“Hold my hand, ViVi,” she said. “And tell me a story until I fall asleep.”

I started telling her a story about when our mother was alive and we went to Tiger Balm Gardens and had our photo taken in front of the tall pagoda. Our mother wore a bright yellow cheung sam with orange fish on it, and Emily had on a child’s version in the same fabric. She’d loved that dress, had worn it until she hit a growth spurt and popped the seams. I’d never liked to wear dresses. But I’d worn an outfit that I was fond of that day as well, a sailor suit with shorts that I had whined and pleaded with my mother to make. As we walked through the gardens, all the statues of gods and goddesses and the magic birds and fish seemed to admire us and speak to us. We met the Tiger Balm prince Aw Boon Haw himself, just in the process of setting up an orphanage for children less fortunate than us. We didn’t know then that Mother would die of TB, or that Father, on his way to jail for the poisoning of Grandfather Cheung, would consider sending us to Aw Boon Haw’s orphanage. We only escaped that fate because Dream Horse White, the anti-opium pills he invented after marrying Second Mother Polly, made Father a fortune, which allowed him to keep the Stable, as well as the services of Amah, Driver Lim, and Auntie Lim. My story devolved into a contemplation of the range of possible fates Emily and I could have lived out. If Mother had not died, if Old Cheung’s father had not died from the Immortal Carp pills, if British forensics had not traced his death back to our product, if the Immortal Carp pills did actually bestow immortality, if the Japanese had invaded Singapore but not Hong Kong, if Chiang Kai-Shek had sided with the Japanese instead of the Communists as he’d originally planned, if the KMT-Communist alliance were able to drive the Japanese out, if the Japanese were actually as benevolent as they’d pretended to be before the war, if there were no war in Asia, if the British had lost the Opium War in the nineteenth century, if Mongols had never invaded in the thirteenth century, if the Song had never fallen to them, or even better, if the Tang had never fallen in the tenth century. My mind reeled with the possibilities of the present we might have inhabited, and with the future that might have come. But then, if anyone had inherited the beauty of the Tang and carried it into the present, it was the Japanese who occupied us now. Though we were most certainly not experiencing anything of Tang beauty. Thankfully, Emily was asleep by the time I began to speak of such things.