He was forced to attend Governor Sakai’s speech at the Peninsula Hotel, where Sakai told 133 prominent Chinese, who had been rounded up just like Old Mah, that his quarrel had never been with the Chinese people, and that his objective was “co-prosperity for all the races of Great East Asia.” The men were encouraged to slough off their European masters who, Sakai said, had used Chinese volunteers, as well as Canadian and Indian battalions, on the front lines in order to preserve their own lives. He invited the business leaders to form a committee to assist the new pro-Asian government in bringing about a new prosperous peace. Of course, it was not actually an invitation. Anyone who did not comply would be interned and executed. Old Mah had no choice.

It wasn’t a good time for him. He wasn’t a traitor. How could he be, since Hong Kong was not a nation? We were a new people—a people who had followed the malaria, cholera, dysentery, and ghosts out of the stagnant swamp that Happy Valley became after rice growing was banned. We weren’t British, we weren’t Japanese, and we certainly weren’t the kind of pan-Asian that Governor Sakai dreamt of. We remained Chinese, but Chinese on a path of our own, different from the Chinese of mainland China, who crossed one set of thresholds while we crossed another.

Don’t you read your history books, Feelie? Nations themselves have not been around for very long. Britain only had a nation because it had an empire; it had the likes of us, who didn’t have a nation to prove to them that they did. And Japan and China soaked the land in blood trying to forge nations of their own. It wasn’t that there were no national ideals to be loyal to, it was more that there were too many incomplete ones, all of which looked wonderful on the surface but none of which looked good when you dug deeper. You could be pro-democracy, but the possibility of being pro-democracy without being pro-British and therefore in favour of European colonialism, was not yet available. You could be pan-Asian and anti-colonial, but then you’d find yourself supporting Japanese fascism. You could be a Chinese Nationalist, but the Kuomintang leadership was notoriously corrupt and actively employed Nazi Brownshirts to train its own Blueshirts. You could be pro-Communist like Captain Lee and Kwan Siu-Wai, which, in those days, was probably the most noble option, but look at how many millions of people were murdered by the Communists later in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution! In the moment, we had no nation, so there was nothing for Old Mah to betray. Old Mah did not want to work for the government that had violated his daughter, but he did what was pragmatic because pragmatism was all he had.