In line with my belief that it’s important to always keep the resumé fresh, I signed up for first aid training six months ago and the first class is today. The Nine Circles exalts dying and death, but not for guests. Plus, most of us sit for nine hours a day and eat greasy meals at lunch, putting us at risk for croaking in our cubicles. A knowledge of first aid does not help me do my back-of-house job better, though if a colleague has a heart attack at work, I’ll be able to perform cpr while waiting for the paramedics to arrive. Even though we’ll be taking an exam during the final class, I’m treating these training sessions as a vacation from my desk. The best part is that Charles and Charlotte are also taking the course; he’s doing it because he cares about the welfare of other employees and she’s doing it because she’ll be on park grounds from time to time working on the new attractions.
Three months ago, Human Resources sorted everyone with a Chinese surname into the Cantonese training sessions without first checking whether we could read or write the language. HR’s mandate seems to be cart before horse. Although it was embarrassing to admit that I was illiterate except for menus and select street signs, I reported that my understanding of body part names and medical terminology was limited to English. (What’s the word for spleen in Cantonese? I still don’t know.) Human Resources Associate Gallant Sum instructed me to take the course on evenings and weekends at a community centre with our expat colleagues—the Nine Circles would still pay the fees, he assured me, but the company would not consider these thirty hours as overtime. But then it turned out that the executive team wanted some of the bilingual Hong Kong staff members to take the course in English to better serve international guests and vips, so Human Resources had to scramble to implement these classes on top of the final push to hire an additional hundred people to round out the team.
Charles and Charlotte are already in the meeting room when I arrive at 9:12 a.m., the official start time at the Nine Circles.
“Is this an actual first aid training session or a mass firing?” Charlotte asks, as she scans the room to see which colleagues are present.
“My tour with Pamela Poon, Raymond Shek, and Jade Chen Church went pretty poorly yesterday, so I can imagine why I’d be fired,” I say.
“I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you think,” Charlotte says.
“Well, I didn’t make any serial killer jokes this time,” I say. Then I’m relieved to spot the Secretary to the Head of Project Delivery. “Helen Chan’s here, and I don’t think they would fire any of the secretaries. Everything would come to a stop if even one was terminated.”
“She’s pretty essential to the park opening on time,” Charles says. “Remember when she went on vacation?” When Helen took her annual leave to get married and go on her honeymoon, the paperwork for the air filtration system for the Afterlife lab went missing and Project Delivery started construction without understanding that the omission of this system violated building code. Charlotte spotted the error and reported it to the executive team and managerial staff. She noted that without air filtration it would be unsafe to display some of our most famous corpses. No one listened to her because she’s not head of her department. The Chaplins and I discovered, during an investigation that we conducted on our own time, that a Project Delivery manager had buried the paperwork to save money, but his gamble resulted in a million-dollar mistake. For reasons unknown, that manager still has a job at the Nine Circles, and somehow Helen got written up for this incident despite eight underlings reporting to the executive team that it was not her fault.
I have one of the jobs that is considered nonessential. I don’t fetch coffee or set up conference calls or schedule important meetings or handle corpses.
What I don’t say is that out of everyone in the training room, most of whom are junior staff from Administration, I have one of the jobs that is considered nonessential. I don’t fetch coffee or set up conference calls or schedule important meetings or handle corpses. No one up on aside from the Executive Director seems to understand that marketing is necessary to get paying guests through the turnstiles. Mirabella Lam, Educational Programmes Manager, believes that the high quality of her programming is enough to draw a crowd and insists that trying to attract attention is crass.
“But how will the public know about your projects if we don’t spread the word?” I once asked Mirabella during an all-team meeting. “We do good work,” she said, directing her comment toward the Executive Director. The ceo, Dalton Northcott, was not in attendance that day, or Mirabella would have addressed him instead. One can sum up Mirabella’s work philosophy as “managing up.” I later discovered I’d made a sworn enemy with my well-meaning query. Mirabella is employee ten, so even though she doesn’t outrank most of us in terms of the org chart, she wields her seniority as a sort of authority.
Many underlings have never met the ceo. With his travel schedule, he’s rarely at the Hong Kong offices. Early on, when the team was smaller, I met Dalton at the groundbreaking ceremony and asked him how to keep my houseplants alive—I’d read that he had a PhD in botany and an impressive orchid collection. His response was warm and engaging, yet I could sense he had boundaries in place that prevented the interaction from becoming overfamiliar. This gave me a false sense of safety—I believed the ceo was a leader I could trust.
The first aid teacher arrives and does not introduce himself. Instead, he says, “Where are we going to eat lunch?” Then he wipes his sweaty forehead with a faded pink towel.
There’s a ten-second silence that feels like an eternity. Many of the participants in this training session are under twenty-five and are too shy to make eye contact when they do their rounds with the mail or set up a projector for meetings. There is no way any of us are going to give up our lunch hour of rest (or work catch-up) to entertain our first aid teacher, but we have to figure out a diplomatic way to communicate this information.
“Most of us brought our lunches,” says Charlotte.
“There’s a food court downstairs in the mall, as well as a supermarket,” I say. We were supposed to have moved into the offices built on park grounds six months ago, but the sprinkler system keeps going off and no one can figure out how to fix it, so now they’re pulling out the entire thing and reinstalling it and most of us are still in our rented office space in the mall. On the way in every morning, I pass Celine, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton and see the salespeople lovingly dusting handbags that cost more than my monthly salary.
The teacher looks disappointed. Did he imagine we’d want to discuss the finer points of guts and gore while eating dumplings? When it’s clear no one is going to invite him to lunch, he opens his PowerPoint presentation. The first slide features a grainy black-and-white scan from a newspaper.
“What’s happening here?” he shouts. None of us can figure out what’s depicted in the image.
The blobs could be a cat playing the piano. “Come on!” he says. “What would you do if you came across this accident?”
“The photo is a bit on the blurry side,” says Charles, ever polite.
“Common sense! First thing at a scene, no illegal touch!” says the teacher.
I wonder if he’s had complaints against him while administering cpr. I don’t remember any instruction about illegal touch from my previous first aid training sessions in Canada. Icarus Sun from Administration, whose clothes always look shrunken in a cool streetwear way, is taking notes. I wonder if he’s writing Do not molest the injured person.
The room is airless, making me sluggish. I yawn and unzip my jacket. “Wah,” says the teacher, switching to Cantonese. His eyes are on my tits. “I thought you were going to take it all off.”
I zip my jacket back up. Charlotte and I look at each other. “What a perv,” she whispers. No one else in the room seems to have noticed what has happened, not even the Human Resources Associate who is observing the session to ensure everything goes smoothly, so I let it pass. “In a few weeks, I will introduce you to a beautiful lady for cpr,” the teacher says. “Her name is Annie.” Icarus is still taking notes. CPR on beautiful lady! “But what’s going on in the slide?” asks Charlotte.
“You will understand when you meet the beautiful lady!” the first aid teacher says with a wide smile on his face. As the minutes pass like snails trying to cross a freeway during rush hour, I think about all the unanswered emails in my inbox and slip into a dissociative state.
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Excerpted from We Are Underlings by Doretta Lau. © 2026, House of Anansi Press. All rights reserved.
