On their wedding night, Siu-Wai woke up to find him out of bed. She searched the village up and down, as quietly as she could so no one would see her. Finally, she found him fast asleep under the green awning in the little tang tsai down at the tiny local dock. She loved him so much, she crawled in beside him, but the rocking of the boat made her nauseous, and she had to return to land. So it was between them their entire lives. They were lucky they had a child at all, my own nearest and dearest Ting-Yan, conceived in a brief undocumented moment on land or on water, where one was comfortable and the other was not. It turned out Old Lee could only sleep in the merciful arms of Tin Hau, the lady he called Mary, who had killed his father and brothers, but afterwards granted him almost everything he could have wished for.

The problem was the “almost.” Though he loved his daughter, Captain Lee desperately needed a son to inherit his investments and his growing collection of boats, not to mention the land at Chek Keng he’d inherited through his wife. In the meantime, their nights together became harder and harder. It was as though the minute the sun set, Lee could not remain on land. And Siu-Wai’s nausea on boats became so bad that the only way she could come and go from Hong Kong Island was to travel overland as far as Tsim Sha Tsui and take the brief ride on the relatively stable Star Ferry. Even then, her stomach lurched, and she had to spend the whole trip at one railing or the other, leaning over just in case. Lee’s wobbly tang tsai was out of the question. She couldn’t even stay there for a few minutes.

Lee’s businessmen friends encouraged him to take a concubine. They were a hearty party lot of landlubbers with dozens of mistresses and voracious appetites for feasts and drinks. But this wasn’t Captain Lee’s way. He refused the bevy of lovelies they pushed at him. He even turned down the sorrowful Macanese fado singer Dulce de Melo, whom it was said no man could resist. Lee loved his wife, and even more than his wife, he loved Our Lady of Grace and was true to her edict of purity.