Cover

Dedication

For those to come

CHAPTER 1Typhoon ShelterYOU ASKED

June 30, 1997

The Typhoon Shelter Restaurant is a stone’s throw from the Tin Hau MTR station, but you really have to look to find it, hidden as it is on a narrow side street and eclipsed by buildings so tall they scrape the clouds. But Ophelia Tang’s great-aunt Violet Mah knows the way. They trudge up the hill through the rain under their commemorative umbrellas in blue and yellow, pausing just long enough to take a quick photograph at Tin Hau Temple Road Garden No. 3, with its little shoji-screened shrine and carved stone lamps. They left Auntie Macy Cheung Koon-Ying’s flat in the Mid-Levels later than intended, and Ophelia wants to get back before 4:30 to watch Governor Chris Patten depart from Government House and board Her Majesty’s Yacht Britannia. It’s June 30, 1997, the last day that Hong Kong will be a British Crown colony.

The wind blows in at an angle, and the two women are getting drenched, eightysomething and twentysomething alike. The steady rain intensifies and threatens to become a deluge. Eager to get inside, they scramble in their squelching shoes. Water begins to descend in sheets and splash hard on the pavement. They huff for breath as the hill grows steeper.

At last, they arrive. The sliding doors roll open, and their faces are hit by a cool, air-conditioned breeze. Their nostrils, mouths, eyes, and ears flood with the scent of seafood, chilies, and fried garlic. A grumpy, tired server greets them and guides them to a table near the tanks, where all manner of sea creatures crawl, swim, or float.

There’s a clock on the wall with a graphic of a girl’s face on it. She’s got turquoise skin, little white freckles, and pink hair. She sports big yellow sunglasses and pop art lips. The hands of the clock circle her nose. She gazes at them impassively, a glamorous space alien from a stellar future no one can yet dream. When the clock strikes midnight, Hong Kong will become part of the People’s Republic of China under the slogan “One country, two systems,” recalling another midnight almost thirty years prior, when Britain let go of a different jewel in its burnished crown, with different but related consequences. The restaurant is only half full, unusually quiet because everyone is either at home watching the pre-handover festivities on TV or down at the waterfront under their own blue-and-yellow umbrellas trying to stake out good spots from which to observe the official ceremony later. Though no one but Ophelia is listening, a New Romantic band called Cri de Cur, popular a decade ago, comes on over the tinny sound system. Safety pin through her lip, the lead singer Donna Wannabe croons, “You say you’ve never been so happy / but you look so goddamn sad.” They find a table and sit.

The grumpy server brings a pot of bo nay cha, the kind that is well known to cut grease. “Yiu mut yeh?” she asks. “What do you want?”

Great-Aunt Violet says, “This place specializes in typhoon-shelter-style crab, Feelie. So we’ll have that first, okay?”

Ophelia nods. “Smells good.”

“Spicy, extra spicy, or super spicy?” the server asks in impeccable English.

“Extra spicy,” says Great-Aunt Violet. “Super spicy would be too much, I think. A little heat is good, to draw out the deliciousness. But too much, and you can’t eat the dish.”

The server nods, scribbles, and vanishes.

In the back, dishes bang and clatter. The crab-pink lights in the dining room flicker. Outside, the rain pours down in torrents, making a temporary river of the narrow street.

Ophelia looks expectantly at her great-aunt.

Great-Aunt Violet crosses her eyes at Ophelia, as if to say, “Why me?”

“You promised you’d tell me,” Ophelia says.

Great-Aunt Violet sighs.

Why is it that the grandchild most distant from the history is the one most interested in it? Do you think you can bring it back? You can never have it back, and thank goodness, because it was a miserable time. Why do you want to look? I don’t want to look. My generation endured so yours wouldn’t have to. You have other options. You should use the advantages you were given to do something useful.

You want to know about my sister, your grandma? You want to know if it’s true that she murdered your grandpa? Where did you even hear that story? Well, it might be true, and it might not be true. Who is to say? So many years have passed, Feelie. It’s long over, and Hong Kong is a different place. Why do you want to know? What good will it do for her or for you now?

