And yet, she fascinated him. He wanted to know more, not just about her, but about everything. Even at that age, he was aware the world only made sense if he looked away from most of it. At school, history was a straightforward pageant of progress with a few unfortunate aberrations. But then there was Siew Li, who called his parents capitalists as if that were a bad thing, who looked down on their successful business precisely because of its success. Why should so many people be working, but only they get rich? He had no answer for her. But he wanted to find out.

His curiosity was how they had met in the first place. The newspapers had been full of this riot at the bus company, and on the radio it sounded like an apocalypse. This had been going on for a while, Chinese middle school students joining forces with labour unions to hold the country hostage. He thought it was important to see this historical moment for himself—though, if he was honest, he just found it exciting—but anyway there he was, on Alexandra Road, the heat and energy of the protest searing through the order of his life. And there she was, a man’s handkerchief folded double and slung rakishly across her face, like she was a bandit. A banner in her hands—Marianne, brandishing a flag. On impulse he said hello.

She lifted the fabric from her face and he saw her firm jaw, her small teeth. He tried to talk to her in halting Chinese, until she took pity on him and they switched to English, which she clearly wasn’t fluent in, but somehow managed to make expressively her own. He felt a flicker of shame, and wondered why. Amongst his peers, it was a source of pride not to speak Chinese, a foreign language. English was the future. His friends mocked the Chinese school students, still clinging to the language of the old country, talking about “going back” to China when they’d been born here, listening to Yao Lee instead of Perry Como. And here he was, listening patiently as she explained the banner she was holding. “Gaicao huandai. Haven’t you heard this before? It means change the time and, what do you call it, the Emperor.”

“We don’t have an Emperor.”

“You know what I mean. The zhimin.”

“The what?”

“The ang moh. Those people.”

“The British? You mean the government?”

“Yes, government.” She pronounced it gahmen. “We
need change.”

“Isn’t this protest about bus workers unions?”

“How can you just change one thing? Everything is
not working.”

They kept going for a while, him tossing statistics and facts against the wall of her indignation, but she was already looking distracted, eyeing the nearby police, pulling the handkerchief back across her face. He didn’t want to talk politics with her, he thought, or not just politics. He wanted to know what else was happening behind those flinty eyes.