‘Yes,’ said Ah Fatt. ‘Through Father. His Elder Wife is Seth’s daughter. For a long time even I did not know …’

Ah Fatt was almost at the end of his boyhood when he found out that he had connections, relatives, in faraway Bombay. As a child he had been told that he was an orphan, that his mother and father had died when he was a newborn, and that he was being brought up by his widowed Eldest Aunt – his Yee Ma. This was the story that was told to everyone who knew them, on the Canton waterfront and in Fanqui-town. There was nothing about Ah Fatt’s looks to betray his paternity, not even his complexion, a sun-weathered tint being not uncommon among boat-people. Growing up, he did not think of his family as being different from the others around him, except in one respect, which was that they had a rich benefactor, ‘Uncle Barry’, a ‘White-Hat-Alien’ from India, who happened to be his godfather, his ‘kai-yeh’. Uncle Barry had been his father’s employer, he was told; after his parents’ death he had felt a great obligation to their orphaned child; this was why he gave Yee Ma money for his upkeep, and brought presents for him from India, and paid for his teachers and tutors.

Yee Ma did not encourage Uncle Barry’s ambitions for the boy: nor did she approve of spending so much money on such things. To arrange schooling for a boat-child was no easy matter and Uncle Barry had to pay generously to organize it: he wanted the boy to be literate in Classical Chinese as well as schoolroom English; he wanted him to grow up ‘respectable’, to become a gentil-man, who would be able to move easily with the merchants of Fanqui-town, impressing them with his sporting talents as well as his knowledge. Yee Ma could not see the point of all this: she would have preferred that Uncle Barry give her the money and leave the boy alone. What use was calligraphy to him when boat-people were banned by law from sitting for the Civil Service examinations? What was he to do with boxing and riding lessons when boat-people were barred even from building houses ashore? She wanted him to grow up like any boat-child, learning to fish and sail and handle boats.

Yet, in her dreams, if not in her waking state, Yee Ma must have accepted that he was not really a boat-child for she often had nightmares in which the boy was attacked by a dragon-fish – a sturgeon. As a result she would not let him in the water.

Like other boat-children Ah Fatt grew up with a bell attached to his ankle, so his family could always keep track of him; like them he had to sit in a barrel when the boat was moving; like them, he had a wooden board tied to his back, so that he would float if he fell in. But the other children lost their boards and bells when they were two or three – Ah Fatt’s stayed on till long afterwards, making him a target of mockery. On the Canton waterfront little boys would earn money by diving in the river to amuse the Aliens, fishing out the coins and trinkets they threw in the water. Ah Fatt too wanted to do these things, to swim with the boat-children, to dive and earn coins – but to him alone, these things were strictly forbidden because of the spectre of the lurking dragon-fish.