It had been several hours already since the British surrender, but the Japanese Imperial Army was too busy looting and pillaging to bother to claim the cricket club. Cheung suspected they wouldn’t be long, though. The Hong Kong Cricket Club was an emblem of British colonial presence, and the Japanese Imperial Army would want to show Asian mastery soon. His diligent and careful stewardship wouldn’t count for much.

Yan rushed past him up the stairs to render the foyer spotless.

Cheung took the crabs to his old domain, the kitchen. Tin-Lok, Lee’s nephew from Chek Keng and Cheung’s assistant of eleven months, had slipped away again. Cheung didn’t know where and wouldn’t ask. In their battered rattan cages, the crabs wriggled. The reddish black tips of their claws caught the artificial fluorescent light of the kitchen. There was no point letting the creatures suffer, and there was no point wasting food. Cheung filled a large pot with water. Though the gas lines were cut, he’d had the foresight to purchase a couple of portable kerosene burners before the invasion. He lit one now. He got onions from the icebox and started chopping. When the water came to a boil, he opened a basket and picked up the first writhing creature. Dropped it into the boiling water and attended to its silent scream.

CHAPTER 26ST STEPHEN’S COLLEGE

December 25, 1941

I was tending a man who had been bayonetted in the belly on Christmas Day, 1941, the day the Japanese Imperial Army took the city. I was a volunteer at St Stephen’s College, which had been converted into a field hospital. Emily was with me on the same ward, working as a nurse. There were about twenty doctors and nurses working there—British, Canadian, and Chinese—caring for the wounded and dying. The sound of gunfire had been steady outside the windows for the last two days. Bombs periodically exploded, far away at first, then closer and closer as the battle wore on. My nerves were frayed, but like all the other medical staff at the college I kept going out of necessity.

The man I was tending was a soldier in a plain British Army uniform, with an embroidered patch on the shoulder that said CANADA. When I first saw him, his teeth were gritted bravely, but his eyes streamed tears. I could tell he was in a lot of pain. Who would not be, gashed in the gut like that? I gave him a morphine injection. Once he’d relaxed a bit, I noticed that his face was a bit like mine. How odd.