She spent years waiting for him. During that time, she found that the more she imagined his perseverance in squalor, the more noble he seemed. And the more vindicated she felt in her decision to invest in this man of rare humility. She imagined his dingy bedsit, riddled with mold and cockroaches, and the floorboard under which he’d secrete money from his week’s wages in a biscuit tin, saving towards their reunion fund. She imagined his cold, lonely nights in the restaurant basement, hunched over metal pails of potatoes as he scraped their skins off one by one, practicing the English phrases (“Good evening, Sir, Madam” “Have you made a reservation?” “I would recommend the lobster”) that would get him out of the basement and secure a front-of-house position. All of it was for their future together.

Eventually Jun-Jun’s wait was over. She stepped onto a plane for the very first time, clutching a handbag that contained her papers, her passport (complete with her new name, “June Leung,” chosen by her husband), and, carefully folded between sheets of tissue paper, an embroidered picture she’d bought of two cranes perched on a treetop that symbolized matrimonial happiness.

“That wall,” says June, pointing to the fat strip of road between two rows of houses that abruptly stops at a brick wall. “It’s blocking the chi.”

“Chi is important,” says her husband, scratching his chin. “What if we sneak back here tonight and knock it down?”

“Very funny.”

“This will be good for us,” assures her husband. He gently pats her belly. “For all of us.”

June discovers that she doesn’t like to eat alone in this country. Stanley is at the restaurant most evenings, and although she tries to wait for him, being pregnant makes keen demands on her appetite. She’s still getting used to their new cul-de-sac home; the quiet doesn’t really agree with her. Eating her dinner in the silent, too-bright kitchen, she becomes almost wistful for their first home: a cramped, one-bedroom flat in the High Street. The noise of the street and the smell of grease from the chip shop downstairs had made it easier to pretend she was back in Kowloon City, with its maze of neon ladders and the reassurance of dense, close-moving bodies.

On such evenings, June paces through the rooms of their new home, trying to reconcile herself to the previous tenants’ taste. They’ve left a few pieces of furniture, most notably the wide, fifties-style drinks cabinet that she envisions as a possible shoe closet. Mostly, though, it’s a virgin shell: rickety window frames that bone-rattle through the night; dark, grubby wallpaper the color of dry lichen; and a peeling orange slab of a front door with a knobby glass pane that tells you if someone is hovering behind it.

ENGLAND, 1983