You want to be a hero or a zero? If you want to be hero, you should try to be like Captain Lee Cho-Lam. He’s the closest thing our family has to a hero. Not a zero like Cheung Chiu-Wai or Cheung Tak-Wing. Or your uncle Raymond. Captain Lee wasn’t born a hero, you know. He came from humble beginnings, very humble. He was a boat person, what we call “on-water people” in polite company. But you know, Cantonese people are not very polite. They call them “Tanka” or “sea gypsies.” Don’t ever say that to your Auntie Ting-Yan. She’ll be very upset because she is part Tanka. I don’t judge her when I say that. You know me, I treat everyone as equal. And besides, she is very dear to me, my nearest dearest one. But she is one of them. These are the people who used to live on the water in houseboats, fishing boats, and sampans, down in Aberdeen and up on the Sai Kung Peninsula. They’ve mostly come ashore now, but you might have seen some of their boats when we passed through Aberdeen to visit your Great-Aunt Hok-Yee in her care home last week. There are all kinds of theories about them. Do you know what a theory is? It’s when people have an idea about something, but they don’t know for sure, so they make their best guess based on intuition and gossip. I know, I know, you’ve been to university. You have a degree in sociology. Why didn’t you study biochemistry so you could be a doctor? I guess with sociology you could still go into law. Just don’t be a writer, whatever you decide to do.

Oh yeah, so the Tanka, I mean the Sui Seung Yan. Some people say they are descended from the Aboriginal people who lived in South China before the Han people came down from the north. And that they were pushed onto boats when the Han people took all the land. Some say their legs are shorter than most other people’s because they lived so many generations on water; they needed a lower centre of gravity to walk on the boats without falling down. Obviously, that is rubbish made up by people who are low and ignorant themselves. Some say they belong to the Yue tribes, that they are the same as the Viet people of Vietnam. Some say that they are the same racial stock as the rest of us, a combination of Yao, Tan, and Tai mixed with Han people. Some say they are Yue people who mixed with the Tan mountain tribes and then were called Tan to distinguish them from the Yue people who are part of the general population. Who knows for sure? There was no such thing as anthropologists or sociologists to keep records back then.