When they were newly married and acquaintances asked how they’d met, Siew Li and Jason would smile and say something non-committal about being at the same school event many years back. How fortunate, with her from a Chinese-speaking background and him virtually monolingual in the Queen’s English; they inhabited such different worlds that if not for this one chance meeting, they might have gone their whole lives without encountering each other. What a loss that would have been, Jason would say, his hand possessively over his wife’s. After the children were born, they discussed how much to tell them, but with no real urgency. The story would work itself out.

Later still, after all that was over, Siew Li had a lot of time to think about that meeting. About how much of her life, for all that it seemed chosen, had been determined by single moments of chance. If she’d stood in a different spot that day, Jason would never have seen her. If she’d gone home early like her mum had told her, Lina would never have spoken to her. And what would have happened to her life then? The Party told her that society would have to break free of its chains, that man’s enslavement of man would inevitably have to end. Yet deep down, she didn’t understand how they could be that certain about anything, when so much came down to happenstance.

Towards the end of her life, she wrote these thoughts down in rambling letters, sometimes on paper, sometimes only in her head, addressed to both her children. The beginning was always the same: I hope you are healthy, I hope you are safe, I hope you have not been taught to hate me. Even if you have, try to understand. I made the decisions that seemed right, though at the time it didn’t feel like there were decisions to be made, that there was only ever one course of action. I must write in Chinese. If you ever see these words, would you even
understand them?

Just before their 15th birthday, which she wouldn’t live to see, she told them again about that first conversation with Lina. They’d heard this before, if they were getting these messages, but she wanted them to think about where they were now, at this age, and where she had been then. Perhaps that would help them to understand. Or perhaps not—and perhaps that was better. Part of her hoped they were doing so well, that they would never be able to see the world through her eyes.