But just because no one asked me what I wanted doesn’t mean I didn’t know. I knew, and I knew very well. I wanted what I wanted, and what I wanted was love. And lucky for me, unlike other pretty Chinese women before me, it was a time when Chinese women could want, and Chinese women could love. A little secretly, a little shamefully, but they could. It was the Dirty Thirties, the Nanking decade, when republicanism was alive and well in China, everyone was full of hope for real freedom, Shanghai was still roaring, and here in the British Crown colony of Hong Kong, though Chinese and British people lived quite separate lives, everybody was fashionable and everybody had a club and a hobby—tennis, cricket, Cantonese opera, mah-jong, dancing. Me, I loved all of those things, sports and the men who played them—tennis especially, though cricket was all right too. Unlike my father, who clung to everything Chinese in spite of how Western he already was, I embraced Western things. But I loved Chinese things too—the Cantonese opera with its moon-gazing maidens, its slender scholars, its just magistrates, and its angry warlords. I loved the stylized high-pitched voices, the red, white, and black makeup, the all-male casts, and the brightly coloured Imperial-style clothes. I fell in love with the men who played the female roles—many young women did in those days, though you weren’t supposed to talk about it. I loved to eat melon seeds, sip oolong tea, and play mah-jong late into the night too. I loved the clacking tiles, the gossip, the old ladies who knew about the most shocking scandals, the pretty young things who would sit for a round or two before losing patience and slipping away to dance the lindy hop, the quiet husbands of the gossiping ladies who played reluctantly to make up the necessary group of four after the young things had slipped away. I was one of those pretty young things. I loved to dance more than anything else in this sad and fleeting world. I loved to dance, and I loved to sing. I especially loved to dance at the Repulse Bay Hotel to the music of Nick Korin and His Swing Band. I loved the gala nights, the tea dances, and the dinner concerts at the Gripps in the Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotel, and the Rose Room at the grand Peninsula. I loved the tiffin concerts, too, put on by George Pio-Ulski and His Classical Quintette, where they’d play highbrow stuff like Weber’s Oberon, Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in D minor, and European popular music like Ralph Benatzky’s “Mein Mädel ist nur eine Verkäuferin.” Later, when the war got going in China, I loved the charity balls and fundraisers for the Far East Flying Training School, the British Prisoners of War Fund, and the Free Schools for Boy and Girl Refugees. Yes, I knew there were big arguments, small skirmishes, and then eventually a real war that unfolded in China. I knew, and I tried not to think about it. I was young, okay? I wanted to love and have fun while I could. Because it would have been unseemly to go alone, I dragged my poor sister Violet around everywhere I went, though she wasn’t much fun. She was so ugly that no one would ask her to dance. She’d find the darkest corner she could to sit by herself until it was all over. I longed for better company, and better guidance.