Xiongmin says, as if he has been holding this in a long time, “Gaolan tells me you knew Lifeng.”

“In a way.”

“Family?”

“My mother.”

Xiongmin nods, absorbing this. Henry shows him the photograph, and he smiles, “Yes, she was so proud of her rifle, and rightfully so; she was one of our sharpest shooters.”

“She sent it to us. Letters too.”

“I knew she was doing something like that, but I chose not to notice. Why make trouble? She missed you terribly, you and your sister. I could tell, even though she hardly mentioned you. We weren’t supposed to think about our old lives. I wasn’t jealous, we all had things in our past. I loved her too, you see.”

Henry looks at him, uncertain what he means. Xiongmin is wiry, light on his feet. Even though he must be past seventy, his hair is still quite thick, and mostly black.

“We didn’t get married in the jungle. It was too bourgeois, part of the old society. But I was her lover. That’s what we called it. I knew about her other family—you—but that didn’t matter. We had a daughter of our own. I was with Lifeng until she died.”

“That was in—”

“1975. Something was growing inside her.”

“Cancer?”

“I suppose you’d call it that now. We didn’t know very much. The medicine we had cured most things, but she was too sick.”

“Couldn’t you have taken her to a doctor?”

“We have medics here. They tried everything, cut her open more than once, but she kept getting worse, losing weight. Like she was being emptied from the inside.”

“A hospital, then?”

“We couldn’t bring her out—it was too dangerous. She didn’t want to die in prison. Back then, there were amnesties from time to time—the army dropped safe-passage papers from helicopters, and if you held one of those, they wouldn’t shoot you, and the police wouldn’t dare arrest you. Special Branch took you in, even gave you a new identity, kept you safe from reprisals. More and more people did that, just to get out. But Lifeng had actually killed someone, you see, and that was the one thing that couldn’t be forgiven. If you surrendered, everything else would be forgotten,
but not—”

“Not murder.”

“It wasn’t murder. We were at war.”

Henry says nothing. No point arguing. Xiongmin’s old, he thinks, and I’ll be old soon. A few more decades in this world, at most. Just finish this story, and carry on. This place isn’t a museum, it’s a memorial. Poor Siew Li. Did she really think she could change the world? In the end, it comes down to this—a dying village with nothing to offer but the past. Would she have been glad, if she’d lived to see this?

He isn’t even that surprised about the killing—why would he be? He knew what that rifle was for. And the thought of his mother dying alone in the jungle—no, not alone, she had this man, and she had—