In the old days, Wong Nai Chung was perfectly situated at the head of a long and fertile valley with a mountain behind it and the waves of a warm harbour peacefully lapping the shore at the far end. Since the Ming dynasty, the valley was a network of cultivated rice paddies, with just a brief interruption during the Qing clearances, when all inhabitants were cleared from the coast on pain of death. So Wong Nai Chung was a wealthy village—countryside wealthy, I mean, not bank-wealthy stinking rich like the taipans that grew out of the British empire. But when the British came, the first thing they did was outlaw the growing of rice in the valley. The villagers went from being comfortable and content to poor and desperate just like that. Ai yah, those demon bastards, I’m telling you! The three hundred or so villagers complained vociferously, to the point that it was said you could tell a person was from Wong Nai Chung because they complained so much about the loss of the rice fields. To compensate, the government put Wong Nai Chung people first in line for construction and quarry work, which is how Grandfather Cheung ended up in the business even generations later. With paddy work outlawed, the abandoned rice fields soon became a malarial swamp. Lots of people got sick and died, colonists and Chinese alike. To add insult to injury, the British changed the name of Wong Nai Chung Village to Happy Valley, which was their way of saying “Valley of Death.” They surrounded the valley with cemeteries and doomed Wong Nai Chung to become just one more burial ground. There was a graveyard for every kind of colonial: a Protestant graveyard that we called the Colonial Cemetery, the Catholic Cemetery, the Muslim Cemetery, the Jewish Cemetery, the Parsee Cemetery. They stuck a fountain in the middle of each and buried all the people who died of the malaria and cholera they’d set off by turning the rice paddies into a swamp. Wong Nai Chung went from being a village that produced rice to a village that produced rocks, mosquitoes, and graves. Talk about curse upon curse! So stupid, lah! Dim dead ghosts! You know that Chinese people are afraid of death the way British people are afraid of sex. It all shows in our curses.