The Forbidden Love That Colonial Hong Kong Could Never Allow#

He spotted them through the window of the Peninsula Hotel. Third floor, the tearoom, where the light had that old-gold quality and the curtains hung heavy enough to swallow the sound of the harbor. Dichen was at a table near the window—his window, the one she always picked when they met in public, the one that let her watch the entrance and the street at the same time. A habit she kept even in moments that weren’t, technically, operational.

She wasn’t alone.

The man across from her was British. Obviously British—the posture, the haircut, the way he held his teacup with the handle at a precise angle, like teacup-holding was a skill they taught at schools Namchoi would never set foot in. Tall, fair-haired, wearing a civilian suit that fit too well to be off-the-rack, which meant money or military. In Hong Kong in late 1941, the distinction hardly mattered.

They were laughing. Dichen was laughing. Her head tilted back slightly, her hand resting on the tablecloth near—not touching, near—the man’s hand. The gesture was so small it could’ve meant nothing. It meant everything.

Namchoi stood on the street below, in the November afternoon, holding a paper bag of oranges he’d bought from a cart on Salisbury Road. He watched them through the window. He felt his stomach drop the way it does when you step off a ledge you didn’t know was there.

~

He knew. Of course he knew. He’d always known, the way you know the weather’s going to turn—not because someone tells you, but because the air shifts, the pressure drops, the light takes on a quality your body reads before your mind can translate it. Dichen was a British woman in a British colony. She had a life outside the flat on Pottinger Street—a life with colleagues, friends, social obligations, and, inevitably, as certain as the tides, men who shared her language, her passport, her access to the upper floors of the Peninsula Hotel.

He knew all this. He’d accepted it. Filed it in the same mental cabinet where he kept other facts that were true and beside the point—the color of the sky, the price of rice, the number of steps from the tea house to the harbor. True. Noted. Moved past.

But knowing and seeing are different countries. You can live your whole life in the country of knowing—comfortable, rational, protected by the high walls of logic and the moats of self-control. Then you see. One image. One gesture. One hand resting near another hand on a white tablecloth in golden light. And the walls come down. Not slowly, not brick by brick, not with any warning. All at once, like a building in an earthquake—the structure was sound, the engineering was solid, and none of it mattered, because the ground moved.

The ground moved.

~

He walked. He didn’t go to the flat on Pottinger Street. Didn’t go to the warehouse on Bonham Strand West. He walked along the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, past the Star Ferry pier, past the clock tower, past the cargo berths where coolies were unloading crates from a freighter out of Singapore—a ship that would leave for Shanghai and knew nothing about the private catastrophes of men walking past its hull.

The oranges in the paper bag were for Dichen. He’d bought them because she’d mentioned, once, in the flat, in the dark, in those hours between midnight and dawn when people say things they don’t mean and mean things they don’t say—she’d mentioned missing the oranges from the market in Pontypridd. Welsh oranges, she called them, though they were actually Spanish oranges sold by a Welsh grocer. But in her memory they were Welsh, and memory carries its own passport.

He threw the bag into the harbor. The oranges floated, bright against the gray water, then drifted apart, carried by currents that had nothing to do with anyone’s intentions.

~

The rational mind is a hell of a machine. It can process information, assign probabilities, build frameworks, and arrive at conclusions that are logically bulletproof and emotionally useless. Namchoi’s rational mind, walking along the waterfront, assembled the following arguments with the speed and precision of Yip Chi-wai’s accounting ledgers:

She’s British. I’m Chinese. We don’t have a future. We barely have a present—just a string of stolen nights in a flat with bad plumbing. She doesn’t owe me anything. I don’t owe her anything. We never made promises. Never swore oaths. The twelve oaths of the Xin Xing She cover brotherhood, loyalty, and silence—they say nothing about love, because love isn’t an organizational resource. It can’t be codified, managed, or enforced.

She’s a police officer. I’m a criminal. In the colony’s taxonomy, we exist on opposite sides of a line that was drawn before either of us was born. Crossing that line in private doesn’t erase it. The line is the colony. The colony is the line.

He’s British. He drinks tea the right way. Holds the cup at the right angle. He can walk into the Peninsula Hotel through the front door, sit in the tearoom, and rest his hand near hers on a white tablecloth in golden light, and nobody looks twice. If I walked into that same tearoom, every head would turn. Every waiter would size me up. Every table would recalibrate its conversation. I’d be a disturbance in the field. He is the field.

This isn’t jealousy. This is architecture. This is the shape of the world we live in, and the world doesn’t reshape itself to accommodate the feelings of one Chinese gangster who made the mistake of falling in—

He stopped. Stopped walking, stopped thinking, because the sentence he was building was about to land on a word he’d never used. Not out loud, not silently, not even in the dark, not even in those hours between midnight and dawn.

He didn’t use it now.

