“The Chinese side will win. Then we can have Asia for Asians without the murdering Japanese Imperial Army, without the Manchu, and without the British. We will get free through commerce.”

“I don’t think that’s how it is going to work. There are too many different kinds of political unrest.”

“Just you wait and see,” Father said.

In the afternoon, Emily came to my door in a simple white dress, beneath which a red slip peeked.

“Come and be witness for my marriage.”

“Your what?”

“Tak-Wing and I are eloping.” Her makeup was nice—her face carefully powdered, her eyebrows tweezed and pencilled in. She wore lipstick too, but the colour was subtle. No one would be able to tell what she was up to from her makeup.

“You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Chinese people don’t elope.”

“Sure they do.”

“Respectable ones don’t,” I said. “I mean, maybe if you were a sampan flower girl you could.”

“Is there something wrong with sampan flower girls?”

“No. But—”

“The world is changing, Violet. And haven’t we both sworn to become modern Chinese women? That means we can’t be classist. And we can elope.”

I chewed on what she was saying. “Tak-Wing?”

“Who else?”

“Father is going to be mad as heck.”

“The old poop will get over it. He always does.”

I scowled, but I went to get my shoes.

Tak-Wing was waiting for us at Statue Square. Neither Tak-Wing nor Emily was particularly unnerved by the statue of Queen Victoria. They had agreed to meet under her watchful eyes. I looked up at her, and she seemed to gaze back sternly. The city of Hong Kong was originally called “Victoria” in her name. What would that distant, dead English queen think of my sister running off with a village boy? I had read Romeo and Juliet in my first-year English class, stumbled my way through “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” and many more thees and thous besides. But could Queen Victoria ever have translated the Montague and Capulet feud to make sense of the enmity between the Mahs and the Cheungs? Or did she see us as all alike, as so many her emissaries here did? Of course, we were all subjects of George VI by then. And he’d had to take the throne because his older brother, Edward, had eloped with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Who was married when they met and got divorced in order to depose a king so she could marry him. If the English king could give up the throne to marry an already married woman, maybe a couple of Chinese kids eloping across a class divide with the anonymous assistance of the British colonial system was not a terribly great matter. But unlike Edward VIII’s father, George V, who was dead, Emily’s father and mine, Old Mah, was very much alive, and he was not going to be happy.