The River Between

 The blue light of her iPhone 6 cast Victoria Wang’s face in a cerulean glow, like a translucent mask, plated against her hairline, across her cheekbones and over her long, sculpted chin. Amongst ornately carved marble pillars and columns of framed pressed flowers, Victoria, who sat in a plush red chair rimmed in gold across from her boyfriend at NoMad Restaurant on Broadway, seemed almost regal in a low-cut black dress and dark eyes hooded in shadows. Her white fur slid carelessly down one arm as she flicked her finger across her phone screen. She’d pushed aside a plate of barely-touched shrimp salad (le grand plateau), and she sipped a Gilsey (London dry gin with orange bitters, but mostly just gin) as she checked orders on her phone.

            “Tonight is all about you,” Howard Zhang told her and reached for her hand.

A few weeks into January, and Victoria and Howard were celebrating what was already a great beginning to 2015. Indeed, the New Year – the new year before the two weeks of celebrations she’d have in February with her Chinese friends – did seem to hold a lot of promise. As the founder of Maywei Wireless, a cross-border smart technology trade-in service, Victoria had started a profitable business shipping several thousand iPhones, Androids and tablets to Hong Kong each week – all within two years of graduating from The University of Texas at Austin. Now, with Apple CEO Tim Cook announcing earlier that day that the Apple Watch would be released in April, Victoria planned to diversify her business model by expanding into the new wearable technology industry, sending more products into Asia via FedEx than she ever had before.

Victoria’s clients in Hong Kong were excited about the possibility of focusing on wearable technology, and Victoria agreed that the Apple Watch would cause a stir in brand-conscious China, where most of her products would end up. Victoria had grown up in Sichuan, a province in southwestern China known to locals as where “four circuits of rivers” converge and millions of people live but is perhaps better known stateside for its spicy cuisine, oftentimes spelled “Szechuan.” She had noticed during her frequent trips to visit family back in China that even people who couldn’t afford designer products spent a disproportionate amount of their paychecks on Chanel, Gucci and Apple. 

The waiter brought another round of drinks.

Victoria and Howard raised their glasses.

            “Cheers,” she said, and they drank.

            From the 45^th floor of Silver Towers apartments, Victoria typed quickly on her laptop, placing orders with retailers like Best Buy and the online “reCommerce” site, Gazelle, her two biggest sources for buying phones stateside.

            “Retail stores like Best Buy don’t want to fix the phones,” she said, as she scrolled through orders.

            After confirming orders with her clients in Hong Kong and purchasing the phones with funds advanced to her in a New York account, Victoria sends them to a warehouse in Los Angeles, where assembly line workers assess the damage and fix the phones.

            “Mostly broken screens,” Victoria said. “It’s amazing what some people consider broken. We’re already seeing iPhone 6s coming in, some of them brand new, with the Apple screen protectors still on them.”

            But Victoria checked herself. She, too, had gone through her fair share of the model, getting four new phones in the less than six months since the iPhone 6 came out in September: two phones stolen at nightclubs (“I go to Lavo too much,” she said, although one of the phones was stolen at a club in the Meatpacking district) and a third with a shattered screen (“So I guess there are more people like me trading in their phones.”)

            She boxes the phones and other devices every Thursday and sends them via FedEx to the industrial district of Hong Kong on Friday. By Monday, the boxes have arrived in Kwun Tong, where the phones are packaged and slipped under fishing nets and piles of bait to sneak across the river into China. The trek by boat takes only about ten minutes. Then the process starts again.

            “Nothing I do or my clients do is illegal,” Victoria said, flicking through her phone for order confirmations as she spoke. “But after it leaves my clients’ hands –”

            Well, then it’s considered illegal by Chinese standards. Technically called a “parallel import,” but better known as “gray product,” or “genuine” (as opposed to counterfeit) goods that are brought into and sold by another country without the permission of the trademark owner.

            The Trade Mark Ordinance between China and Hong Kong specifically addresses products shipped across the waterways by naming as a registrable transaction against trademark: “the granting of any security interest, whether fixed or floating, over a registered trade mark or any right in or under it.” The term “floating” is only mentioned once in the partially-redacted 99-part ordinance uploaded to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s website – a rather large oversight considering the fact that much of the two countries’ trade is conducted over a small stretch of water running between the borders. (Quantifying the trade is nearly impossible due to the massive amount of parallel export between the countries.)

            “I don’t deal with the fishermen,” Victoria said. “I’m the go-between. My clients need me to get the phones into Hong Kong.” She absently struck her bright red manicured nails across her screen and keyed in her four-digit passcode.

            “It’s not a stressful job,” Victoria said. “In fact, I probably should work more.”

She said she typically works from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., giving her an open schedule in the evenings to go out with friends and the early mornings to recover.

            Of course, she works more than perhaps she even realizes, taking calls on her iPhone from clients in Hong Kong as she strolls through the art galleries at The Frick Collection and often discussing ways she hoped to expand her business over dinner and drinks at an array of carefully-selected restaurants, like Hatsuhana (a sushi bar that frames its rolls in vibrant orchids) and The Standard (where the view of midtown is “not as good as the view from my apartment.”)

            Now in her apartment, dressed comfortably in knee socks and a baggy T-shirt, Victoria stood from her desk, which faces floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Times Square, and paced around the room. She was waiting for a call from one of her clients in Hong Kong to check an order. She stared out the window; despite passing the view everyday, its beauty wasn’t lost on her. The midmorning rays filtered through the city streets, creamy and radiant, sieving harsh shadows against the Empire State Building across the way. The sunlight threw streaks across her face. Victoria’s phone rang, and she turned away to answer.

