Though this novel is the product of my search for knowledge about family, it is not a story about my family as such. Nor is it a book that purports to accurately represent historical personages, though a number of them do appear. Rather, it is a fiction imaginatively brought into being by reading between the lines of such texts as Philip Snow’s The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation (Yale University Press, 2003); Edwin Ride’s BAAG (British Army Aid Group): Hong Kong Resistance 1942–1945 (Oxford University Press, 1981); Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke’s memoir, Footprints (Sino-American Publishing Company, 1975), Buck Clayton’s Jazz World, by Buck Clayton with Nancy Miller Elliott (Macmillan, 1986); A History of the Hong Kong Cricket Club 1851–1989, edited by Spencer Robinson (Centurion, 1989); Andrew F.Jones’s Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Duke University Press, 2001); W.E.B. Du Bois on Asia: Crossing the World Color Line, edited by Bill V. Mullen and Cathryn Watson (University Press of Mississippi, 2005); Cree Code Talker, a short film about Charles “Checker” Tomkins by Alexandra Lazarowich (NSI IndigiDocs, 2016); Liam Nolan’s Small Man of Nanataki: The True Story of a Japanese Who Risked His Life to Provide Comfort for His Enemies (E.P. Dutton, 1966); W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War (Random House, 1939); Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Mariner Books, 2014); and Chan Sui-jeung’s invaluable East River Column: Hong Kong Guerillas in the Second World War and After (Hong Kong University Press, 2009). In addition, I read (or at least looked through) quite a number of accounts of the war by British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers, as well the work of Eileen Chang, Han Suyin, and of course, the wonderful Madeleine Thien. Inspiration for Old Mah’s Dream Horse company came from the article “Narcotic Culture: A Social History of Drug Consumption in China” by Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun in the British Journal of Criminology (Spring 2002). For more on Hong Kong’s role in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, see “China’s 1936 Olympic Football Team: Eight of the Players Were From Hong Kong” by Vincent Heywood in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch (2008). I relied extensively on news articles from the 1930s and 1940s in the South China Morning Post, and the archival photographs and facts of interest on David Bellis’s website, gwulo.com, were immensely helpful. Also helpful was the website for Hong Kong’s War Crimes Trials Collection. Readers wishing to dig deeper into this subject might begin with Hong Kong’s War Crimes Trials, edited by Suzannah Linton (Oxford University Press, 2013).