“I used to be Ah Mui,” says Gaolan. “Can you imagine? Like a little girl. I don’t think about Ah Mui much, these days. She was a different person.”

“What happened to Lifeng?”

“She’s dead,” says Gaolan gently. “How did you know her?”

“She was a family member.” That’s all he feels capable of saying at the moment, and they let it go. This must happen a fair amount, because they don’t ask him where he got the photograph, or seem surprised that he has a picture of one of them in uniform.

“It was a long time ago,” says Gaolan. “She had a friend in the next village. I’ll take you to see him tomorrow—he can tell you more.”

•

Henry sleeps well that night. This place is high up enough in the hills for there to be no mosquitoes, and the air is eerily still. When was he last completely out of reach of traffic noises, even distant ones? Real silence. It’s unsettling. He reaches for his phone to text Janet, but there is no reception.

There is surprisingly good coffee the next morning. Gaolan serves him toast and soft-boiled eggs in a porcelain bowl, with soy sauce and white pepper on the side. “From our own chickens,” she beams. “See how yellow the yolks are? That’s how you know they’re fresh.”

Breakfast is just as delicious as last night’s dinner. There’s something appealingly simple about life here, everything pared down but of the highest quality. He knows a lot of the former Ma Gong were devastated not to be allowed back into Malaysia or Singapore, but he can also see why these people chose to stay here after the travel ban was lifted, on the land they were given. This place is monastic, stark without being austere. If I stay here too long, he thought, I’ll stop thinking about the outside world, because everything I need is right here. But this isn’t fairyland, and he can break the enchantment anytime, as he does now—taking in a lungful of sharp, fresh air, and shaking his head.

Afterwards, Gaolan offers him a lift on her scooter. They putter along the trail, heading higher into the hills so white that wisps of mist start blurring the way ahead. Should have brought a jacket or something, he thinks. He should have known—the hills were always where the British came to cool down, when they wanted weather that reminded them of home.

The road wraps around the overgrown slopes, and it’s easy to see how the Ma Gong could have stayed hidden so long, beneath the green fog of vegetation. “They sent planes out—the Thai air force,” says Gaolan when he asks, “but we always managed to avoid them. They just dropped bombs at random onto the canopy.”

She drops him off not at the next village, as he expected, but in front of a cave just outside. He looks at her askance and she waves him in. “Xiongmin works inside. You’ll see.”