Movement XI · The Republic · Hong Kong's War of Resistance

The calamity of the opium he had fallen into in the late Qing took him decades to pull free of. By the time he stood straight again, the world had changed beyond recognition: the queues were gone, the empire gone, trains and electric lights come into the cities. Only this time he no longer had his own kind at his side — the opium of the late Qing had taken Zhao Hao; Chen Xiu, whom Ye Chenyu had turned with his own hands, had left in grief and never appeared again. He was alone once more.

(By this stretch of the road — counting from his rebirth in the Western Zhou — he had wandered some two thousand nine hundred and forty years; barely a hundred years had passed since the last era, the Qing: the gunshots of the Xinhai Revolution had scarcely faded before the warlords rose, and by the time he settled in Hong Kong, the clouds of war between China and Japan already hung overhead.) He walked forward with the years, like a cloud belonging to no dynasty, pushed now and then by the wind into the middle of some war.

This time he did not have to take a new name and become anyone's general or minister. A chaotic age has its own way of being lived.

He first arrived in Hong Kong in the nineteen-twenties of the Republic. The island was still quiet then; trams clattered along the shore, sailboats and steamers moored side by side in the harbour, and Western houses rose one by one on the hillside. He found a room by the sea and settled in; by day he wandered the streets, by night he walked in the direction of the scent — it was faint, as if beyond several ranges of mountains, not yet arrived at this city. He found himself strangely adrift: for two thousand years there had always been someone beside him he could talk to — Zhao Hao would slap his shoulder and say "That's the spirit," Chen Xiu would tuck in his blanket from the shadows. Now not even a shadow remained, and for a while he did not know how to live alone. He learned to sit over a pot of tea and a couple of dim sum at the teahouse, learned to read the war news in the papers, learned to live as an ordinary, aging lodger — though he did not age.

At night he often sat alone at the window, listening to the water of the harbour slap the shore, one wave at a time. For two thousand years, in almost every life, someone had kept vigil with him — in the Western Zhou, Wan handed him water by the campfire; in the Han, Heng warmed a pot of wine for him; under the lamps of the Sui and Tang general's residence there was always someone laughing and jesting until dawn. But this time the room held only himself, and the dim yellow streetlamp outside the window. He tried to make loneliness another kind of food — not blood, but that emptiness of having no one to wait for, and no one waiting for him. In time, he even grew used to it. Only sometimes, waking with a start in the small hours, his hand would still reach out of habit toward his side, and he would remember with a jolt: that place had long been empty — even the one who tucked in his blanket had scattered into the smoke of opium. Late at night he sometimes murmured, without meaning to: "Fair was old Chang'an at peace; this poem became a boat." He did not remember where the verse came from, nor what "this poem" referred to — only that those ten characters were the one thing harder than memory that he had carried out of his rebirth. On this island whose name he had all but forgotten, those few lines of meaningless rhyme had become the last strand of gossamer between him and "the self he used to be."

After he had lived there two or three years, an herbal tea shop opened downstairs. The shopkeeper was a widow; her name was Shi Jing, but from the day the "Tong Kee" sign went up the neighbors all called her Ah Tong, and the name stuck so well that even she answered to it faster than to her own. Her husband had crewed on boats and gone down in the South China Sea years before, leaving her alone with a medicine pot. She lit the fire before dawn — twenty-four herbs, hemp seed, sour plum — brewing pot after pot, and the whole street's morning was steeped in that bitter fragrance. Chenyu came down past her shop every day, and every day she called out, "Sir, have a bowl," rain or shine. At first he would not sit — after the late Qing he had made himself a rule: do not get close. Get close and you cannot bear to part; cannot bear to part, and you must watch people grow old. But Ah Tong paid no mind to rules of his: on typhoon nights she shouted up through the floorboards for him to take in his laundry; she set brewed soup down at his door; when his face looked pale she pressed a hot bowl into his hands. A dozen years passed this way. He never told her a word of the truth, and she never asked — the lease was renewed again and again, and she took him for a strange gentleman who never aged. The shop simmered with the smell of medicine all year round, the bitter fragrance settling heavy; once in a while he vaguely felt that beneath the smell was hidden something unnameably familiar — he took himself for old (though he did not age), took that bitterness for medicine someone had once warmed for him in some past life, and thought no further. He believed this was good enough: keeping one step apart, being an old neighbor of the street, keeping one street safe — that was the whole of his livelihood in this era.