And why does everyone want to know about her and nobody cares about us? Always, it’s Emily, Emily, beautiful Emily. Emily the beloved. Emily who suffered. Emily who had children. Emily who died for our sins. Well, she’s not around anymore. She died. I’m alive. So you’re stuck with me, and what I remember, and what I’m willing to tell. Sorry about that, but that’s life. Sorry I’m not her.

Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was kind. Yes, she cared a lot. No, she never got justice. Who gives an onion pancake? That’s how it goes in this life for most of us. You think you’re special? You aren’t special. The past is not going to come whirling back to you the way you want. Doesn’t it already reek of mildewy brown wainscotting and mothballs? Old incense and rotten oranges? How spoiled are you, anyway? You’re just going to have to take it how it was, with everything that’s missing—everything I don’t remember, everything I was never told, everything I never saw. Also, everything I don’t care about and everything I don’t want to tell. That’s it. Like it or lump it. I’m just one old lady, one cranky old lady with a faulty memory, a big ego, and all my confabulations. Too too bad, too too sad, so sad for you.

Raymond? He lived with us until he was twelve, and then he took off. I don’t know where he is. Why does everyone ask me? I don’t know. He was troubled, and then he was gone. Why don’t you ask me about Macy? Didn’t Macy pay for your plane ticket? Aren’t you staying in her beautiful flat in the Mid-Levels? Didn’t she pay for your education, and your condo in Vancouver? Wasn’t it Macy who invited you here to watch the handover of Hong Kong from the British Crown to the People’s Republic of China? Didn’t she also help arrange the adoption of your new daughter from that orphanage in Qinghai?

I can tell you Macy’s story because Ting-Yan and I raised Macy, and Macy stayed. Macy was a good girl who became a good woman. A smart girl who became a rich woman, a kind woman who takes care of her family. We treated Raymond and Macy the same, but Raymond took off. Too much of his messed-up parents in him, in my humble opinion.

It wasn’t our fault Raymond left. If it was anyone’s fault, it was Emily’s. Emily’s fault and Tak-Wing’s fault. Tak-Wing was an asshole and Emily was a romantic fool. Why does everyone ask about them, and not Tak-Wing’s younger brother Tak-Tam, who was good and kind, and who died so young? Why does no one ask about his father, Old Mah, who poisoned his own people with opium packaged as a cure for opium addiction? Why does no one ask about Old Cheung, who tried so hard to do what was right for his family and almost destroyed it by trying so hard? Why does no one ask about Old Lee, one of the early South China communists? Or his wife, Siu-Wai, and her friend Yim-Fong, who gave their lives to the movement only to be purged before the new country was ten years old? Why does no one ask about Morgan Horace, the Jamaican revolutionary and rum importer, whose beautiful visions were dashed to the dirt? Or Isadore Davis Wong, who facilitated the passage of so many refugees to Free China and the rescue of so many Allied soldiers as a member of the British Army Aid Group, and who was left stranded in Hong Kong with a large family and no home for his pains? Why does no one ask about the Irish professor of Chinese history, Kathy Duffy, who helped so many young Chinese women find their way in the modern world? Why does no one ask about Tanaka Shigeru, the civilian translator torn apart by what the Japanese Imperial Army did to his classmates and friends? Why does no one ask about William Courchene, the Métis soldier from Saint-Boniface who brought Raymond into this world? Why does no one want to know about Lee Ting-Yan, whom the handsome prince didn’t want to marry? Why does no one ask about me?

What has Macy been saying to you? Macy is a good person, but she doesn’t know diddly-squat. She doesn’t have a clue. She is good with money, but stupid about human beings. Lots of Hong Kong people are like that. They find the past unbearable, so they drive as hard as they can into the future without understanding how their ignorance of yesterday creates a miserable tomorrow. Macy can be like that. I can’t believe that she thinks Emily was a murderer.

Emily was not a murderer. You don’t understand the whole story. I’ll tell you what she did, but you can’t tell a soul.

