As the rumours and stories of the massacre at St Stephen’s and many other places all over the territory came out, he thought all the more about Emily. Though no one directly told him what had happened, he knew. He thought about revenge. Second Mother Polly told me he slept badly and smoked too much Dream Horse White in order to relax. But he also did what he had to do and bided his time, as so many of us do, even now, much to the detriment of our children and their futures, if you ask me. I wish he had fought back though. I wish they all had, those grand old men of the city. Do you suppose the tide of history might have turned if they had?

As for me, I was beside myself with a furious restlessness, a need to act. We were thwarted at every turn. My mind spun hourly from the grim contradictory position my father was in to the horrors that had befallen my sister to all the unspeakable things I myself had seen and not seen at St Stephen’s. When Dr Selwyn-Clarke asked me come work for his humanitarian mission, I jumped at the chance. I had graduated with my medical degree from HKU earlier that year, rushed through by Professor Ride and the university administration in anticipation of the likelihood that I and my fellow graduates would be called upon to do exactly this kind of work. It was how I’d ended up working at St Stephen’s on that fateful Christmas Day. And now it would give me something meaningful to occupy my mind. There would be some action I could take to mitigate my overwhelming feeling of helplessness.

Emily wanted to help too. She took every chance she could to get away from Tak-Wing, who had grown rageful and quarrelsome, perhaps suspecting what had happened to her, perhaps just full of general pent-up rage and grief like the rest of us. Courchene, trained by the Canadian Army as medic, joined us after he had recovered from his stomach wound.

The fluorescent lights at the Typhoon Shelter flicker. Great-Aunt Violet looks up at the turquoise girl. “It’s 5:20! You better get going!”

“But what happened to Emily? Was she pregnant with Uncle Raymond?”

“You’ll miss the arrival of President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng!”

“I don’t care about President Jiang Zemin and Premier Li Peng. Tell me how Emily made it through.”

CHAPTER 29STUBBORN

Undisclosed Village

New Territories

December 25, 1941

Dear Morgan,