Later, at home on my own, I wondered if that had been the right thing to say. Though, in our family, the brunt of the Japanese Imperial Army’s hatred for us Hong Kong Chinese had fallen on Emily, we had all been soiled by the Japanese soldiers. I remembered something else I’d heard shouted in English as I hid in that supply closet. “We’ll stop raping Chinese women when Hong Kong stops supporting the British and joins the Asian brotherhood. Who is so stupid as to use their women to protect their colonizer?” I had never loved the British, but I didn’t hate them either. They had never used us as this infernal Japanese army was using us. It was hard to understand what to want, politically, and I had the benefit of my HKU education. No wonder Tak-Wing, once so beloved and so sweet, was confused. But it was impossible to think of him now as sweet. It was impossible to love him. Humiliation had descended upon him through the body of his wife, and he had become a monster, while Emily and other Hong Kong Chinese women like her were forced to absorb without acknowledgment or recompense Japanese disdain, British indifference-turned-helplessness, and the Confucian despair and self-loathing of Hong Kong Chinese men like Tak-Wing. Maybe I should try to drag Emily back here to Old Mah’s house before it really was too late.

The next day, I went back to the Tai Hang house to get Emily. Despite her black eye and her pregnant belly, she still wanted to go to St Paul’s, the French hospital, to help Dr Selwyn-Clarke. The car had been confiscated by the Japanese and sent to Japan to support their war effort, and Driver and Auntie Lim had fled in the first days of the occupation, so I went to the house on foot, and we took a streetcar from there.

Dr Selwyn-Clarke, chief medical officer of Hong Kong, had been permitted by Colonel Eguchi to keep running medical services for the city. Eguchi was a civilian administrator, not military police like Noma. He had known Selwyn-Clarke before the war and respected him. He knew, too, that if no one took responsibility for public health, Japanese soldiers and civilians would die of diphtheria and dysentery along with the general population.