“Of course, jiejie! Ooh, is that soup?”
“It’s not ready yet. Here, eat this if you’re hungry.” She took a deep breath, swallowed down her fear, and looked him in the eyes. “Tinseng, I forgot my datebook today. I had to come back to get it.”
“You did? But I didn’t see you.”
“No,” she said, “You didn’t. You were busy with other things.”
“I don’t—” Tinseng’s mouth fell open a little, then closed tightly. She watched him take a step back from her: her little brother putting distance between them, pulling taut the threads they’d sewn between their two hearts—any further, and they’d all snap.
“It isn’t what you think,” he said in his most convincing tone, and with horrible clarity, she realized she had to find a way to keep him here in this kitchen. If she said the wrong thing, he’d bolt. The next time she saw him, he’d be a stranger; she already saw the mask falling into place. She had to think quickly if she didn’t want to lose him.
“I think I need help chopping these green onions,” she said.
“I . . . what?” He blinked, confused.
“Come here and help me cut these. If you’re going to eat, you should help,” she insisted, and after a moment’s hesitation, he picked up the knife and started chopping. She watched a moment, then laughed quietly and crowded his space.
“I remember teaching you better than this. Look, you still don’t put your thumb where you should.” She covered his hand with hers, but he startled, the knife clattering to the board. They avoided each other’s eyes. “Some things never change, do they, A-Seng?”
“You don’t change,” Tinseng said earnestly. “You’re always the best.”
“And you’ll always be my little brother,” she said.
“Your little brother who can’t hold a knife properly.”
“My little brother who forgets to take care of himself.” Quietly, still not looking at him, she said, “You know you have to be careful now.”
“I know.” His voice was barely audible. There was no one else in the house, but it still felt dangerous to speak of it out loud. “I’ll never let anyone drag you into this. It will never come back to your family, Yukying, I promise. I’ll go bow before your mother and promise her too.”
Yukying sighed and took the knife from his hand. “All you need to promise me is that you’ll look after yourself and stay out of trouble.”
“I will.”
Six Days Ago. June 19, 1963. At Sea.
Four years later, she stood over her brother as he had a nightmare. She touched his shoulder gently to wake him and then listened to his story about a man who blackmailed for a living, an immoral man motivated only by profit. Tinseng painted the picture of a greedy mouth slavering to devour, and Yukying wondered what this had to do with any of them, except she knew. How could she not know? She had carried the fear in her heart since that day in December.
So, four years later, when Tinseng sat nonchalantly smoking a cigarette in his pajamas and said, “Because I’ve run into some trouble,” Yukying knew what this was about. What it was always, inevitably, going to be about.
Over the years, some part of her had wondered whether it would be a relief, almost, if something did happen—at least then there would be a resolution. Now with the fear realized, Yukying saw what a fool she’d been to think that. How could she ever have thought certainty would be a comfort in the face of losing her brother’s safety?
Head spinning with secrets, Yukying left Tinseng and Shan Dao in a daze. She walked down the hall to her own room and lay down, hugging a pillow for comfort as she tried to think.
She’d had four years to come to terms with her brother being homosexual, or at least having those tendencies. She hadn’t gone out of her way to seek out books on the subject, as that would have drawn attention; where would she get them, anyway? Instead, she listened where she wouldn’t have before. From a Party friend, she heard homosexuality was the cause of fascism. “Like Gorky says,” the friend proclaimed at dinner, “exterminate all the homosexuals, and fascism will vanish.” From one of her brother’s coworkers, she heard instead that homosexuality was simply trauma suffered under capitalism. When she visited refugees from Shekou, she heard it called the White man’s disease from Chinese families who don’t know their own history. No one seemed to know what kind of immorality homosexuality fell under, or what was to blame for its existence.
Her conservative church friends often discussed the newest psychoanalytic theories in drawing rooms after dinner: how to stop the masculinization of women that was producing a breed of increasingly feminine men, and whether Freud was correct when he wrote that a man’s love for other men masked his forbidden love for his mother. Her liberal church friends insisted that legalization of buggery was coming to England in the next ten years, possibly five—it was inevitable, they said, as the tide of public opinion turned. And once it was legal in England, surely it was only a matter of time for its colonies. But Yukying couldn’t imagine that for Hong Kong, not when the vitriol was so vast and so varied. Perhaps if the rejection was coming only from the British, or only the Chinese. But with enough agreement from both sides on the issue, they would never see change.
She hugged her pillow tighter at the thought. It was so bloody hypocritical, she thought, for Hong Kongers to call her brother a deviant. After all, what would Westerners call the majority of marriages in Hong Kong? Most of the marriages she knew weren’t Western registry marriages; they were customary marriages following the six rites. And yes, those marriages were legal under British code, recognized as a fundamental part of their way of life, but what would Mrs. Lanzette say, or Mrs. Duncan? Or, worse, if she explained to them that concubinage was still quite a common practice in Hong Kong, that a concubine in Hong Kong had more legal protections than wives in most Western countries, and that she herself found it perfectly acceptable? Would they listen? How would they react if she tried to explain that she knew of no single marital tradition and held no importance to the union between one man and one woman?
She knew exactly what would happen. They would look at her with pity and dismiss her culture whole cloth with the wave of a hand.
How was she supposed to accept the same dismissal from her own people? How was Tinseng? How was he supposed to live in this place they so desperately wanted to call home, and how could they call it home when it wanted to kill him?
By the time Laurence returned from his morning tennis, there was something strange buzzing under her skin like summer heat. She had always been cold—iron deficiency, a recent doctor diagnosed—but this felt like it could keep her warm for a long time if she let it catch. She couldn’t do that. She had watched her mother live in her anger; she saw A-Kwan doing the same. She couldn’t let her anger at the injustices of the world turn her into an inferno. Yukying would burn quickly, and the rage would leave nothing behind. That was how it went in her family. She had to let it all go; she didn’t want to be the type of person who carried this around inside. But how did one get rid of anger, except to let it burn?
“Are you resting?” Laurence asked as he set down his racket. He began to say something else but she interrupted,
“Laurence.” She meant to say more, but her voice cracked.
“Oh—what, um, are you—”
“Come here, please?”
He obeyed, lying down next to her. Before he could ask, she pressed her face into his shirt and started to cry. Her tears were silent, but her shoulders shook; his hands rubbed soothing circles on her back. The motions of simple comfort made her cry harder, but her tears dried quickly; soon she leaned her cheek on his chest and breathed slowly, gathering her calm back to her center.
“How can you be crying?” he asked as he smoothed her hair down. “We’re on vacation.”
Her laugh came out a hiccup. She didn’t always appreciate his distance from emotions, the way he rarely understood how a person could be overcome by them, but now she let him ground her. She wasn’t Tinseng; she didn’t have to experience life as though being tossed around by a hurricane.
“You’re right. We are on vacation.” She accepted his handkerchief and dabbed her eyes dry. “I’m sorry.”
“No reason to apologize,” he said, flustered as he always was during these displays. “Did your brothers say something?”
“No, no. It’s all right. I’m fine now.”
“If you’re sure,” he said in a tone that implied he didn’t believe her but wouldn’t push. She hugged him again, warmly this time, and he pulled her close.
