I signed too, as witness.

They held hands and kissed, and we ran out of the Supreme Court singing at the top of our lungs, not “Here Comes the Bride,” but absurdly, “Rule, Britannia!” Their glee was so infectious that I felt it too.

But they skipped ahead of me, and I thought of all the things that hadn’t happened. No brothers of the groom ritually arguing bride price with the bride’s father. No tea service given by the bride to the mother- and father-in-law. No twelve-course feast with shark’s fin soup, fried shrimp balls, and roasted capon. Father would be so mad. And Mother, were she still alive, would have been devastated. I tried not to think about my parents, tried to get with the spirit of the new age.

Tak-Wing took us for a ride on the Peak Tram. Unlike the larger but tightly packed red trams in use through the city, the Peak Tram was wide, squat, and green—the same green as the velvet jacket I wore for the special occasion, though it was uncomfortably warm for the muggy Hong Kong summer. Amah said that young ladies should wear dresses, but she wasn’t my mother, so she couldn’t tell me what to do. Tailor Chang had warned me I would be too hot, and he was right. I loved the jacket anyway.

I watched the leafy trees and many banana palms go by the tram windows. The English didn’t really like us to go to the upper levels of Hong Kong Island—they saw it as their domain. But there was one Chinese who lived up there—a wealthy comprador called Sir Robert Ho Tung, who, like us, descended from one of the original taipans. While Chinese were forbidden from renting houses up on the Peak, the British had never supposed that one of us might be rich enough to buy. But Robert Ho Tung was, and he did. And there was nothing the British could do about it. I’d been up here a handful of times with Father, to visit with Robert Ho Tung’s daughters while Father visited with Sir Robert himself.