I stay in the supply closet for an hour, two hours, three. I stay in the closet for a year, a decade, a century. I will never leave this closet. The closet is full of packages. I take inventory in an attempt to neither see nor hear: field dressings, shell dressings, morphine tartrate, morphine syrettes, tubunic ampoules, anti-tetanus serum, anti-gangrene serum, needles, iodine swabs, adhesive tape, eye dressings, tourniquets, linen ligature thread, scissors, safety pins, boric acid ointment, Dettol, cotton wool, instrument rolls, and tablet tins. At the start of each shift, the doctors and nurses hang their civilian clothes on hooks along the wall, and put on scrubs. Here’s Doctor Wong’s overcoat. Here’s Nurse Petrov’s pretty scarf. Doctor Oliviera’s belt is very worn. The floral pattern on Nurse Eagleton’s blouse is too busy for my taste. Nurse Chan’s simple dress is exquisitely cut. My mother was a seamstress before she died. Not out of necessity, but she liked to make her own cheung sams. She’d used to take me with her to the fabric shop to choose cottons for summer, silks for winter. The shopkeeper, a handsome Chinese man who wore Western suits and put Brylcreem in his hair loved my mother, would keep her chatting as long as possible. Have you eaten rice yet? How is your sister in Guangzhou? I think the monsoon rains will come early this year.

I stay in the closet. The century flows by.

I try to remember more of the things the Brylcreem man said to my mother. All the fashionable ladies in Shanghai are wearing two-toned silk this year. Organza is cool in summer. Have you seen the new rayon fabrics, strong and delicate as silk but much cheaper?

She’d used to make our clothes herself, but later, after she got sick, she started sending us to the tailor. I think about all the little backstreet shops. We chose one that had piles of fashion books from England, France, and America to study. There were so many lovely drawings of ladies in cloche hats, coats in elegant grey or flashy green and black with fur collars. There were ladies in drop-waisted dresses. They wore pointy-toed shoes with straps across the tops of their feet and mink stoles draped over their shoulders. They pointed discreetly at the ground in kid leather gloves.

There was a book on ribbon art that Emily particularly loved. It showed all the things you could make with ribbon: elaborate hat decorations that looked like fans or cummerbunds, elaborate bows to decorate babies’ blankets or baskets, garters in frilly pink and black or ruched blue and tan, decorations for negligees to make them seem longer and more fluttery than they already were, lampshades and flowery wall hangings, headbands decorated with leaves and flowers that were all the rage when we were girls.