~

Three days went by. He didn’t contact Dichen. Didn’t go to the flat. He threw himself into Xin Xing She business with the focused efficiency of a man using work as a barricade—meetings with Wong Tai-keung about the Sham Shui Po expansion, a dispute between two 49-ranked members over a gambling debt, the ongoing surveillance of the Nathan Road barbershop. He ate. He slept. He woke at three a.m. and lay in the dark staring at the ceiling and told himself things.

He told himself a lot of things.

It doesn’t matter. (It mattered.)

We’re not in a relationship. (They were in something that didn’t have a name, which is more dangerous than a relationship, because unnamed things can’t be ended—only abandoned.)

She can do what she wants. (She could. That was the problem. She could do what she wanted, and what she wanted might not include him, and the possibility of not being included felt like a hand reaching into his chest and rearranging the furniture.)

I’ve survived worse. (He had. Famine. Beatings. The ghost pond. But those were things that happened to his body from the outside. This was internal. This was the body attacking itself—the immune system mistaking the self for the enemy.)

I don’t need her. (He needed her. Not the way he needed food or water or shelter—those needs could be met by substitution. He needed her the way a language needs a listener. Without her, the things he said—the real things, the things he said in the dark, in the flat, in those hours between—became sounds without meaning. Noise.)

The rationalizations stacked up like tiles on a mahjong table. Every one was valid. Every one was correctly played. And the hand, taken as a whole, was losing.

~

On the fourth day, Dichen sent a message through the usual channel—a folded note left with the tea house owner on Des Voeux Road, tucked inside a newspaper, same as always. The note said: Tuesday. 8pm. The usual place.

Professional. Clipped. Exactly what she always wrote. Nothing different. Nothing extra. No acknowledgment that three days of silence had happened, because in their world, silence wasn’t absence—it was the default state. Communication was the exception.

He went. Of course he went. The flat on Pottinger Street, the bad plumbing, the cabinet with the whiskey, the window looking out on the harbor. He got there at eight. She arrived at eight-fifteen. Wearing the police mackintosh, unbuttoned. Hair pinned up the way it was on duty. She looked like exactly what she was—a British police inspector at the end of a shift, carrying a folder of documents, entering a building for professional reasons.

She set the folder on the desk. Poured two whiskies. Handed him one.

“You’ve been quiet,” she said.

“Busy.”

“The Kwok situation?”

“Resolved.”

She nodded. Sipped her whiskey. Looked at him over the rim of the glass, and in that look was the entire problem—the warmth and the distance, the intimacy and the impossibility, the fact that she could see through every mask he wore except the one he was wearing right now, because this particular mask was made of the same material as his face.

He almost asked. The question was right there, fully formed, sitting on his tongue like a hot coal: Who was he? Four syllables. Simple. Destructive. The kind of question that, once asked, rearranges every conversation that comes after, because the question itself is an admission—an admission that you care, that you watch, that you count the hands near her hand on tablecloths you can’t sit at.

He didn’t ask.

Instead he said: “The Japanese are moving faster than we thought. Chan intercepted a communication suggesting a landing within six weeks.”

And just like that, the conversation shifted to operational matters—troop movements, supply lines, evacuation plans, the dry machinery of intelligence work filling the space where personal questions might’ve lived. They talked for two hours. Shared information. Made plans.

They didn’t touch.

At ten, she gathered her folder and her mackintosh and stood by the door. For a moment—half a second, maybe less—her hand reached toward his face, the way it had that first night, tracing the scar on his cheekbone. The gesture stopped mid-air. Her hand dropped back to her side. She left.

He stood at the window and watched her walk down Pottinger Street. Mackintosh buttoned now, folder under her arm, heels clicking on the wet pavement with the steady rhythm of someone who always knew exactly where she was going.

He poured himself another whiskey. Drank it standing at the window, staring out at the harbor, where the lights of Kowloon reflected in the water like a city that existed only as a reflection—bright, trembling, unreachable.

A world between us.

Not a wall. Not a barrier. A world. With its own geography, its own weather, its own population of assumptions and histories and skin colors and teacup angles and doors that opened for some people and stayed shut for others. You can’t climb over a world. You can’t tunnel under it. You can only stand on your side and look across and see, on the other side, a woman walking away in a mackintosh, and know—with the kind of knowing that lives in your gut, not your head—that the distance between you isn’t measured in feet or miles but in something older and heavier and more permanent than either.

He finished the whiskey. Washed the glass. Put it back in the cabinet.

He didn’t wipe the cigarette burn on the windowsill. Neither had she.

Some marks you keep. Not because they comfort you. Because erasing them would mean admitting they mattered, and admitting they mattered would mean admitting that the careful architecture of not-caring—the rationalizations, the logic, the three days of disciplined silence—was exactly what it was.

A bluff.

And in mahjong, as in love, the worst bluffs are the ones you almost believe yourself.