He came to know Lü Xiao and Shi Gang at the teahouse. Both were laborers on the island — one carried sacks at the wharf, the other bore loads for hire in the hills — and in their free hours they came for morning tea and loved to talk of fresh news from down the hill. Listening to them — which lane had a new herbal tea shop, which ship had brought refugees from the north — he gradually found these two mortals honest enough to be fond of — more truly "alive," it seemed, than he, a thousand-year lonely ghost. In those months when the war clouds pressed down, Lü Xiao often sighed, "Who knows how many days are left of this peace?" He held his teacup, made no answer, only marked those two faces in his heart. Later they joined the East River Column, and following that thread he became once more the unseen shadow.

Lü Xiao was quick-tempered, Shi Gang a man of few words, but both were honest. Once they spoke of their home village, flattened by Japanese bombs; Lü Xiao slammed the table — "In this world, the living are worth less than a dog" — while Shi Gang only bowed his head and drained his tea, eyes rimmed red. Chenyu sat and said nothing. He had seen too much of such hatred, and too much of the courage that blossomed in it. Later Lü Xiao asked him, "Sir, you're of an age — why not come help us run a message or two?" He smiled and shook his head, saying only, "I have my own ways." They took him for a timid old man and pressed no further — none of them could have guessed that this silent lodger, at night, became the island's sharpest hidden arrow.

He had come to Hong Kong in the thirty-first year of the Republic, 1941 by the Western calendar. The full-scale war between China and Japan had broken out back in 1937, at the Marco Polo Bridge — the gunshots south of Beiping opened eight years of beacons and smoke; Nanjing fell, and three hundred thousand wronged souls were buried into that city's name; Chongqing became the wartime capital, and half of China was already in flames. This island too would be drawn in sooner or later. He stood in the shadow of Victoria Peak, watching this city — where in time to come he would live in Tsim Sha Tsui — covered over by firelight and gunsmoke, while the scent within him was quieter than it had ever been. She had not yet arrived.

He thought: if only she were on this island now — but the scent was still far, as far off as an entire span of modern history. So he folded that longing into his sleeve and went first to shield this city, so close now to catching fire. To shield the city was also to shield the place where she would one day come to stay.

Around Christmas the Japanese army crossed the border, and the guns on the island sounded for eighteen days. The Gin Drinkers' Line collapsed in a single day; the British fell back to Hong Kong Island; the Japanese crossed the harbour and landed, and every street and lane became a battlefield — those eighteen days were the longest eighteen days this city had ever known. The water of the harbour stayed as calm as ever, too calm for a place under bombardment.

In the gunfire he felt for the first time that this city was different from the falls of cities in his earlier lives. In the past, when a city fell, at most he shielded its people; but this time the enemy came from the sea, and even the sky burned red. He stood in the shadow of the Peak and watched the firelight crawl across the harbour, and suddenly wanted badly to gather the whole island into his arms — but he could shield people, not the city. All he could do was pull out, one by one, whoever could be saved from the fire.

In the weeks before the war the island had already fallen out of order. Star Ferry Pier was packed with refugees dragging children by the hand; the harbour ferries ran back and forth for their lives, loaded with furniture and chicken coops. He stood on the shore at Tsim Sha Tsui, caught a thread of unease floating in the salty sea wind, and suddenly remembered the stillness before every fall of a city in his past lives — that hush before a storm when even the cicadas fall silent. He had a premonition that this city, for which he had only just begun to feel attachment, was about to take a beating it had never taken. And indeed, around Christmas, the guns sounded for eighteen days.

Those weeks, he always walked along the shore at night. The sea wind carried salt, and saltpeter, and that scent that had always pulled at him — nearer than when he first came, yet still oceans away. He kept his hands in his sleeves and suddenly remembered how Zhao Hao used to say, "Big Brother, you walk too slow — people grow old ahead of you." Now Zhao Hao was gone, and he truly was alone; he had walked to the gate of these years of peace, only to find the same chaos behind it.

Eighteen Days · Street Fighting in Sai Wan

Through those eighteen days the Japanese cleared the streets house by house, and Sai Wan became a killing ground. Following the sound of weeping, Chenyu felt his way to a trapped Hong Kong family — five people huddled beneath a staircase while soldiers outside pounded the door with a grenade discharger. He slipped along the wall into the front room; his short knife crossed one soldier's throat, and the man dropped voiceless before the blood could even spurt. Another sentry crept up from behind; he touched his toes to the floor, swept past the crowd, pinned the man back into the dark, drank once from the side of his neck — red bloom drawn dry, the man silent. Outside, shellfire filled the sky; like a shadow in the dark he delivered the family to an air-raid shelter in Happy Valley. The mother looked back and saw only a blurred figure vanish into the smoke, never knowing that for that half-cup of tea, death had stood one door away.

