The baby was already crawling. She had a huge head, and large round eyes like the water buffalo that ploughed the village fields. She crawled across the floor of the Oolong like a fish, on her elbows, dragging the rest of her body across the floor. As she crawled, she gurgled, delighted with her own movement and the sweet, warm stink of the village: vegetables growing in human manure, salt air, drying fish. Ting-Yan watched her with one wary eye while the other focused on the painstaking work of mending a fishing net. Out of the corner of the eye that watched the baby, Ting-Yan saw a tall tree fall in the distance, by the next village over. That was the sign that the Japanese were coming. Kowloon had fallen two weeks earlier, when the 5/7th Rajputs were forced to withdraw at Ma Yau Tong. Rumour said that Hong Kong Island itself had fallen. The Sai Kung hills had become a free-for-all, overrun by Triads, bandits, and the conquering Japanese Army all running through the territory looting and pillaging. The Nationalists, on their way to Hong Kong when it fell, might have had an advance guard in these hills. There was a Communist presence too, that some of the villagers were sympathetic to.

Ting-Yan’s cousin Ka-Wan—the one she’d borrowed the motorboat from four years earlier—came down to the dock to make sure they knew.

“Hurry, hurry! Japanese soldiers coming!” he shouted. Before she could acknowledge his words, he was halfway back up the path to the village to warn others. Ka-Wan was part of a guerrilla force that had been preparing, keeping abreast of what was happening in the city and what was needed by friends and extended family. They had a patchy network from Kowloon stretching through the New Territories and over the border through the network of roads, boats, and villages as far as Waichow. They called themselves the Hong Kong and Kowloon Independent Brigade, and distinguished themselves from the ordinary bandits who roamed the Sai Kung hills harassing anyone who passed through, and the pro-Japanese supporters of the puppet government in Nanking who functioned as a fifth column, preparing the way for the Japanese invasion. The Hong Kong and Kowloon Independent Brigade had been running a regular patrol along the perimeter of the village in light of reports that the Japanese Army was on the march through the villages.