So back then, things were pretty good. What changed? I finished high school and decided I needed to explore the world. So for a couple of years I worked my butt off and saved like crazy. I worked in my uncle’s store, in a warehouse, at McDonald’s, I was even one of those beer promotion girls for a while. The day I left for the States, Popo said she was so proud of me. She didn’t care that I was going to a crummy community college in a crummy beach town. To her, someone who never got the chance to go to school, I was flying to the Gold Mountain to get an Important American Education. I took film classes, learned to pronounce Truffaut, and got into surfing and pot. In the meantime, Popo’s house got too much for her to manage on her own. She got cataracts, then glaucoma. She let my uncle sell the house and move her into a nursing home closer to town. She didn’t last a month there—she was lonely and depressed because the other residents never spoke to her and the nurses were bullies. So my uncle and aunts found her a small apartment in Tsuen Wan and hired a live-in helper from Indonesia called Suli. The first day, they showed Suli where everything was. The second day they went back to check on her. Then it was another week before they went back. Then another two, three weeks would go by before any of them would visit. When I phoned from the States, Popo always said she was fine, that her kids were over there all the time. It was only when I came back to Hong Kong and visited her in that dark, pokey apartment that Suli took me aside and told me everything. “Popo sad,” she said. She was learning Cantonese. “Popo lonely. Nobody come.”

I read this book once about this teenage boy who stabs an old woman in the eyes with model aeroplanes and leaves them in the sockets. Actually I never finished it because I had to stop after that. I mean, what kind of sick fucker would write a story like that? Are all families this disappointing? // Yi

The next day, Dave and Mayling meet his parents for dimsum and negotiations over the invitation list for the Hong Kong reception, which Dave doesn’t really want. In fact, he doesn’t really want the English village hall reception either. With the newly slimmed down invitation list, Mayling has decided that the original seating arrangements are no good and must be changed. Dave secretly wonders why they can’t simply take away a few chairs here and there. Nevertheless, the two of them have plans to take the train up to the Lake District that weekend so they can pace the village hall and take measurements and photos.