That night he made his way to another household: an old woman living alone, her eyes gone dim, groping through the bombardment to cover the rice jar she was keeping for her grandchild, unaware that soldiers had already come in outside. As he stepped in, a Japanese soldier was seizing the old woman by the collar to drag her away; his short blade sank into the man's neck, and he dragged the body dead into the corner, then helped the old woman back to sit by the stove, sealed the rice jar, and said softly, "Don't be afraid. When the fire passes, someone will come." She had no idea who he was, only murmured prayers to Buddha over and over. As he withdrew into the smoke he suddenly felt that on this long road he had saved generals and ministers, saved cities in their founding — and in the end, what he most wanted to protect was the rice jar at the hand of a dim-eyed old woman.

Afterward the old woman often dried rice on the rooftop and told the neighbors, "A good man came that night." They took her for senile. But once, at the street corner, she narrowed her dim eyes and called "Good man" after a figure hurrying past — Chenyu did not answer, and walked into the crowd. She knew him; however dim her eyes, she knew him. And Chenyu, passing, never stopped — he feared that to stop was to be remembered. But he remembered the old woman: remembered her hand feeling its way in the dark to cover the rice jar, remembered her murmured prayers. Years later he would still sometimes detour past those old tenements; the buildings were long torn down, nothing left but wind, and he stood in the wind as if listening for a belated thank-you.

Another time, at a street corner in Sai Ying Pun, he came upon three Japanese soldiers surrounding a girl in a school uniform — a student of St. Stephen's College, suspected of carrying messages for the guerrillas. He dropped from the eaves; his short blade struck point after point, and the three soldiers crumpled before a single cry escaped them. The girl was too frightened to speak; he only pushed her toward the safe house: "Go. Don't look back." She really did go on to study in the wartime interior, and half a century later wrote of that night in the papers, saying only, "A shadow saved me, and to this day I don't know who he was." He read that article after 2000, and smiled faintly.

There were those he failed to reach. Those same nights, at the other end of Sai Wan, a household never got the chance to wait for him — when the soldiers broke in, the mother pushed her two children into the cavity behind the cupboard and was dragged out herself. He arrived at the sound, and only in time to touch, through the crack in the wall, the children's trembling hands. He saved the two children but could not save their mother. He crouched outside the wall cavity and thought of his vow, the injunction against altering the great currents of history: this chaos was made to swallow countless mothers like her; he could save one household, not a whole era. He could only smuggle the two children off the island and swallow the helplessness back down.

He fed on the hunting of Japanese soldiers. This was when he was least torn — with every enemy he killed he thought of the three hundred thousand wronged souls beneath Nanjing; a blood debt must be collected by someone. Fighting alone was quieter: no one shielding him, no one demanding he divide his attention to protect them; where the blade flashed, there was only the blade.

Fighting alone was exhilarating, and cold. In the Sui and Tang, in the Ming, there had always been sworn brothers at his side to feed the fire and keep watch; now there was not even someone to hand him water. When he finished killing he licked the blade clean, and the stillness around him held nothing but his own breathing. Sometimes he would stop short — as if he could still hear Zhao Hao laughing behind him, "Big Brother, on your own again" — and turning, find only smoke. He shook his head and slid the blade back into his sleeve. This solitude was what he had carried out of the opium smoke of the late Qing, and he accepted it.

The ones who dealt with him in the dark were Lü Xiao and Shi Gang, two couriers of the Hong Kong–Kowloon Brigade of the East River Column, who trusted this "shadow" but never saw his face. The invading soldiers burned villages, seized grain, pressed laborers; at night he slipped into their camps, found one isolated, drank once from the side of his neck — a day passed. If they moved in squads, he drained one and bought three days of peace. With the red bloom drawn, the man fell silent, and no one discovered that an undying avenger was hidden on this island. He carried his old rule — draw the red bloom for food, never be found by his own side — to its uttermost: when Lü Xiao's people moved the wounded by night or rescued trapped intellectuals and ran into danger, he quietly cut down the pursuers, never showing himself; when civilians were trapped in the street fighting, he slipped them into dark alleys in the confusion and withdrew himself into the seams of the shellfire. One man was a hidden arrow that never tired. Occasionally his mind wandered: in the old days, at such moments, Zhao Hao's short staff and Chen Xiu's twin blades would have been cutting the path beside him; now those two figures lived only in the emptied rooms left behind when the opium smoke cleared.

