What you need to know is that they live on boats. They were disdained and looked down upon by other Hong Kong people. They had to do all the bad jobs and all the hard jobs. They were the labourers, what we used to call “coolies,” and sex workers, what we used to call “flower girls.” But primarily they fished. We bought fish from them sometimes. Rumour says they were also smugglers and that long ago when the British forced opium on us, they were the ones who used to run the opium ashore at Whampoa, and bring back tea, silk, and rice for trade. I think this is how Captain Lee got rich. Not smuggling opium or its modern versions, heroin and morphine. I’m not saying he didn’t do that, but I’m not saying he did. But his time was a bit later, when other goods were more important. Ting-Yan told me once he made a fortune in the 1920s, when the new Chinese Nationalist government was trying to make money to keep its hold on power. They hiked up the tariffs on all kinds of goods as a way of raising funds to support the new government. To make it modern, on par with all the European states. But the tariffs were so high, and smuggling was such an old tradition all along the South China coast, so old that you can’t even really call it smuggling. It was just trade in the old-fashioned way. But in those years, people could make a lot of money evading the tariffs. They didn’t even need a black market. They would just quietly transfer the goods to ordinary shops through family and old business connections and they could make a pile. Ting-Yan thinks that that’s what her father, Captain Lee, did.