Love letter lost

I met Irenka in a bar in Hong Kong where the foreign dancers liked to drink tequila after work. It was a mad, jumbled kind of place, full of dissolute expats and locals with a little bit of wild in their eyes. The kind of place a guy like me swooned over at first sight.

But I'd never been in this particular bar before that night. Two days earlier, I'd been in Taiwan, with no intention of heading across the South China Sea.

But Taiwan wasn't working for me. I'd come there from California to find out why a long-distance relationship had gone sour, and the answers I was learning were not to my satisfaction. John, an old roommate of mine, was urging me to get the hell out of town. Let's go to Hong Kong for a couple of days, he said. Anything is better than wallowing here.

He had a point. I was a sad case. It was one week after the Tiananmen massacre, and 10 years of studying China had suddenly lost their attraction. On top of that, I had just broken my clavicle in a biking accident, and been dumped by a woman I loved. Maybe the reason John wanted to get me out of town so fast was that he was afraid my black hole was about to obliterate his apartment.

In any case, we went, and we ended up in that bar. We started drinking San Miguels and not long afterward we found ourselves in the midst of a group of foul-mouthed, tattooed women who thought John had a cute butt and I needed to cheer up.

Irenka had long, dirty blond hair and full red lips. She was a dancer, she said, at a club where Chinese men came to ogle foreign women. She was discreet about what kind of dancing she did, but that was of little relevance to me. She was interested.

Getting dumped usually makes me feel not quite at the top of my game. But having a sexy woman nod her head at me with a twinkle in their eye? It's a simple old story, made all the better in a bar so loud and crowded that you had to holler to get heard, your lips just inches from her face, the press of bodies mashing you against each other.

She was half-Russian, half English, she said. Irenka. And somewhere during our mad conversation, with our knees jammed together, and my voice getting hoarse as I rambled on about god knows what or who -- I realized that I was having a hell of a good time. She wasn't just interested -- I was interesting. And life wasn't so dreary when you were chatting up Irenka in Hong Kong at 4 in the morning on a hot June night.

We kissed at dawn, and said goodbye. Then John forced me back to our room in the sleazy maze that was Kowloon's Chungking Mansions. We had a flight leaving town in just a couple of hours and John wouldn't let me out of his sight because he was afraid I would miss the plane.

But we had exchanged addresses, and Irenka had promised to make her way to San Francisco. So I wrote her. But the months went by, and I never heard a word.

Then, a year later, a letter arrived. She had written me back, before, but the first letter had never gotten to me. She told me it had been very long, and she had written it on the Trans-Siberian express, and that she had loved the letter I had sent her, but after so much time had gone by and she had never heard from me again, she decided not to come to the Bay Area. Then the letter she had written from somewhere in the Siberian Tundra made its way back to her.

By that time, a year later, I was on to other things, and other women. I sighed and put the letter away. But every now and then, I wonder what would have happened if the letter from Irenka written on the Trans-Siberian express had made its way to me, the letter written by the woman I had kissed at dawn to the sound of dirty water lapping against the docks of Hong Kong harbor. I think I would have found a way to see her again.

Did she get away? Maybe not, but she's the one I've wondered about ever since.

-- Andrew Leonard

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