The crab arrives, his otherworldly face deep-fried and facing them with all the wisdom of sea and wok. He waves his antennae at them in the air-conditioned breeze. Beside his wise and knowing face sits a massive claw, bigger than any Ophelia has seen in her life. The head itself is propped up on a heap of fragrant crab pieces still in their bright orange shells, but smashed with the flat side of a cleaver so it’s easy to get the meat out. Deep-fried garlic, chilies, and shallots are piled to overflowing atop the crab. The whole concoction smells irresistibly delicious.

Out on the street a car alarm goes off. A customer rushes out of the restaurant to see if it’s hers, and the shock of rain hitting her face makes her shriek as the sliding doors close. Ophelia glances over, glad to be inside.

“Here,” says Great-Aunt Violet, plunking one of the juicy claws onto Ophelia’s plate. “Try this. Best in Hong Kong.”

1936–1937

CHAPTER 2TUITION

December 12, 1936

When I was seven and Emily was eight, our father announced his modernity. “You can marry, or you can go to university. I’ve put aside a decent sum for each of you—wedding gift or tuition, your choice.”

There was no real choice.

It was obvious who would receive the money as wedding gift: beautiful Emily, lovely as the moon in spring, gorgeous as a pink peony at the height of bloom, even at seven. What Emily had received in beauty, however, was taken from her account in wisdom. Worse, it was eclipsed by her vanity. The only knowledge she had, and the only knowledge she cared about, was the knowledge of her own beauty. Her beauty was immense, and her knowledge of it deeper than the South China Sea. She understood that beauty was a kind of currency better than money, at least for women of our generation. She knew she had to use it to get what she wanted, everyone else be damned. If only she’d had the wisdom to make better choices. But no one talked about choices in those days—that’s a Generation X thing. My generation talked about desire and death, and got plenty of both.

It was obvious, too, who would receive the money as tuition: yours truly, Violet Mah, bright as the sun and sharp as the edge of a pork cleaver, but ugly as the butcher’s chopping block. I mean ugly: square face, pointy nose, small eyes, gigantic mouth full of teeth so big they barely fit. You think I’m ugly now because you think all old ladies are ugly. It was more obvious when I was young.

In looks, I took after my father, but looks matter less to a man. My father was wealthy. He made his money in gambling; this whole cursed colony did, one way or another. But I mean he was a casino man, first in Macau, then in Hong Kong. Not as successful as Stanley Ho, but good enough to make a few investments. With a Singaporean school friend, Yeo Chooi Koon, he started an anti-opium pill company called Dream Horse to help our people recover from the scourge of dragon chasing imposed on us by the British a hundred years ago. Father and Yeo believed that a special recipe for a Tang dynasty elixir of immortality, which included magical ingredients like cinnabar, realgar, arsenolite, malachite, and magnetite, could cure the people of their dependence on opium. Not that I am in any place to denigrate the value of opium. My father’s grandfather made his fortune selling it as a comprador for Witt-Weatherall and Co., and his father (my great-great-grandfather) was the famous taipan Mr Henry Witt-Weatherall himself, though this is seldom discussed in polite company, because my great-great-grandmother was Chinese. Because Witt-Weatherall never claimed my great-grandfather, he became Chinese, like his mother. After that, Witt-Weatherall was no longer around to claim any descendants, and all marriages were Chinese. So we are Chinese too, and do everything the Chinese way.

“What a headache trying to remember them all, ViVi!” Emily said once upon a time, when I was fifteen and she was sixteen. She dabbed her wrists with a bit of Chanel Bois des Iles. She liked that one better than the Chanel No. 5 that all the other girls wanted. She had sophisticated tastes. “A new world is coming in which we will be free from all those dreary, oppressive old ancestors—just you wait and see.”

The smell of a distant forest and languid flowers rushed to my nose. “Don’t be so disrespectful, Emily,” I said. “There will come a time when you’ll wish you could remember.”

“I really doubt I’ll ever care.”

“Someone you care about will care.”

“Don’t be such a bore, Violet.”

Some people say we don’t look very Chinese because there were compradors in the families of some of the Chinese wives, too, including my mother, Eunice Liu Hei-Yu. But what is Chinese in this moving, changing, twisting world? If I took my father’s money for tuition, was that still Chinese?

