My tone didn’t deter her. “Everyone dislikes me because I’m Madam Chan’s favorite, and everyone dislikes you because you’re her least. We should be friends, don’t you think?”
The proposal was matter-of-fact, the way that one would count from one to ten. I was stunned. “Is that how you make friends?”
“I don’t have many,” she admitted. “But I’m guessing you don’t either.”
I had to admire her directness. It was no trivial feat, how Sui Chan had made me forget my grudge against her. “Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“Your godmother should have sent you to be a cook instead of a seamstress.” She smacked her lips, eyeing my lunch with longing.
Sui Chan’s meals were tragic puddles of congee with a smear of tomato sauce or, on good days, a burnt egg. “You can’t cook,” I realized.
“Haven’t had time to learn, with my brothers at home. The little pests aren’t much help, they scorch the rice.” Sui Chan made a face, but she spoke with affection.
“Scorched rice makes the best porridge,” I replied. “How about this: You teach me to sew, I’ll teach you to cook.”
She grinned. “We’ll start tomorrow.”
I dreaded work less after that. The only time Sui Chan and I got to talk was at lunch, so we ate with alacrity, then exchanged lessons. I drew step-by-step pictures of my favorite recipes, and she taught me to wind my machine’s handwheel and thread the needle when it was at its highest point, and how to guide the fabric with my hands so that my stitches would be straight and even. “Think of the machine as your car, and you’re driving within a lane,” she told me. “It’ll be more fun that way.”
The advice helped me get through our long days. Gu Ma left the factory at four o’clock, and the seamstresses were permitted to leave beginning at seven. Each evening, I was the first to bounce up from my chair, depositing my slippers into the collection bin. Then I began the long walk to Gu Ma’s house.
The seamstresses didn’t gossip much about my aunt, but they did talk about the mainland. On most days, Mrs. Dang tuned her radio to romantic and popular music—which I adored—but often a news broadcast would interrupt the program. From what I could gather, the newscasters worried that civil war was coming to China.
“Do you think the Communists will win?” Sui Chan asked.
“Heaven wouldn’t be so cruel as to make China endure another long war.”
Sui Chan didn’t look as sure. After losing both of her parents during the war—her father had been a soldier in the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps, her mother a nurse—she leaned more cynical.
“Let’s hope you’re right,” she said. “And let’s be grateful we’re in Hong Kong.”
I put on a smile, pulling it out of the well of desperate optimism I stored inside me. It was what had kept me going during those four years in Tunglam while starving and praying the Japanese wouldn’t find us. In the back of my head, Iconvinced myself that things would be fine. Mama would have warned me if war were coming.
Then again, I’d never asked.
Chapter Eleven
On my twelfth birthday, Gu Ma held a dinner party at the house that included the family physician Dr. Wong and his wife, as well as Sai Ma’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Leung.
Sai Ma was dressed up, wearing carmine lipstick and multiple bangles around her wrists. While the maids prepared the dining room, she sat between her parents on a rosewood bench. Sai Ma would age well, I predicted—her father had fewer grays in his hair than Baba, and her mother’s skin was as smooth as soap, her voice still high and animated. Seeing them reminded me how young Sai Ma was. Far too young to have a twelve-year-old daughter and fifteen-year-old son.
Yi Gor and I hung back by the staircase landing, our faces pressed to the wooden spindles, waiting to be called down as Lily had been.
“You must try these,” Sai Ma said to the doctor and his wife as Tingting brought a tray of dried fruit. “They’re from my family’s garden—my father brought the seeds over from Shandong himself.”
“You grow your own persimmons?” asked Dr. Wong.
“They’re Seet Ling’s favorite,” Sai Ma’s father replied.
Sai Ma smiled. “My parents used to make me drink many bitter soups, so I’d bite into one for a sweet treat. But they’re only ripe in the winter, so I dried them for the rest of the year.”
“They’re the only thing she can make that tastes good,” Gu Ma added dryly.
While everyone laughed, Mrs. Wong motioned to Yi Gor and me. “Come, children. You ought to enjoy your”—she faltered briefly, not knowing who we were—“your aunt’s persimmons too.”
I saw Sai Ma tense. Silently she tugged Baba’s sleeve, wearing a pout.
I didn’t know what she was trying to tell him, but Baba gestured for us to come down. “This is my son Syun Kit and my daughter, Yut Ying,” he said.
