“Yes,” says Xiongmin. “You mustn’t think it was just fighting all the time. We went amongst the Thai people, you know, helped them with their weeding and housework, sorting out domestic issues. The Thai police knew we were here, but they didn’t do anything. Everyone trusted us. When we told them we were leaving, some of them held onto us and cried, but we had to go. The struggle was over.”

They walk on a bit farther, in silence. The exhibition is amateurishly designed, the grammar imperfect in both English and Chinese. They have obviously done it all themselves, with no outside help. Four decades of fighting, and this is the only residue. There are newspaper articles too, including Revathi’s famous one in the Herald. Xiongmin points at it with some pride. “That’s my mother,” he says, “That’s her, in the photo. I didn’t see that till years later, but I was happy to have that. I never saw her again.” He says it without loss, as a fact. Henry thinks of mentioning that he knows the journalist, but what for? Another meaningless point of connection.

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?”