“Enough now. I won’t have my last loyal daughter siding against me with my worst enemy.” Sweat ran down his cheek. He turned the fan on again, and the papers again began to rattle.

“Pretty and Pineapple are loyal too. Don’t be melodramatic.”

“Stop behaving like Emily. It doesn’t become you.” He closed his eyes to signal the end of his patience.

Why did the old poop have to be so stubborn? I walked out, and shut the door hard. I’d had enough of my own entanglement in other people’s business. I left him to his grief and consternation, and went back to the Stable.

I went to my own desk and tried to study, but I couldn’t concentrate. I thought about the impossibility of being a modern Chinese in the aftermath of the Opium Wars. We didn’t play along with the British and their need for Chinese tea, and so they forced opium on us—on our vanity and our need for prestige goods, on our bodies and their need for pleasure, and more deeply than that on our biology and its capacity for addiction. I was learning all about that in Dr Selwyn-Clarke’s class on pharmaceuticals.

Most of my classmates thought that to be modern was to be Western—to perm one’s hair, to wear rouge and pancake makeup. My English literature professor, Dr Carston Hughes, said that such ideas were pure foolishness. That to be modern was to believe in democracy and freedom, which were the gifts the British could give us as recompense for the scourge of opium. But my Chinese history professor, Kathy Duffy, said no, Hong Kong people had their own traditions of liberty and an open society, but they went back, way back, and we had to look beyond our occupation by the Manchu, that is, the Qing dynasty, which fell in 1911. She said even the Ming, which preceded it, was not so great because it was conservative and militaristic. For cultural openness, one had to look to the Song. But even it was not perfect because, though much was possible for artistic men, and there were many extraordinary poets and painters, that society was not so open for women. To be a free Chinese woman, she said, one had to look to the Tang dynasty. That was why she was a cultural historian of the Tang. I admired her very much and wished I could be like her, but I felt I must do something practical with my life. If I married, perhaps my daughter would be a historian. But in all likelihood I wouldn’t marry, so maybe Emily’s daughter would be the historian.