalities to harm someone else’s child rather than their own.

We were doing what he and Miles did—acting out scenes. He did that with everyone: extemporized until he’d decided his dynamic with them, then held on to it for dear life.

For Seb, I’d spend a great deal of time with my hand near his belt buckle and see if he nudged me down to touch him or up to undo it. Julian sometimes did one and sometimes the other, so never let anyone tell you men are not complex.

I said something in passing about posh English people, and Edith said the concept of poshness didn’t exist in Hong Kong. It was like Ireland: all money was new money.

I guessed from the Kindle on the table that he was moving with the times.

Howdy cousin

English has a subjunctive. I learned that fact the morning I taught it.

We argued over certain words. They held, for instance, that “film” had two syllables: “fill-um.” I wanted to say most of Dublin agreed, but their parents weren’t paying for Dublin English.

I’d been a pliable child and I wondered if it was obvious, even then, that I would never be an artist. If a teacher had told me to put in line breaks, I’d have sliced up my words like ham in order to please them.

Ringing home made me miss discussing politics openly. I couldn’t at work, not least because Joan and Benny were both landlords on the side, but more fundamentally because bosses did not like to employ people who thought they should not exist.

I enjoyed conversations where I wasn’t attempting to persuade anyone, where I just said precisely what I thought. I got tired of making myself acceptable.

I’d never brought guests to the apartment and was relieved there was no tiresome process of registering them at the lobby. The rule was that you should, but it turned out to be one the doormen did not apply to white people.

have to admit I don’t,” I said—absent-mindedly, but he laughed and said he could always count on me for brutal honesty. That wasn’t true. I often lied to spare others’ feelings or to make them like me. Most of my directness was by accident.

Irish English made sense. That was how one distinguished it from British English.

“You shouldn’t pretend you hate your friends,” I said. The noise drowned me out again and Edith asked me to repeat myself, which let me redraft it to: “Sorry I made you feel like you have to pretend to hate your friends.”

She added that many people, her parents included, had a misplaced nostalgia for the British Empire because at least it wasn’t China.

We talked fast together. I was always slowing down in Hong Kong, either to help the kids understand me or because Julian said everything at leisure and I felt I should stay in rank. Only with Edith could my mouth get ahead of me.

Our walk started with ignoring everyone around us and ended with no one to ignore.

He didn’t want me to see him any way other than how he was now. He liked me because I didn’t know him before he was on a six-figure salary.

Sometimes I wondered if I was actually a native English speaker.

“Everyone does that, Ava,” she said. “You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special—which is fair, who doesn’t—but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.”