This made her weep, out of love for him and out of grief for herself.

Because she was crying, Old Mah wept too.

What we didn’t know was that he was already courting somebody else, a sing-song girl at Tim Nam Teahouse at Wing Lok Street and Bonham Strand, where he stopped on his way home from work many days of the week. In those days, rich men did what they wanted, and Old Mah was no exception. That’s Confucian patriarchy for you! Aren’t you glad you don’t have to live in such backward times?

The songstress was blind, as many in that profession were. It was a profession that poor people put their daughters into as a matter of tradition and livelihood, since it was harder for them to be married off. Don’t be so judgmental with your sociology degree, Ophelia! I know it wasn’t right. But it was the shape of the world then. The sing-song girls had much better lives than a lot of women in old Hong Kong.

The blind singer Polly Tsai Mei-Gwan was smashingly beautiful. I mean really gorgeous, like a cool breeze blowing over a misty mountain. The fact that she couldn’t see and so didn’t know this just made her all the more beautiful. The good Christian orphan Ada Ng was simply no competition.

When my mother found out, she was stinking mad. I mean howling mad, and bitter as that smelly herbal medicine we had to drink when we were sick, the kind that boiled for hours in a crusty clay pot.

“How could you betray me like that?” she wailed. “You don’t love me! You never loved me! What kind of modern husband are you? None at all! A modern husband does not take part in these barbaric feudal practices!” She tore her hair, cut up her beautiful cheung sams with ragged scissors, threw her perfumes and powders at her vanity so hard that its perfect moon-shaped mirror broke. She was very ill at the time, so it was amazing that she could rage so hard. Don’t underestimate how tough those women of the 1920s were, Feelie! She was tough! Ten times tougher than you or me, even though she was so sick.