The women wailed and shouted. “The village was fine before any of these construction projects!” They burned incense for the Earth God and laid out precious oranges for him. The men called it superstitious hogwash and reported to the foreman for work. They destroyed the auspicious placement of their own village by moving the landscape around it. Yim-Fong said that Cheung was deranged to the point of death. “Your father doesn’t know any better because he’s done this all his life. But the world is new now. You have to learn to use your head! If you can’t look after your own interests, how do you expect anyone else to?” She was mad as the hot place below because she knew what would happen, while Cheung did not have that foresight. Cheung said, “All you do is complain like all the generations that have gone before. When are you going to stop complaining and start taking responsibility?”

But Yim-Fong was right. When the floods came in ’23, all 130 houses in the sunken village were flooded and twenty-six collapsed. Between the reclamation work at the back end of the village and the huge bank of earth thrown up at the front, there was nowhere for the water to go but into the houses. All of the village’s pigs and chickens and one little boy who was washing clothes in the nullah when the flood struck were drowned. The waters were so deep people had to swim to safety. They lost all of their belongings—furniture, mattresses, cooking pots, dishes, clothing, everything.

Worse luck hit the family in ’25, when robbers came to the house and stabbed Grandfather Cheung. He survived, but between his poorly healed foot from the quarry accident years ago and his poorly healed stab wounds, he was in a lot of pain. Our Dream Horse products, especially Immortal Carp, were a great help to him, at least until they weren’t. The robbers took what little money and jewellery the family had saved from the ’23 flood. Shortly after that, the typhoon of ’25 hit. The retaining wall that the men had helped build collapsed, and mud, debris, and water flooded again into the village. Public Works had mixed the cement with red earth rather than the sand that would have made it strong. Everyone had to flee in a hurry. When they got to higher ground, Cheung Wan-See wasn’t with them. It turned out a house had collapsed right on top of her, though miraculously, she was unharmed, in a little pocket of air. The fire brigade had to come and dig her out.