            When Victoria was eleven, her mother remarried, and the two moved from Sichuan to Toronto. Her father stayed in China; they would speak on and off for years. Her mother would go through three marriages, and they would move again with the next marriage, this time to Texas. But while geography and home changed, her mother remained her constant and her role model. Eventually, her mother moved with her new husband to Los Angeles, where she started a technology-trading company between the United States and Hong Kong. This time Victoria stayed behind to finish college at UT-Austin, where she graduated from the Red McCombs School of Business.

            The flight from Sichuan to Shanghai and then from Shanghai to Toronto lasted 16 and a half hours, before layovers. Victoria stared out the window for most of the flight, watching as bright puffs of clouds rose up over the golden cast city, the early morning light enshrining the gray of the skyscrapers and curving Huangpu River in a warm glow. Victoria pressed her face to the window, trying to stay as close to the image as possible, until the clouds overtook the ground below, shrouding the city in a cloak of white. That early morning skyline would be Victoria’s last view of China for three years, when she would return to see her father for the first time since the divorce, and it would be a view that darkened her immediate perception of Toronto, as she struggled with the intricacies of two new languages (English wasn’t enough, she also had to learn French) and the separation of her parents. Years later, she would come to see the skyline of Toronto: the Scotia Plaza in the financial district and the slated Commerce Court with its masked men flanking the windows as a welcome homecoming. Like a concrete finger gesturing to the sky, the CN Tower could almost be mistaken for Shanghai’s Oriental Pearl Tower, a TV and radio tower that had reminded Victoria in childhood of Aladdin’s lamp.

            Now, years later, Victoria traverses a different set of skylines between New York and Hong Kong. Traveling to Hong Kong on business three or four times a year, she stays at posh hotels like the Four Seasons on 8 Finance Street, which overlooks the waterways along the urban district of Tsim Sha Tsui. A few hours of sunbathing in a white bikini at the hotel’s rooftop pool encapsulated most of Victoria’s relaxation during her most recent weeklong business trip. While her friends back in New York said they yearned for her work life: creating her own schedule, working four hours a day and traveling to Hong Kong on business, her hardest workdays were those spent in Hong Kong at trader meetings in which she was the only woman, and, despite her Chinese and Canadian roots, a New Yorker – virtually an American – at that.

Victoria was keenly aware of the entrance she made at the meetings. Drinking tea at a roundtable, surrounded by balding middle-aged Chinese businessmen, many of whom came to Hong Kong with little more than the equivalent of a fourth grade education but a great sense of trading street smarts, Victoria was a superior in terms of education, but, as a woman, she was considered inferior in everything else. Once, at a conference of telecommunications traders, many of whom were current and potential clients in Hong Kong, a businessman had invited Victoria to join them for drinks and a few games of double zero roulette. At first, Victoria, who considers her alcohol tolerance to be high considering her weight and height, kept up with the men as they downed shots of Santis Malt Swiss whiskey between rounds. But as the night continued, Victoria began to feel herself drifting from the game table, as though she were a puppet suspended on strings. She remembered falling from the table and the room – all flashing lights and festive clicking – closing in, like curtains drawing across a stage.

Thirty minutes later, the emergency response team rolled Victoria out in a wheel chair. She slept as if underwater, awaking in the middle of the night, gasping for air. Her body sunk deep into the Egyptian cotton sheets, and she wondered what she was doing and why she was doing it. Did she even understand her business? Sure, she had a manicured website detailing her business in a resume-ic lexicon: “We create value and develop new, sustainable business by leveraging our industry expertise, market knowledge, and our global network” – using the collective “we,” a staple in Asian parlance, despite the fact that she was a one-woman business. But what did that really mean? Where were her phones really going, and who was buying them? Often she considered these questions in passing and then glossed over them, considering it better to push some thoughts away. Why question a good thing? But this time, as she got up several times in the night to wretch into the toilet, she couldn’t dismiss the concerns. Once, as she stumbled into the bathroom, she realized she didn’t even know the name of the river where the phones crossed into China. When she arrived at her morning meeting, her business partners never asked if she were okay; they acted as if nothing had happened.

            Several months later, back in Hong Kong, her business partners asked her to drinks. She was careful to count her drinks, and, after three gin and tonics excused herself to return to her room for the night. She drew a hot bath, filling the tub almost full before submerging herself in the water. She left the bathroom door open, and through the doorway, she could see the first morning rays falling through her bedroom window. She recalled her questions of where and how from back in Las Vegas. Pulling herself from the water, she wrapped a thick white towel around her torso and dug through her suitcase for a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Hair dripping, she dressed quickly, grabbing her purse as she headed out the door.

            The walk to Victoria Harbour – the significance of the name never failed to escape her – took only a few minutes. There she found a fisherman. She asked in Mandarin for the name of the river running between Hong Kong and the mainland. “Sham Chun,” he said.

            The 45-minute cab ride led to a lot of questions on the part of the driver. “Why are you going? It’s just a speck of water,” he said. “Tourists don’t need to see it.”

            So close to China and yet still considered a tourist. Victoria tried to shrug off the feeling of discomfort and continued looking out the window.

            When she arrived, the dock was flushed with fishing boats ready to sail the short distance into the mainland of China. From the looks of the fishing boats, Victoria couldn’t tell which were legitimate and which were being used to carry other goods across borders. She approached one of the fishermen: a wiry wrinkle of a man with a broad-rimmed hat and a canoe weighted heavily with crates and fishing lines.

Victoria introduced herself and told him about her business. From his reaction, she couldn’t tell if he understood her role in the business. She said she wanted to go across.

            “Get in,” he shrugged.

            The small boat rocked under her weight as she stepped inside. She hunched in among the crates, and the fisherman pulled back on the oars. The sun splayed in the rippling water and drew dark bands across the man’s torso and forearms. Shielding her eyes, Victoria squinted into the mass of shadows that was the approaching harbor on the other side.