“Don’t feel bad, it happened a long time ago.”
“You must miss her.”
“I do. None of my other relatives are funny. Everyone’s boring and works too hard, especially my grandpa.”
“You’re quite unfilial to say such things about your family, especially to a stranger.”
“Trust me, Gong Gong would consider ‘boring and hardworking’ as two markers of great character.” Tommy grinned. “And we’ve met before, you’re hardly a stranger.”
“You don’t know my name.”
“I will when you tell me.”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Come now, I regaled you with stories about my family. My mum’s side, anyway. What do I know about you? That you like listening to birds and—”
“Nothing,” I interrupted. I reached for the strawberries. “You know nothing about me. I like being invisible.”
“Invisible.” Tommy was intrigued. “Why?”
Because it’s safer that way,I thought. Because Sai Ma would leave me alone and I wouldn’t entertain any impossible dreams about becoming a famous singer. But instead I said, “When people forget you’re there, you get to see and hear a lot.”
“So, little hwamei,” he mused, “you’re a spy.”
“I’m a survivor,” I said. “Like my mama.”
I glanced down at the dangling peanut on my bracelet. “I never met my mama’s family. My grandfather was a cabbage farmer from the north.”
“My grandfather’s a farmer, too. He grows soybeans.”
“In Hong Kong?”
“It’s hard to grow soybeans here. His farm is in the Zhejiang Province. That’s where he grew up—he learned to make soymilk from his mother, and he’d ride on his bicycle delivering it to their neighbors. When he moved to Hong Kong, he turned it into a business. Do you like soymilk?”
“I like soda more.”
“So you don’t like soymilk?”
He certainly asked a lot of questions about soymilk.
“It was a treat during the war,” I replied. “My mother grew a few soybean plants—we’d soak the beans for a few days, thenmash them into gruel. When we were lucky, Mama was able to barter for some sugarcane.” I licked my lips, reminiscing about the droplets of sweet soymilk my brothers and I had squeezed out from the gruel.
“I bet it tasted better than soda.”
“Anything tastes good when you have nothing.”
Tommy gave a small but inscrutable smile. “Lots of families survived off soybeans during the war. It’s a miracle food. Nutritious, too.”
Like luncheon meat,I thought.The other miracle food.
“Friends joke that my mum nursed me with it as a baby.”
I cocked my head. “Why do you call your mother ‘mum’?”
“I go to a British school,” he explained. “Grandpa says English is the language of the future.”
“Madam Chan says it’s the language of the colonizers,” I retorted. “But since the colonizers are rich, she has a tutor come into the factory to teach her. Honestly, it hasn’t done her much good—everyone secretly thinks she sounds like a dog when she speaks.”
