Packed like rice grain fish into a tiny omelette, we were not exactly a happy family. We didn’t fight outright, but we bickered and politicked against one another. Sometimes it was Second Mother Polly and her brood against me, Ting-Yan, and Emily. Sometimes conflagrations would break out among family members living in the same room. We grew irritated and responded by doing our best to be irritating. We stole individual socks from one another to ruin the pair. We put brown vinegar in the soy sauce bottle. We cut holes in one another’s mosquito nets. When someone was upset about a lost scarf or a nasty interaction with a shopkeeper we goaded and taunted them ’til they fled the house in tears. The war of irritation escalated until we inhabited it at a frenzied pitch. It was no one’s fault and it was everyone’s fault. It was the result of falling fortunes, lack of opportunity, crowding, disappointment, and frustration. Those were not happy years.

Emily in particular suffered during those bickering years. Second Mother Polly was always kind to her, but her real feelings for Emily were expressed through her children, who stole her lipsticks and Florida water and worried the threads of her cheung sams so they would wear out quicker. When she sang to soothe herself, they screamed, or they aped her.

Father pressured her to take over Dream Horse, but she had no mind for business. My work as a doctor was more needed and made more money than Dream Horse, so I primarily did that. These conditions left Ting-Yan to run the company as best she could, though its products were no longer fashionable and her heart wasn’t really in it. Because she was dutiful and competent she kept it afloat, which was good, because between both our family and Second Mother Polly’s we needed the income to survive. As the effects of the embargoes deepened, however, the business declined badly. We were as poor as we had been during the Japanese occupation.

After the Japanese surrender, China had her civil war. Some of the guerrillas from Chek Keng who’d fought as Maoists during the Japanese occupation were happy about this. They believed China was finally free of foreign interference, and that the people were truly represented by their government. Some were not because they thought Mao was a dictator. A lot of East River people were purged during the anti-localist directive from the Central-South China Bureau of the CCP, including Ting-Yan’s mother, Kwan Siu-Wai, and Tak-Wing’s mother, Ng Yim-Fong, as well two more of Ting-Yan’s cousins, and also her uncle. More East River guerrillas died during the Cultural Revolution. A lot of the bodies washed into the Hong Kong Harbour. When we saw them, it reminded us of the Japanese occupation all over again. Some of them lived, however, to participate in the leftist riots that took place in Hong Kong in 1967.