We walked a block to the Peninsula Hotel and waited for Keung. Vivienne had instructed him to keep circling until she called him to pick us up. This seemed reasonable enough; parking was difficult in that area, and we were only making a quick stop. I suspected, however, that Vivienne had given him these instructions because she didn’t like the idea of our driver not driving. One afternoon she’d seen him dozing with a newspaper spread over the dashboard. She’d turned to me and said, “Well, what do you think of that.” I’d reasoned that Keung was almost sixty and still getting up at five every morning to take me to school; it was natural that he would get a little tired in the afternoon. I had always been fond of Keung, I told her. He had a gentle, steady way about him and had been with us forever. “A bit too long if you ask me,” Vivienne had replied.

Despite the cool wind sweeping in from the harbor, she decided we would wait outside the entrance. We looked out onto the hotel’s large, oval forecourt with its pruned hedges and ornate centerpiece: a thick, gushing fountain with dolphins frozen mid-leap. Beyond that were the Salisbury Road shoppers moving in distracted patterns, inadvertently hitting prams and dogs with their oversized shopping bags. Further down were the harbor waters, dense green-brown and full of metal and contaminated marine life that nonetheless got pulled up like prizes by the amateur anglers lining the waterfront promenade. Across the harbor was Hong Kong Island, with its cramped skyline of paranoid, competing neon brands. The Bank of China building rose up like a dark knife, its white crosses giving off bad chi to its neighbors. And beyond that was the winding green Peak Road, at the top of which my father lay in a stiff bed in a bright, air-conditioned hospital room. I imagined him alone there, dumb and startled, in a scratchy gown that irritated and embarrassed him.

“Let’s go for afternoon tea after we see your father,” suggested Vivienne. “We haven’t done that in a such a long time.”

I gestured at the ugly block of beige across the road. “I have to go to the Museum of Art, remember?”

“Oh?” She smiled. “What are you going to do there?”

“Look at art, I guess.” I caught the meanness in my voice. I tried again. “Miss Lin—”

“Your art teacher?”

“Yeah. She gave us an assignment to complete over the Christmas break. We have to choose a piece of art and write a page about it.” I sighed. “If it’s a Chinese piece, the paper has to be written in English. Anything else has to be written in Chinese.”

Vivienne seemed amused by the idea. “I think I’ll join you.”

I shrugged. The truth was that I actually didn’t mind having someone with me on what had promised to be a tedious chore.