In 1952, when she was only ten, your precocious auntie Macy encouraged Ting-Yan to bring a small quantity of penicillin in from the United Kingdom to export to China. She read the papers every day and pored obsessively over the business section. It turned out her advice was good. With the Korean War raging, antibiotics were making a big difference in terms of whether injured soldiers lived or died. Ting-Yan made a small profit by investing a little bit of money in the companies Macy suggested. She would have made more if she’d invested more, but she didn’t quite have the nerve. However, dotty Old Mah discouraged Macy’s interest in Dream Horse. He wanted Raymond, as both a boy and his biological grandchild, to take over the business. At twelve, Raymond was extremely clever, easily capable—at least intellectually—of beginning to learn how to run Dream Horse. Mah called him into his old office, where the fan still turned and the papers still rattled. He placed columns of numbers in front of the boy and tried to show him how to balance an accounts ledger. Raymond said he said he wasn’t interested. He said Tak-Wing wasn’t his father. He said he was going to Canada to find Courchene, who was the closest he’d ever had to one. He took the parcel of inheritance money Old Mah had given him the week before and disappeared. We think he stowed away on one of the big freighters that still came into the Hong Kong Harbour, maybe from Ceylon or Egypt, since neither Americans nor Canadians were trading with us. We searched for him for months, spending our days on the docks, stopping every sailor we ran into to ask if they’d seen a Chinese boy with angry eyes and a birthmark in the crook of the elbow. We begged our way onto ships to search, and filed a missing person’s report with the Royal Hong Kong Police Force, but we never found a trace. It was as though Ting-Yan’s long-ago curse were finally being set in motion. Raymond’s disappearance broke Old Mah’s already ailing heart, and Mah left this world shortly after that.

With Old Mah no longer around to keep the peace, life at the Stable became unbearable. Uncle Peanut started snooping through Emily’s things when she was out. She caught him at it once, when she came back early from visiting Auntie Jane, and gave him such a tongue lashing that he spent the rest of the day under his blanket crying. But the next day, she found her favorite cheung sam snipped to shreds. That night, in the darkest hours when everyone else was asleep, Emily was visited by Mother’s hollow-eyed ghost, coughing and shivering in a tattered dressing grown. Mother tried to touch Emily’s hair. Emily was not comforted, she was terrified.