I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. I was meant to put two and two together. I thought about my great-grandfather, the taipan Henry Witt-Weatherall, who had made a great fortune for his paler descendants by selling opium to China, even after the drug was outlawed. My father told me once that the local fisher people used to help bring the opium ashore. It would make sense that Ting-Yan’s family were among those fisher people. Maybe even back before the Opium Wars. I thought about the name of this boat, the Oolong, and how smugglers would use rice, and sometimes tea, as a cover for their smuggling and also to make additional profits. Of course, it wasn’t legal. All of us South Chinese fell between the lines of the law and lived our lives out there. I thought of how the Japanese, the British, the KMT, and probably the Communists too, all used the junks, tang tsai, and sampans for their own purposes: landing troops, smuggling arms, drowning refugees, escaping POW camps. The boat people had their own interests too, of course, to which others could be instrumental or detrimental. All through the occupation, there had been tales of widespread looting. Why not? Who did the local people really have to be loyal to? Me, I felt some loyalty to the British, because, working with Selwyn-Clarke, I could see how he risked his life to help the wounded, the sick, and the starving, and I admired that. But I didn’t blame those who weren’t loyal. The British, after all, had commandeered this colony in the interests of their own wealth, against the interests of Chinese people here and on the mainland. All that opium. The anti-opium pills my father made were just opium in disguise, so my well-being came from it also. But it did bring people pleasure. It relieved pain. Once, opium-smoking had been the pastime of cultured, gentle folk. Now, coolies and ordinary workers smoked my father’s Dream Horse pills so their backs would hurt less. What was so wrong with that? I thought of all the coolies who made this once and future colony run, their strong backs twisted by the long poles they balanced over one shoulder or the other, carrying baskets or buckets of anything from vegetables to live chickens to rocks to night soil. Father used to say that any coolie who lived past forty must be superhuman.

“Give us a hand, will you?” shouted Captain Lee.

I snapped out of my reverie. Tanaka, Horace, and Courchene were helping Lee and Ting-Yan pull a laden net out of the water.

“No food shortages in the ocean,” Horace muttered.

I rushed over to help. The net was full of fat, flapping fish.

Ting-Yan lifted the floorboards of the boat to reveal a spacious hold. It smelled of salt and stale water. We poured the fish into it.