I don’t know if there was ever a man as helpless as Cheung Tak-Wing. His wife was raped by the invading Japanese. His younger brother was tortured and murdered by them. His wife loved another man—not a Japanese soldier, thank God, but a Canadian one. He had a child who might be his, or might be the child of the raping invader. After Colonel Noma’s gruesome parade of women, Tak-Wing lost his last scrap of conviction that Raymond Duk-Ming was his and began to call him Raymond Kennosuke. To me, Tak-Wing was first and foremost the unrepentant batterer of my spirited and beautiful sister, the woman he’d sworn three times in three different ways to love and cherish. What made it all so sad was that the sweet and charming boy my sister had married was still under there, somewhere. That boy had brought Emily to St Paul’s so that Courchene and I could deliver her baby. But the monster within had quickly overtaken him. I pitied the sweet boy, but I hated the monster. I had to put Emily before the drowning boy, however sad he might be under his demonic shell. At that age, in that complicated time, I wouldn’t have known how to help him anyway.

I worried about Emily staying with Tak-Wing at the Tai Hang house as she nursed little Raymond Duk-Ming, innocent of the sins of his father, whoever that might be. But the needs of the city were also terrible and great. I did my rounds of the doorways and gutters, the hotels and POW camps, administered the meagre medicines we had, the inadequate care we were able to dispense. I saw horrors I can’t tell you about, because Professor Duffy encouraged me to push them out of my mind. She said my own psychological well-being was at stake. Because I didn’t think about them, I forgot them. I became an automaton for the revolution yet to come, the one that might free my people from a suffering so deep I could not afford to fully see it. Had the people I helped done worse things than my beastly brother-in-law? I didn’t know that they hadn’t. The misery of this poor city was so deep that surely some of the men must have beaten their wives. But I didn’t know about it, and I didn’t know about any of the other things they had or hadn’t done before I came upon them in the ditches, and so I didn’t think about it. They were still human. That meant that Tak-Wing was still human too.