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Back Last of Her Name
Chapters (13)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
  4. Last of Her Name
  5. The Wrong Dave
  6. A Reasonable Person
  7. Accident
  8. I Have Never Put My Hope in Any Other but Thee
  9. Wedding Night
  10. Bad Influence
  11. The Woman in the Closet
  12. Acknowledgments
  13. About the Author

Jun-Jun will take the boy with her into the city. One morning, she will lose him on a crowded street. In the days that follow, she’ll hear that people are fleeing and manage to get on a boat to Macau. It will be years before she finds her way back to Hong Kong, many more before she boards a plane for England, and a few more again before she’ll allow herself a moment now and then—eating dinner alone in a new country, or watching her daughters play-fighting in the garden—to think about how she lost the boy. If it had really been the force of a crowd, or if he’d panicked and struggled away from her grasp. Or perhaps she had been the one to struggle away, sensing an opportunity in the chaos. She’ll never know what happened to him.

But for now, before any of that, the two of them huddle together in the ditch. And they wait.

The Wrong Dave

THE WRONG DAVE

10-02-02

6:01 pm (GMT +7)

Okay, Dave. I forced myself to think about it all night and now, finally, I think I have an answer. I want you to know. Well, maybe I need a little more time. But I’m close…And when I’ve got it you’ll be the first to know, okay? OK. // Yi

As the Thames reflects the grey morning sky, Dave Tang, a promising architect in his late twenties, stands in front of his drafting board full of ticks, looking to everyone else in the layered glass office as if he’s thinking seriously about the new Nike store. He is not not thinking about the new Nike store, but he is thinking more about the email he received that morning from a drunk, interesting girl he met some years ago in Hong Kong. He doesn’t, in fairness, know if she is still drunk, or even interesting, but since that is how she appeared to him the first and only time they met, and since she never acknowledged or responded to his efforts to keep in touch, and therefore forfeited opportunities to demonstrate other aspects of herself, he still only thinks of her as drunk and interesting.

He thinks about how to reply, imagining that he’ll politely let her know of her mistake, that she is writing to the wrong Dave. Or he could just ignore it. He is mildly annoyed that after all this time—he calculates three years since they met at his cousin Pete’s wedding—he is thinking about her again.