I was so shocked when he made the offer again, when the reality of one option or the other seemed sooner and more likely. I loved my father, but in those days, relationships between fathers and daughters were more distant than they are now. When I was little, he lived with us at the Stable, the first house he bought with his casino money. But when Dream Horse began to do well, he bought a house for himself just around the corner, the Kimblewick. So he wouldn’t be distracted, he said, by the sounds of things that were women’s business. I saw him perhaps once a week for Sunday dinner, during which he would dispense wisdom to all members of the family.

“A woman should put others first, herself last,” he’d say. “When she does something good, she shouldn’t cluck about it. When she does something bad, she shouldn’t deny it.”

But other times, he was more progressive. “Women should have the right to education. And when China comes into her own, women should have the right to vote.”

Whether the wisdom was conservative or progressive, it was always stated firmly and with authority. We never knew how to respond, so we just ate quietly.

Sometimes he’d give us his opinions on the politics of the day. He admired Sun Yat-Sen, but worried that Chiang Kai-Shek was a despot. He thought the Communists had some good ideas, but mistrusted their zeal. When we were young, we thought China was very far away and only half listened to his ideas about it.

My mother was the one who translated his offer into details that made sense. She invited me to drink tea and eat melon seeds in her room, at the little rosewood table she had for entertaining exactly such conversations as these. “If you want to marry, your father and I will arrange for you to marry his business partner Yeo’s oldest son in Singapore. By all reports, he’s a very nice young man.”

“But is he good looking?” I asked. I split a melon seed with my giant front teeth.

“No.” She didn’t say any more than that, but I had already been to literature class. I could read subtext. How could someone as ugly as you possibly expect to marry handsome?

“Didn’t think so,” I said. “Maybe Emily will marry him.”

“I’ve suggested it to her. Yeo has two sons. You could both marry into the family, if you wanted. When it’s time, the four of you could inherit Dream Horse and carry it forward into this bright new century.” She poured a little cup of tea for each of us.

“If I were to marry, I’d want to marry for love.” I tried to sip, but the tea was much too hot and burned my tongue.

She looked at me the way a sage looks at a common person. Paused for way too long. “That’s what Emily says too.”

“Mama, no one will marry me for love, no matter how much I love them.”

She sat there, uncomfortable, trying to think of something kind to say.

I said, “Only the beautiful get to marry for love. Only the beautiful can be modern. In love, at least. The ugly must take arranged marriages because that is the only way they can marry at all.”

“You always were the cleverest of my children, dearest Violet,” she said.

“The clever, ugly, and modern go to school.” I sipped again. She had put little rosebuds in the tea, and their sweet odour filled my head.

“I would have liked to have gone to school. I’m smart, like you, but my father was not modern. He arranged my marriage. I suppose he was modern enough to ask me beforehand how I felt about it.” The sorrow in her beautiful face was very romantic. What did she ever really have to worry about?

“And so you married Father for his money?”

“Don’t talk like that about your father. He is a good man. A kind man.”

“A wealthy man who looks like a horse.”

“Violet!”

“I’m sorry, Mama.”

“I know you don’t think so, but it’s possible to be two things at once. Your father is both wealthy and kind. In a husband, these qualities are more important than good looks. If you decide to marry young Master Yeo, you will come to understand this when you are older.”

“I don’t want a husband. I’ll take the tuition. I want to help people. I’ll study medicine, continue our family’s commitment to the health and longevity of the people.” The University of Hong Kong offered a bachelor of medicine, and a slightly older friend of mine, Lai Po-Chuen, was one of the first women students in that program at HKU. She was halfway through the degree and enjoying it.

My mother smiled.

“If I understand you at all, child, this is the path of your greatest happiness.”

“I know, Ma. It’s also my only real choice. I just wish there was more than one real choice.”

She died of tuberculosis shortly after that. Before she died, she tried to arrange for my father to take a concubine so he wouldn’t be alone after she was gone. In the old days, men were free to take more than one wife as long as they had the means to support more than one family. It was almost expected, particularly among businessmen, who did it as one way among many to show off their success. My mother went so far as to choose an eighteen-year-old orphan girl called Ada Ng Yeuk-Hai from the Po Leung Kuk home for wayward women and girls.

But Father said no, that he would remain true to her memory.

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