The East River Column · The Night Line

With the occupation accomplished, resistance moved into the shadows. Lü Xiao and Shi Gang's unit carved a "night line" through the villages and mountain paths of Kowloon and Hong Kong: medicines, radios, and rescued intellectuals smuggled off the island leg by leg. Chenyu became the least visible stretch of that line — scouting routes, clearing sentries, covering the rear during transfers. Once, a column of medicine-porters was being searched by military police at Shing Mun; he lay along a beam, and when a policeman raised his hand to search, a small stone flew from the dark and struck the lamp above the man's head; in the blackness the porters melted into the crowd and dispersed. Afterward Shi Gang said only, "The wind was strong tonight; the lamp went out by itself," and no one asked more. Watching these mortals risk their lives on the line, Chenyu suddenly understood: his undying body was made for exactly this — not for eternal life, but so that those willing to risk their own lives might die a few fewer.

Once, moving wounded men, Shi Gang nearly caught sight of him. That night Chenyu had just finished off a pursuer without a sound and was about to withdraw into the dark when Shi Gang came around the fork of the path with a torch, its light sweeping the base of the wall, nearly catching the blood still wet on his cuff. He held his breath against the wall; fortunately Shi Gang was drawn away by some movement in the distance and did not turn back. Afterward Shi Gang muttered to Lü Xiao only, "There was a smell like rust in the wind tonight," and Lü Xiao laughed at him for imagining things. Chenyu listened from the dark and suddenly felt these two mortals were sharper than he thought — and precisely because they were sharp, he had to hide all the more completely. A shadow that is seen is no longer a shadow.

Mountain Paths · Escorting the Liaison Post

One night during the occupation, Lü Xiao brought urgent word: Old Zhou, who ran the liaison post coordinating the whole island, had been exposed; the Japanese were searching house to house, and he had to be got out to the New Territories that very night. Chenyu went with Shi Gang, moving in darkness over the small paths across the Kowloon hills. Halfway they met a patrol of military police sweeping the mountain; he crouched low to the ground, and as the enemy came near he ended them one by one from behind with his short blade — red bloom drawn dry, the men silent — in less time than it takes a lamp of oil to burn. Old Zhou gasped, "This life was given me by the shadow"; he only shook his head and pushed the man toward the relief party waiting ahead. In the mountain wind he suddenly thought of the countless people he had shielded across a thousand years — generals and ministers, cities, a dim-eyed old woman, a girl in a school uniform — and understood that what he had been protecting, all along, was the same single thing: that those still willing to live might be allowed to live on.

On the way, Old Zhou asked him in a low voice, "Brother — what manner of man are you, really?" He paused, and answered only, "The same as you. Wanting the people on this island to live a few lives longer." Old Zhou asked no more; once in the New Territories he insisted on taking him as a sworn elder brother, and he refused, only pushing the man toward the relief party. He had stopped swearing brotherhood long ago — since Chang Yan left him in the Ming, he had feared that to claim another "brother" was to see another one walk away. What this road had taught him was not protection but the holding back from closeness; draw close and you cannot bear to part, and then you must watch them grow old.

The Kempeitai · Rescuing the Hostages

In the years of the occupation the kempeitai detained a number of intellectuals, interrogating them by day, making them disappear by night. Lü Xiao's people came to beg Chenyu — this time, he would rescue them. In the middle of the night he slipped into the alley behind the kempeitai post, pried open the cell door, and woke the prisoners one by one. A kempeitai sergeant, hearing the sound, came charging; a bayonet drove straight for his back. He turned aside, caught the sergeant's wrist, pinned him against the wall, drank once from the side of his neck — red bloom drawn dry, the man silent — finished without a sound. He led the intellectuals out through a tunnel and saw them into a safe house before dawn. This time what he saved were unarmed scholars — Chenyu thought: turning people could not save this chaos, but the blade could still cut a way out for the nameless.

The night of the rescue he carried a wounded intellectual through the tunnel, the man's blood soaking through his shoulder. Half-conscious, the man asked, "Benefactor, your name?" He made no answer, only lifted the man a little higher. Out of the tunnel he handed him over to the students waiting in relief, turned, and vanished down the end of the alley. He did not want a name — in six thousand years he had been remembered seldom and forgotten often; yet every forgetting meant that those he had protected had gone on living well. By that reckoning, he always came out ahead.

