Ophelia thinks she can’t eat another thing, but the conchs are so tender and sweet. The taste of the ocean fills her mouth—a little briny, a little boozy, and so spicy she squeals, then grabs her glass of ice water.

CHAPTER 15MONKEY’S WEDDING

July 14, 1937

Martin Colville’s last duty before setting sail for Australia was to organize and oversee my sister’s wedding. The hard part would be keeping it secret from Cheung. Colville wasn’t at all convinced that it was the right thing to do, but the young cricketers said his name would go down in the annals of Hong Kong Cricket Club shame if he could not achieve this. Their hearts were full of compassion for Edward, Duke of Windsor, and his commoner sweetheart, Wallis Simpson. Just as Edward and Wallis had married in exile, Tak-Wing and Emily would too. But unlike Edward and Wallis, the young cricketers thought, Tak-Wing and Emily would be surrounded by friends. That meant something different to them that it did to the young couple, but the cricketers didn’t know that. They put the proscenium right where the near wicket usually went, and festooned it with azaleas, impatiens, irises, and camellias.

Since it was all to be kept secret from Cheung, the food was prepared by the individual cricketers’ staff in their grand colonial houses up on the Peak or at the very least the Mid-Levels. Elizabeth Hancock’s staff made potato salad with shrimp. Hilda Selwyn-Clarke’s staff made spring bean salad and Quails Juniper. Some of the Chinese staff got wind of who they were cooking for and were delighted by the idea of a young Chinese couple getting married at the HKCC. They didn’t know or care about church weddings and thought that the HKCC was a romantic and wonderful place to get married. The whole colony blossomed in imagining what was possible and beautiful about taking up the culture of another, without being yoked by the thick braid of power that constituted tradition on both the British and Chinese sides. They cooked fantasy elements into the food—a few dong gu chopped into the cream of mushroom soup, Chinese chestnuts in the stuffing for the roast chicken, a bit of red bean paste between the layers of Victoria sponge. Some sent traditional Chinese treats, also: wife cakes, roasted-pork steamed buns, sticky rice cooked in lotus leaf with chicken, sausage, mushrooms, and mung beans. Emily and Tak-Wing’s cricket club wedding became a modern fairy tale for everyone, all the more so because their fathers didn’t know about it.