I have received a call from a relative who is very sick, and I must visit her at once. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Please don’t worry about me. I’ll be in touch.

Please take care of yourself,

Your mother

Don’t call the police, Son, she thought, And don’t worry about me. Once things were more settled, she would write again. She thought he wouldn’t approve of her making her own arrangements in this way, and might even feel as if he’d let her down. But she felt it was the right decision; in the long run, her daughterin-law would be happier, which meant that her son had a chance of being happier.

That first week, Kitty was a constant presence, bringing with her visitors such as Brother Shek, a construction worker. He lined Granny Ng’s tent with mesh sheets that he assured her would protect her from bugs and damp. Brother Shek’s wife gave her acupressure massages for her aching back, while a young woman called Miss Kwan came by to donate a pair of gloves.

Uncle Chow explained how the village worked: the timetable for communal meals, the mail system, the procedures for submitting suggestions and complaints and so on. Meanwhile, Kitty showed her where to go for drinking water and washing facilities. Her favorite spots were the public bathrooms near the British Council, which tended to be the cleanest, but she warned her not to go there after dark. She showed her spots around town where she could collect cans and bottles for recycling, the best underpasses from which to hawk goods without being bothered by police, and the best flyovers from which to beg—or as they liked to call it, “ask for donations.”

At first, Granny Ng did not sleep well in her new environment. She didn’t mind the ground, which was not much harder than her previous bed, or the smallness of the space, though it would have been nice to be able to stand up instead of crawling and stooping all the time. What bothered her were the noises, which seemed to go on all night through to the morning: fellow tent dwellers chatting and cooking, voices and songs from their radios, teenagers’ yells and screams floating over from the other side of the park. Traffic never seemed to stop, either, the roar of engines and horns constant through the night; she wondered where these people were driving to under the cover of darkness, and when they planned to catch up on the sleep they were losing. She found she was stiffer than usual. In the mornings, it took about half an hour of stretching and walking about before she felt normal again.