Cheung did not want to offer the trophy of his mother’s ashes in the fine English china soup tureen to the winning team. Of course, it was better than having his mother’s body thrown to the dogs, but it was hardly dignified. Then Noma appeared beside him. “You have to heed the call of duty,” he said, in perfect Cantonese. “None of us likes what we have to do, but we don’t always have a choice.”

Afterwards, the victors shouted, “Huzzah!” Everyone laughed and chatted and shouted some more. Everyone expected tea and cucumber sandwiches.

Noma scowled. “The game might be over but the party is not. Bring on the dancing horses.”

He gave a signal, and Emily Mah Wai-Yee walked out onto the green, followed by a parade of Chinese women all carrying babies, which begin to wail in unison. The spectators in the stands collectively inhaled, so loud it was audible above the crying. The women kept coming. There were twenty, then fifty, then a hundred. Still they came. More than a thousand women poured onto the green, each one holding a newborn child in her arms. None of them looked happy. All were pale and grim-faced, their eyes without light. And yet still they came, until there was not a spare inch of cricket green for the women to stand on, and they had to stand on the road. Chinese women with Japanese babies, every woman the subject of rape. Unit 731 in Manchuria could not have done better.

“This!” shouted Noma. “This is the true prize! I give you the mothers and the children of the New Asia!”

Tak-Wing, standing with the young cricketers, stuck his hands in his pockets and clenched his teeth.

Cheung flushed with the incandescent twin emotions of rage and humiliation.

“How do you like that, Cheung?” said Noma in English. “Huh? Your first-born grandson, a child of the new empire. You are free from those barmy British bastards at last.”

CHAPTER 42THIS FISH

September 20, 1942

How many times can a fish be eaten before it ceases to exist? Surely only once. You can only catch it once. You can only kill it once. You can only season and fry it once. You can only serve it once.

Even a fried fish is better off than me, used and reused in every way one might imagine, for what I look like, what I’m worth, what I desire, how I feel, what I can do with my body, what I represent, what I can say, what I can sing, how I can dance, who I can love, what I can bear, what my biology can bear, how I can reproduce, what my reproduction signifies, what it means to different people, how I can be punished for being one thing to one person and something entirely different to someone else.