When she declared her intention to marry Cheung Tak-Wing, the handsome cricket-playing son of the Hong Kong Cricket Club’s head cook, I became very worried. Our father had one enemy in this world, and that was Head Cook Cheung, because Head Cook Cheung was the son of the man from Wong Nai Chung Village who died of opium poisoning after smoking our Immortal Carp. My usually kind, solemn father was mad as hell. “The damn English!” he said. “They take care of their own and don’t give two hoots about any Chinese, even if what we do is no different from what they do.” We were at the Kimblewick at Second Mother Polly’s urging, and both of us were terrified. We almost never visited Father in his private abode, that glossy European house with its arched gateway and wide verandas. The interior was decorated in an elegant but austere Chinese style. And of all its rooms, his office, in which we visited him, was the most elegant and austere. He sat behind an ornately carved desk on a throne of hard rosewood.

“Cheung is also Chinese,” Emily squeaked.

“Yes, but he’s one of their Chinese. A servant, a lackey, without nerve or enterprising spirit.” Behind him, traditional Chinese paintings of his esteemed mother and father gazed at us with disapproval.

“You don’t know that,” Emily said, finding her nerve. “Cheung is a man from the villages. His prospects were always limited. He’s worked hard and done well for himself.”

“That’s my other objection,” said Father. “Of course, I want you to marry for love, but must you love beneath your station?”

“That’s not the way love works, Father,” said Emily, in a soft but steady voice. “Love doesn’t know class. Besides, you have no idea what Tak-Wing is capable of. He played football in the Berlin Olympics! He’s going to be someone.”

“I forbid it,” Father said. “I didn’t teach you to be free so you could shame and humiliate me.”

I interjected on Emily’s behalf. “It’s not freedom, Father, if you take it back when we decide to exercise it.”

His face was red and hot. We weren’t supposed to talk back—the fact that we did, however meekly, posed a real dilemma for him. Father struggled so hard to be a modern Chinese man, but he didn’t fully know how. He had learned how to be Chinese from his mother, because his father had wanted to do everything the English way. “Tell her,” he said to me, “tell your sister to choose anyone except that dreadful Cheung boy.”