“Nearly midnight already?” says Great-Aunt Violet. “We missed the entire handover ceremony.”

“I forgot all about it,” says Ophelia. “What happened to Courchene and Grandma Emily?”

“You want that soup?” says the grumpy server. “It’s green bean with seaweed. Very cooling.”

“Ho ah, ho ah,” says Great-Aunt Violet. “Yes, please. We will eat it and then get out of your hair.”

The tapioca pudding was hours ago, and Ophelia finds that she does in fact have stomach space. “What happened to Old Mah? And was that really how Cheung died? What happened to Tak-Wing? Is Auntie Macy really such a great businesswoman? Where is Uncle Raymond now?”

Courchene stayed in the village through to the end of the war to be with Emily. We survived the American air raids together, and helped countless escapees and refugees flee to Free China. The person who could write Cree syllabics and who worked with Izzy Davis Wong turned out to be Courchene’s cousin, Philip Courchene, who had been in the Winnipeg Grenadiers with him. They weren’t a full Cree code-talking unit, but they routinely sent notes to their colleague on Hong Kong Island, in support of work done by the East River Column and the British Army Aid Group. But after the war, when Courchene learned his mother was dying of tuberculosis back in Saint-Boniface, he went home to see her one last time. He promised to come back. But once he was home, Hong Kong became a distant and almost unbelievable memory. He wrote Emily a long, sad letter saying he’d changed his mind. She cried a lot.

Shortly after that, Tak-Wing began to visit Chek Keng. At first, we tried to drive him off. But he kept coming—every weekend through 1948, even if we never let his boat dock at all. After a few years, we let him land. He seemed his old self again. The war-madness had left him, and it was clear that he missed Emily. He begged her to come back.

He kept saying to her, “I want to have a family, Em. I want to have that family with you, and no one else.” He brought her gifts—cases of Awakening Lion brand aerated lemonade, a radio, a new cheung sam.

“I will never come back to you, ever,” she said. “You tried to kill me. You tried to kill your own son.”

“I wasn’t well,” he said. “I was beside myself.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I could never trust you again. How could you ever imagine that I might?”

“I don’t expect it,” he said. “But we aren’t young anymore. Who else will want either of us?”

She still held out hope that Courchene would come back, though she didn’t tell Tak-Wing that. She wrote songs to will him back, and sang them to Raymond as she dressed the little boy and combed his hair.