Victoria Harbour · The Grain Ship Raid

In the third year of the occupation, Japanese grain ships lay at anchor in the harbour, rice piled mountain-high in their holds, while on shore the people of Hong Kong stood in long queues for rations. Chenyu raided by night. He slipped into the hold and lowered the sacks of grain one by one down to a small boat; a kempeitai sergeant guarding the ship came charging at the sound, bayonet driving straight at him; he reversed, caught the sergeant's wrist, drank once from the side of his neck — red bloom drawn dry, the man silent — finished without a sound. Under cover of night he carried the seized rice to the internment camps and the slums. That night, who knows how many households had a New Year without hunger because of those few boatloads of rice.

The night he handed out the rice, he came upon a small thief who had come to steal it, crouching under the eaves of the slum, thin enough that his ribs showed. The thief raised half a loaf to smash at him, then froze at the sight of his face — those gray, sunken eyes, not the eyes of a living man. Chenyu did not strike back; he only stuffed a sack of rice into the boy's arms and said quietly, "Take it. Don't steal again." The boy hugged the rice and ran, looked back after a few steps, as if he could not believe the world still held anyone willing to give. Standing in the shadows, Chenyu suddenly felt that the hardest thing to save in this chaos was not hunger but that "cannot believe" in the boy's eyes. Turning people could not save this chaos, he thought; but the blade and the shadow could still cut a way out for the nameless.

Smuggling by Sea · The Lifeboats

In the years of the occupation, many families on the island wanted to send their young out of danger — to Huizhou, to the wartime interior. Lü Xiao's people gathered a few lifeboats and slipped out to sea in the dark; the most perilous stretch was past the Japanese patrol boats. Chenyu lay at the bow like a silent guardian — when a patrol boat's light swept over, he slipped into the water and quietly nudged the tiller aside, letting their own boat slide past the reefs; when an isolated sentry leaned out to look, his hand rose from beneath the water, dragged the man under, one drink from the side of the neck, finished without a sound. Thus a single boat carrying a dozen-odd children and women crossed the blockade. The mothers who saw them off from shore never knew that beneath the surface an undying man was keeping watch for them at that gate of hell.

After the boats set out he floated in the water a long while, watching the stern light grow small. Under the water it was very quiet — quiet enough to hear his own heartbeat, if he had one. He thought of that scent, thought whether she too, in this chaos, might be fleeing with a child in her arms, entrusting her life to some unknown shadow. He had protected countless mothers and children, yet had never protected anything for that scent — she was still at the far end of six thousand years, not yet arrived in this city. And so he soaked in the cold sea, and turned one man's vigil into a habit.

The Occupation · Trouble at the Rice Shop

One day during the occupation a scuffle broke out over rations in front of a rice shop; Japanese soldiers leveled their rifles to drive the crowd back, and the old, the weak, the women and children were about to go down under rifle butts. Chenyu was mixed into the crowd, keeping his hands hidden, only quietly steadying the old men about to be kicked down, pushing children behind the wall of bodies. When a rifle butt swung at an old woman he pressed a finger to the soldier's knee, and the man staggered and drew back his gun; another soldier who lunged he tripped into the midst of the crowd. In the confusion he gathered the old woman out of harm's way — like a wind from the dark, and so the bloodbath before the rice shop never happened. The old woman never knew; she said only that her luck was strong. Chenyu thought: on this road he had killed armies by the thousand, and in the end what he most wanted was this — to protect, without leaving a trace, an old stranger.

After the trouble at the rice shop, the old woman later recognized him at the ration station and said in a trembling voice, "Young man, that day it was you who pulled me back." He only smiled and handed her half a steamed bun he had quietly saved. She moved to thank him, and he had already melted into the crowd. He did not want thanks — the word was too heavy; it would press down what little warmth was left in this chaos until it became a burden. He wanted only that she live on, live to the liberation, live to hold her grandchild and say, "Back then there was a shadow." Shadows were never meant to be remembered; what should be remembered were the ones who lived.

He had protected many people. But he remembered the line that must not be crossed: history was not to be changed.

So the three hundred thousand of Nanjing he could not bring back; so in Hong Kong's eighteen days he could only save the one in front of him. He was not a god — only a bystander who could not grow old, watching dynasties turn their pages, watching people go off one generation after another, while he stayed nailed to the spot. Sometimes he asked himself: this undying body — was it grace, or punishment? Six thousand years of asking, and still no answer.

