Grandfather Cheung was badly injured while drilling a hole at the bottom of a cliff. Part of the cliff collapsed, a boulder rolled down the incline, and his leg was pinned under it. Grandfather Ng had just finished selling his salt and was recruited off the street to help lift the boulder off Grandfather Cheung. His foot was broken. Grandfather Ng helped the younger Cheung carry Grandfather Cheung all the way back to Wong Nai Chung Village. Neither man was wealthy; they had to walk. It took the rest of the day and the better part of the night. It was a very unusual thing to go so far out of one’s way to help a stranger. Old Ng said later he felt called upon by Tin Hau to do it, that he wasn’t in the habit of such benevolence. The men became fast friends, visiting one another at Chinese New Year and sending parcels of salt or fruit on other special occasions. Since Old Ng had a daughter and Old Cheung had a son and their friendship was so strong, they pledged to bind their children together in marriage.

Yim-Fong and Cheung were introduced and nominally consulted, but in those days, children really had no choice. So they married as strangers, and Yim-Fong came down from her small island home to the big island of Hong Kong, where everything was noisy and boisterous all the time, and the streets were packed with tall, hairy foreigners who smelled of sour milk. Because of the rigours of salt farming at home, she was a sturdy and reliable person. She took good care of Cheung. They were both smart—Tak-Tam inherited his intelligence from them. They studied English together from one of those little phrase books that gives a rough transliteration in Chinese characters.

Usually, Chinese daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law don’t get along well, because the mother-in-law likes to oppress the daughter-in-law the way she herself was oppressed by her mother-in-law before. That’s Confucian patriarchy for you! But Cheung Wan-See wasn’t like that, maybe because, like Ting-Yan, my nearest and dearest, she’d stayed in her natal village and brought a husband in. This was also unusual. Cheung’s wife and mother got along like a house on fire, or should I say a flooded house, since that was the fate that bound them. Both were steeped in the culture of geomancy—do you know what that is? It’s like what those New Agers these days call feng shui, the orientation of life toward the flows of wind and water. Cheung’s sister, your Great-Aunt Hok-Yee, was good at it too, particularly skilled at a kind of fortune-telling called bone-weighing.