Are you shocked, Feelie? That men would blame women for their own violation? That’s how men thought in those days. That women were an extension of the nation to which they belonged, to be held up or torn down, depending on which side you were on. Once a woman had had relations with a man from the other side, voluntarily or not, she became a traitor. Their feelings were complicated by the fact that we had no nation and two nations: we were British and not British, we were Chinese and not Chinese. This only it made it worse for them. Because both England and China wanted loyalty from them without expecting such loyalty to be singular or deep, Hong Kong men had to assert the tentative loyalties they felt harder than they would have had they felt secure in their commitments. Treated all their lives as second-class subjects by the British, in a city where some Chinese people had gone over to the Japanese side as fifth columnists against British imperialism, they had to convince themselves that they never would join that Asian nation that now murdered Chinese people with such cruelty and impunity. The slightest intimation that they might, brought on by sexual relations between a Japanese soldier and a woman close to them, however involuntary, sent them into paroxysms of shame. This shame that they felt was unbearable. It wasn’t rational. It went straight to the heart of the hate that war creates. It doesn’t excuse what they did, though. Not in any way.

Would you like a baked tapioca pudding to calm your nerves? It’s custardy on top and has red bean paste at the bottom. Remember how I didn’t want to tell you this story? Most old ladies would refuse outright. But I can see that your psyche is different from mine. You need the truth to move on. Whereas my generation thought it was healthier to forget. We think that the worse the events that befall you, the more deeply you ought to bury them, so as not to burden the next generation. We are a people who love our children! I hope I haven’t hurt you by telling you this story. Maybe my old form three teacher was right: silence is golden.

Well, everybody lived at the furthest extreme of their worst selves in those days. Okay, maybe not everybody. But during the war, if a person carried ghosts, those ghosts were likely to wake whether the person actively chose to disturb them or not. You could say the war brought to the surface the histories of suffering that they were already carrying. Remember, our forebears lived through enough displacement and violence to make your head spin—the Qing clearances, the Taiping Rebellion, the Red Turban Rebellion, the Punti–Hakka Clan Wars, where neighbour attacked neighbour and unspeakable things were done to women and children.