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By Root 1350 0

here in Vancouver and in a few days will dispatch them home via Hong Kong. The Sincere Company from Canton will contract the builders to do the work. They have agents here and have worked with Canadian firms for some years, so I know they are completely honest. I will manage the funding myself. However I cannot afford the passage home to oversee the work so Mak Dau and Ha Kau must supervise it very carefully. Please tell Mum that I am sorry not to be able to come home for her sixtieth birthday as a dutiful son should. Have you any definite news on when Kam Shan’s boat sails? I await his arrival eagerly. Do not send Kam Ho to school any more, in case any further accidents should befall him. Look for a suitable teacher who can teach him at home. Ask Mak Dau to find servants who can handle weapons, buy some Western and Chinese arms and keep the front gate guarded. Please take very good care, wife, and do not go out without taking men as bodyguards. I mean this most seriously.

Your husband, Tak Fat, the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month, 1910, Vancouver, Canada

Year one of the Republic (1912)

Spur-On Village, Hoi Ping County, Guangdong Province, China

As she dressed, Six Fingers realized she had put on weight. She had had her jacket made the previous autumn and now she could hardly get the buttons done up. The fabric cut into the flesh under her armpits and over her belly when she bent down. She knew it was because she had taken little exercise lately. Mrs. Mak had kept a close eye on her since the kidnapping two years before. Even though they had hired half a dozen strapping bodyguards to protect Six Fingers and Kam Ho round the clock, Mrs. Mak would not allow Six Fingers to take a step out of the house. Since she could not go out, Six Fingers shut herself in her room and practised her calligraphy and painting. Both, she felt, had markedly improved.

Six Fingers opened the window and heard Kam Ho reciting his morning lessons in the reception hall. A new teacher had just been engaged.

As for the way autumn takes shape, in colour it is bleak, the fog lifts and clouds begin to dissipate; the atmosphere is fresh and clear, with the sky high above and sunlight crystalline. The weather becomes cool, chilling men to the bone; it conveys desolation, amidst deserted mountains and rivers. Thus as it produces sound it is chilly and cutting, crying out in great anger. When luxuriant grasses are bright green they struggle to stand out; when the beautiful trees are lush it is easy to enjoy them. But as the grasses meet autumn their colour changes, and as the trees meet autumn they shed their leaves. The reason for this destruction and falling is the excess harshness of all its breath.

Six Fingers leaned against the window listening quietly. It sounded familiar. Maybe as a child she had learned the text in class with her nephew, young Loong. Wasn’t it from the “Rhapsody on Autumn Sounds” by the Song dynasty poet Ouyang Xiu? She should ask Kam Ho when he finished his class.

Kam Ho sounded so unlike Kam Shan, she thought to herself. Kam Shan had been gone two years now. Even before he left, Mrs. Mak was so sad she could not say his name without heaving a sigh that filled the reception hall like a draught. If Six Fingers tried to comfort her, Mrs. Mak would say she did not miss her men, not even her own flesh and blood. But if Six Fingers said nothing, Mrs. Mak would accuse her of wanting to take the whole family to Gold Mountain—leaving her, a lonely old woman behind, just waiting to die. So no matter what she said, she could not get it right. Mrs. Mak’s grief was so great, Six Fingers almost forgot that it was she who should be weeping and grieving over her son’s departure.

The year that Kam Shan left, he grew as fast as a moulting silkworm. His voice suddenly became gruff, and he croaked like a drake. When Ah-Choi washed his hair for him, she said: “The young master’s growing a beard!” At fifteen, the boy was already as tall as Mak Dau. Last New Year, in the gown and jacket he put on for the ancestral rites, he looked like