In Grandfather Cheung’s time, the Public Works Department got involved and began dredging and digging and building. They drained the water from the swamp and turned it into the Jockey Club. Horse racing, so fantastic! Chinese people love to gamble, you know. But then they put up signs: No Chinese Allowed! At least not until 1926, after the floods, after Cheung and his family were relocated. Well, their lucky racecourse was also doomed because of all the ghosts from the cemeteries above wandering through it. But they didn’t believe in such things, called it superstition. If it’s superstitious to believe in ghosts, why isn’t it superstitious to believe in gambling luck? Don’t ask me, I’m just one ugly old lady. No one cares what I think.

Well, the three graces, or the three witches, however you want to think about them—Cheung Wan-See, Cheung Hok-Yee, and Ng Yim-Fong—they could see the geomantic trouble coming a mile off. They could see the romantic trouble coming too, but no one asked them like no one asks me. Except you, of course, my darling, but you ask in such a strange way. Ho kei gwai. Very weird. I don’t understand you at all.

Public Works would not be daunted! They built roads, they built a sanatorium, they built residences. They knocked down Morrison Hill and used some of it to build up the land and some of it to reclaim ocean. Wong Nai Chung Village, which had once sat on land rising to become hillside at the end of the valley, sank beneath all the new roads and buildings.

Well, the big fight in the family was when Public Works came knocking, looking for workers to build a retaining wall along Stubbs Road. Wan-See, Hok-Yee, and Yim-Fong were against the men going to do that work. But Cheung and his father wanted to go. By then, the family was so poor. Three generations had passed since it was possible to farm rice. Cheung and his father were always looking a job, and construction work close to home paid as well as quarry work farther away. Whether they helped or not, the wall was going to get built. So why not work close to the village and be able to come home for dinner? “Anyway, the wall will protect the village from flood waters by holding them back.”