New Year's Eve · The Air-Raid Shelter

On the first New Year's Eve after the fall, Japanese planes came by night and the sirens screamed. Chenyu went along the streets, hurrying civilians into the air-raid shelters. A woman clutching an infant fell in the middle of the road, the fire of the planes' strafing already licking at her heels; he threw himself over mother and child, and with his short blade finished a lone Japanese soldier who came lunging. He gathered this family, with a dozen-odd neighbors besides, into the shelter. As the dust thrown up by the blast at the entrance came down, the infant in the woman's arms was howling — the sound of the living. Leaning against the wall of the shelter, breathing the smell of blood mixed with dust, he suddenly thought: on this road he had shielded generals and ministers, shielded cities in their founding, and in the end what he most wanted to protect was a baby's cry like this one. If Zhao Hao were still here he would surely laugh: "Big Brother, you old soft thing — the longer you live, the softer you get." But Zhao Hao was gone; there was no one to laugh, and no one to lean against the shelter wall beside him and listen to that cry.

In the shelter the woman later insisted on asking his name; he said only, "Just call me the shadow." The woman shook her head — "What shadow ever takes a blade for someone?" He did not explain. When the dust at the entrance had settled he felt his way out into the dark, and behind him the baby's cries were fading and the woman's low prayers going on. Walking among the shattered walls, he suddenly wanted, very badly, for someone to say, "Big Brother, it's been hard on you." But Zhao Hao was gone, Chen Xiu was gone; there was not even a brother left to pass him a cigarette. And so he carried the night of the whole island on his shoulders alone, and carried it until the sky went pale at the edge.

Rationing Years · The Darkness in the Streets

In the years of the occupation, queues stretched outside the rice shops, the walls bore slogans of the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity," and behind them were rationing and hunger, kempeitai interrogation and disappearance. He saw the other face of darkness: some betrayed their neighbors for half a sack of rice; some pushed decent young women into the barracks to buy safety. Once, in a mean alley in Sai Ying Pun, he watched with his own eyes a young man give up a guerrilla in hiding for a ration card — the young man's hands shook as he took the card, but his eyes looked elsewhere; he did not dare look at the man being dragged away. It reminded him of the officials of the early Qing who sold their country willingly for silver. The cowardice in human nature, it turned out, chose no dynasty. He set his teeth and turned all his rage into the night's hunting — he killed only enemies who carried guns, never his own unarmed countrymen. It was the one clean line he kept for himself. That young man later starved to death in front of the ration station. He passed by, did not reach out a hand, and did not turn his face away — the cowardice and the hunger were both real; he had no right to punish, and no power to save.

He stood a long time in that mean alley, watching the cold gleam of the ration card in the young man's hand. He knew this cowardice too well — had the opium of the late Qing not destroyed that same "refusal" in men? The weakness in human nature chose no dynasty, and chose no rich or poor either. He turned and walked into the night, to hunt the hunt that belonged to him alone. Deep in the darkness, that scent which had pulled at him for six thousand years seemed to come a little nearer — as if answering one man's loneliness, as if reminding him: this stop was almost over; the next stop was recognition.

He also saw those who would not be cowards. Once, in front of a rice shop, a small thin woman was being held down to be sold into the barracks for grain; she bit the man's hand and would not let go, blood smeared over her face. He had not meant to show himself, but that refusal was the very image of Ah Wan's last struggle before she was dragged into the opium den — he walked over, gave one shove, and flung the man into the mud, then took the woman away. Later she pressed half a sweet potato into his hands; he did not eat it, but he accepted the warmth of it. Only then did he understand: in this chaos, cowardice and courage were two halves torn from the same body, and what he protected was never "the right people" — it was that little spark of refusal that had not yet been starved to death.

The woman who would not be a coward later really did get out of the city and made her way, by one route and another, to the wartime interior. Years afterward she sent word through someone that the man who had pulled her back that day she remembered all her life. When Chenyu heard it he only smiled faintly. Most of those he saved never knew what he looked like; yet it was precisely that "never knowing" that made him feel he was still something like a man — not a monster, just an ordinary undying one, willing to reach out a hand from the dark.

The Quarantine Camp · Stolen Medicine

In the years of the occupation, epidemic spread with hunger; the Japanese set up quarantine camps and gave medicine only to their own wounded. The sick children of Hong Kong died of malaria for want of medicine. At night Chenyu slipped into the kempeitai medicine store; a kempeitai sergeant inside, hearing the sound, came charging, bayonet driving straight for his back; he reversed, caught the sergeant's wrist, drank once from the side of his neck — red bloom drawn dry, the man silent — finished without a sound. He carried out the quinine, crate by crate, through the tunnel and gave it to Lü Xiao's people to pass into the quarantine camp. That night, who knows how many sick children lived because of those few crates of medicine.

