In looks, I took after my father, but looks matter less to a man. My father was wealthy. He made his money in gambling; this whole cursed colony did, one way or another. But I mean he was a casino man, first in Macau, then in Hong Kong. Not as successful as Stanley Ho, but good enough to make a few investments. With a Singaporean school friend, Yeo Chooi Koon, he started an anti-opium pill company called Dream Horse to help our people recover from the scourge of dragon chasing imposed on us by the British a hundred years ago. Father and Yeo believed that a special recipe for a Tang dynasty elixir of immortality, which included magical ingredients like cinnabar, realgar, arsenolite, malachite, and magnetite, could cure the people of their dependence on opium. Not that I am in any place to denigrate the value of opium. My father’s grandfather made his fortune selling it as a comprador for Witt-Weatherall and Co., and his father (my great-great-grandfather) was the famous taipan Mr Henry Witt-Weatherall himself, though this is seldom discussed in polite company, because my great-great-grandmother was Chinese. Because Witt-Weatherall never claimed my great-grandfather, he became Chinese, like his mother. After that, Witt-Weatherall was no longer around to claim any descendants, and all marriages were Chinese. So we are Chinese too, and do everything the Chinese way.

“What a headache trying to remember them all, ViVi!” Emily said once upon a time, when I was fifteen and she was sixteen. She dabbed her wrists with a bit of Chanel Bois des Iles. She liked that one better than the Chanel No. 5 that all the other girls wanted. She had sophisticated tastes. “A new world is coming in which we will be free from all those dreary, oppressive old ancestors—just you wait and see.”

The smell of a distant forest and languid flowers rushed to my nose. “Don’t be so disrespectful, Emily,” I said. “There will come a time when you’ll wish you could remember.”

“I really doubt I’ll ever care.”

“Someone you care about will care.”

“Don’t be such a bore, Violet.”

Some people say we don’t look very Chinese because there were compradors in the families of some of the Chinese wives, too, including my mother, Eunice Liu Hei-Yu. But what is Chinese in this moving, changing, twisting world? If I took my father’s money for tuition, was that still Chinese?