Tanaka was devastated by the way the war ended. He had a sister in Nagasaki, who died with her husband and children in the A-bomb blast. He had been thinking of going back to Japan, but after learning about his sister’s death, he couldn’t stomach the thought. So he came back to Hong Kong Island and worked as a translator for Japanese sportsmen during the golfing craze in the 1950s. He never got rich, but he made a decent living. I think you know his daughter from one of your classes at UBC?

After the war, Mah suffered because of his involvement with the Chinese Cooperative Council. He wasn’t exactly called a traitor, but it became harder for him to make the business deals he needed to keep Dream Horse afloat. He became—what’s that word you young people use—“toxic.” No one would touch him. That’s the way it was with the less powerful among the justices of the peace who’d sat on that council. The big players got away with it because the British needed them when they came back into power. But Old Mah was not so much needed. Dream Horse, which had already lost a lot of money because of Japanese raids on the godowns at the start of the occupation, declined rapidly and he had to sell the Kimblewick.

He moved back into the Stable, and the bedroom of his dead first wife, my mother, Eunice Liu Hei-Yu. He asked me and Ting-Yan to come back to Hong Kong Island to run the business, with the understanding that as soon as Raymond was old enough, it would go to him.

We felt bad for Old Mah, and, in the end, we all went: me, Ting-Yan, Emily, Amah, Raymond, and Macy too. This was the early 1950s, around the time of the Korean War and the American embargoes that devastated the Hong Kong economy. Ting-Yan left Siu-Wai and Yim-Fong in charge of the Chek Keng house, boat, and land and came to the Stable to live with the rest of us. Siu-Wai still didn’t like being on the water, and so Yim-Fong did all fishing work that Old Lee, then later, Ting-Yan, once used to do.

Dream Horse kept losing money, and Father told Second Mother Polly he had to sell the Nest. She flatly refused, and told him to sell the Stable. Though Father let Second Mother Polly have her way in most things, he refused to sell the Stable. They had a royal row about it, but in the end, for once, Old Mah put his foot down. Second Mother Polly and her brood moved in and took over my room, while Emily, Ting-Yan, Amah, Macy, Raymond, and I crowded into Emily’s. Old Mah lived with Mother’s ghost in her old bedroom.