As he carried the empty crates back into the tunnel he heard a sick child somewhere deep in the camp humming a Cantonese nursery tune, the melody crooked but clear. He stood a moment and did not go in. He feared that if he went in he would begin to think of turning the child, of keeping them — but turning could not save this chaos, and turning could not keep a person who ought to live and live well. He only kept the tune in his heart, as his payment for that night. Years later he would still sometimes find himself humming it, and humming it, remember the countless children on this island he had saved but never met.

Opium · The Shop Downstairs

Under Japanese rule, opium was banned in the open and fostered in the dark — opium dens opened under other signs, and heroin flowed into the streets along the channels of the ration system. The hungry used it against hunger; the suffering used it against pain. This city was being beaten in exactly the way Guangzhou had been beaten a few decades before.

In the second year of the occupation, Ah Tong's shop closed. The younger brother she had brought out from her home village had never made it into an air-raid shelter in those eighteen days. She kept the medicine pot and brewed on for more than half a year, but in the end she could not outlast it. Chenyu, coming back from the night's hunt, found the shop door boarded up and assumed the rationing had cut off her herbs. Half a year later he caught, at the foot of the stairs, that sweet, cloying rankness — the smell he hated above all others across two lives. The night he broke the door open, Ah Tong was thin as a bundle of bones, curled on the bed, the pipe resting beside the medicine pot. When she saw him she even smiled: "Sir, have a seat." Just as on every night of a dozen years.

He snapped her pipe, nailed shut the doors and windows, and kept her through the withdrawal. A body coming off opium is harder to keep than a soldier on a battlefield: she beat against the wall, bit, vomited up her bile, passed out and came to. And in the passing out and coming to, she began to speak — and what she spoke was not the speech of this life.

"The water skin..." Her eyes were closed, her hand groping over the quilt, as if handing something to someone by a campfire. "Cold by the fire... take a sip of water..."

"The wine is warmed," she said one night, sitting up suddenly, speaking into the dark. "Come back and drink... it won't do once it's cold."

"Don't cry," she said, wiping the eyes of someone unseen in the air. "I'll pinch you a little dough figure... one on horseback..."

"The silver flask..." She cupped her two hands together, as if holding something she would not let go. "Hold it tight... don't drop it..."

"If the felt coat is torn, take it off," her fingers walked stitch by stitch over the quilt. "I'll mend it for you. It's cold in the north; you never would wear enough."

Chenyu sat at the bedside, not daring to move. These were words she could not possibly know how to say — in this life she had never seen a water skin by a campfire, never warmed that pot of wine, never pinched a dough figure, never held a silver flask, never sewn a felt coat for the north. But he had heard every one of them. Sentence by sentence, all of it heard across these three thousand years, from her mouths, at her ears' side, out of her dreams, life after life. He was suddenly cold all over, colder than she was on the bed.

On the last night she grew quiet, her eyes unnaturally bright. She looked at him, looked a long time, and said suddenly, "Brother Chen, you're a man... waiting for someone, aren't you." — Qi had said that once; Chang Yan had said it; so many of her had said it. But they always laughed first, themselves, after saying it. Ah Tong did not laugh. She only said again: "After all these years of waiting... this time, let me go one step ahead." Then she closed her eyes, as if only sleepy.

Through the half hour of her dying she did not speak again. But just as the last breath hung between ending and not ending, the sweet, cloying reek of opium in the room suddenly dispersed — whatever had soaked into her blood and settled over her body dispersed with that breath. And in the instant it cleared, Chenyu smelled it: cool and clean, like a river in winter. That scent he had followed for three thousand years, believing it oceans away — just like that, in a ruined room with its doors and windows nailed shut, it rose to the surface.

So she had been on this island all along. So she had been right downstairs, steeped in the smell of medicine and opium, steeped for a dozen years. Night after night he had walked toward the scent and the sea, believing she lay beyond the oceans — she had been downstairs, brewing his soup all those years.

His hands shook. These hands had put out an entire army, and now they shook too hard to hold one of hers. He bent down, his teeth half an inch from her wrist — turn her, and she would not have to go; turn her... — and then he froze where he stood. Three thousand years, and he had kept this one unbroken rule: not one of them may be turned. An undying body would spoil that reunion still eighty years away. He pressed his forehead against her wrist, and inch by inch felt the pulse slow, grow light, and stop.

That night the neighbors of Sai Wan said there was a beast weeping in the room upstairs. The weeping was not loud, yet the whole street lay sleepless. By daybreak it was gone. A cat, the neighbors said.

