It was probably because Tak-Wing was the source of the family’s greatest pride. Along with seven others from the little village of Tai Hang, he had gone to the 1936 Berlin Olympics last summer as a member of the football team representing China. The village had provided eight out of the eleven team members, so it was in essence a Tai Hang team. This mattered a great deal because the village was so modest, a little backwater previously famous for its laundries, fishing, and quarry work, its poverty and labour. Not yet a hundred years old, it had begun at the same time as the British Imperial presence here in Hong Kong, as a site of relocation for people displaced from other villages, like Wong Nai Chung.

Though they were beaten by the British team, the Tai Hang boys came back as heroes. Who would have thought a handful of village boys could take on the world like that? If that wasn’t a Hong Kong miracle, Cheung didn’t know what was. Sometimes he wondered if the very existence of Hong Kong was nothing but a collective opium dream. Surely, in some more likely parallel universe, China had defeated the British in the Opium Wars and remained sovereign and strong. Still, he thought, if our reality is as it is, then playing at the Berlin Olympics is as good as taking on Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler himself.