He saw to her funeral, and only then learned that her name was Shi Jing. A dozen years of neighbors, and all he had ever known was to call her Ah Tong, all he knew was that those two characters were the name the shop sign downstairs had given her — he had never once asked. From the wooden sign of "Tong Kee" he sawed off the small corner bearing the single character Tong — the gold she had painted herself the year the shop opened was still on it — and put it into the same box as the old jade pendant and the old bronze belt hook. The whole board was too large to keep; he split it for firewood and lit a fire to brew one last pot of twenty-four herbs. Her shop lit its own last fire. This one box held every farewell he had gathered across two lives. For many years after he still lived upstairs; the shop below became a sweet-soup stall, then a barbershop, and at last was torn down and rebuilt, and he never once went down to look. Only every twelfth month he brewed a pot of twenty-four herbs and drank it himself. Bitter. He never thought of adding sugar — hers had been bitter too.

The Eve of Liberation · Clearing the Last Holdouts

On the eve of the Japanese surrender, a force of holdouts dug into a pillbox on Hong Kong Island and vowed to bring the whole place down with them. Chenyu raided by night. He slipped in through the ventilation shaft; his short knife crossed the first man's throat, and the man dropped voiceless before the blood could spurt; the machine gunner who turned to look he took from behind. Like a shadow in the dark he finished every holdout without a sound, sparing the last needless bloodshed before dawn. As the sky lightened he withdrew into the seams of the shellfire, and from far off came the first broadcast announcing the surrender.

When the pillbox was cleared he stood on the broken walls, watching the east go pale. This battle was his last on any battlefield — from then on, the enemy would no longer be soldiers with guns, but time, and memory, and that scent drawing ever nearer. He wiped the last drop of blood from his blade, the way one wipes away the full stop at the end of an era.

In August 1945 the news of the atomic bomb reached the island, and the Japanese army surrendered. On the day of liberation some wept in the streets and some set off firecrackers, and the red paper of the firecrackers lay strewn all the way to the door of the shop downstairs that would never open again. Standing in the crowd, breathing the long-unfamiliar wind that carried no smell of blood — the wind no longer carried her — he suddenly felt hungry. With the war over, his food was cut off too — the red bloom of battlefield enemies being spent, he took instead to slipping into hospitals at night to steal packs of blood from the blood bank: this was his new way of taking food in this era, no longer stooping to draw the red bloom of enemies, but drawing it instead from bags in cold storage. Wars had grown fewer; even the rules had to change. From then on he had to learn again how to live as an ordinary man in years of peace without a battlefield.

In the years after liberation he still kept to Tsim Sha Tsui. Once in the street he met Lü Xiao, now an old man; the two sat facing each other in a teahouse, and Lü Xiao did not recognize him, took him for a familiar-looking lodger, and rambled on about how the "shadow" of the old days had helped them run the line. Chenyu listened, turning his teacup half around in his hands, and answered quietly, "That shadow, now — a good man, that one." Lü Xiao laughed — "The good ones died long ago; the ones who lived are old." He lowered his head and drank his tea, saying nothing — he had neither died nor grown old; he had only remembered that war, alone, to the very last.

He did not leave Hong Kong. Some time, he could not say when, the island had become the place he was willing to stay — her grave was here; the old ground of that shop was here. And there was a premonition that pinned him even more firmly: that scent, in the end, would come down in this city. This time he dared not let any whiff of that scent pass under his nose masked by some other smell. He later moved into Tsim Sha Tsui, and every day looked toward West Kowloon, waiting for an opening that had not yet come. He did not yet know that his memory had already faded to the point where he would forget what he was waiting for — he would remember only that he must wait. And through all that waiting, there was no more of Zhao Hao's "That's the spirit" at his side, no more of Chen Xiu's hand tucking in his blanket from the shadows. In the decades after liberation he watched the island change its face again and again — the public housing estates of the fifties, the refugee tides of the sixties, the rattle of sewing machines in the garment factories of the seventies, the skyline of Central in the eighties — and he stayed in Tsim Sha Tsui all the while, keeping watch toward West Kowloon, that stretch still sea and waste ground. A man with a failing memory cannot even feel his own waiting; he remembered only that he must wait, and little by little forgot whom he waited for. Not until 2022, when the Hong Kong Palace Museum opened in West Kowloon, did that scent draw near at last — but that must be left to the final chapter. Alone, he waited until 2022.

*(End of this movement. Next: Final Chapter · Recognition at the Hong Kong Palace Museum.)*