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equipment of a photographic darkroom. This moonlighting he called Happy Snaps, but most of the happy snaps he took were of the growing, smiling child – a child with hair that sprouted thick and long, and over whom strangers would make prophecies – few commissions came the father’s way and the child reasoned early that the camera was not for business but his parent’s one escape. The child hoarded stories, the father images of his life – appropriated for a golden dust-free future, when the past was both a record and something he could richly mock. The aspiration was great: to have a light-meter you must first have light, and the room should not be colouredlike sleep before you even kissed the pillow and closed your eyes.
    Closed your eyes, then made a moon in your mind to illuminate the brown, reciting to yourself a favourite child’s poem of the moon bright he had learnt from his mother. One day, when he learnt the rigours of speech, he thought, he would say this poem – not mother, nor father, but moon bright, after that the word for want.
     
    From the grandparents’ room came each night a certain whine, a mechanically arbitrated whine that nevertheless suggested a higher, more courtly, more educated Cantonese than that with which he was addressed. Ah then, he thought, a hierarchy in language. It was a tape recorder, clumsily unwinding reel-to-reel a ritual opera with timed intonations, drum beats and cymbals clashing. In bed, the moon switched on, a brown music nevertheless intervened against that slippage to unconsciousness, and his dream of the moon and what was signalled by the acne on the moon’s full face.
    The evening’s progression would be from dinner, all seated on wooden crates, Chinese newspapers spread as tablecloth, the table itself prefabricated from banana crates that were taller than the orange crates that served for chairs. A cat sat on one corner of the table, unable to eat except as a full person; chicken, blood pudding, fish would be served – particles of each to the cat as well. Afterwards, debris would be rolled up in the newspapers, and the apparatus of dining dismantled like magic. Magic is a rehearsed routine, he thought. Then bed, then moon, then the brown music.
    And the music would always be of love, love lost or love divided, death or near death, reclamation of love on earth or in heaven. The division of love, more specifically of lovers, would be accomplished in a court populated by corrupt magistrates, inquisitorial lawyers, and parents anxious to divide the anguished pair. A last hopeless cling, and they would be ripped asunder, the girl to be imprisoned in her parents’ house, the boy to be sent off, a single cloth bag over his shoulder, to a distant university. Years later, for the most part, he would return – perhaps on a white horse– to find her grave stone, marked by the incense of her broken heart.
    What the child marvelled at was how love could be subjected to inquisition. Grown, bearded men in the hats, stiffened belts and regalia of judges and lawyers would denounce, in those days, something merely aspirational, virginal, and flowering for a first and only time.
    Although all the operas had the same theme, he had a favourite – an aria in which the high notes were deliberately cracked, a duet between two men, the pale, love-lorn scholar praying for God’s miracle – ‘if the peach blossoms open’ – and his encouraging companion clasping his shoulders and singing sturdily, ‘of course God will let the preach blossoms open’, but it is the middle of winter, under a stark moon, and the merciless magistrates of love had smirkingly delivered a judgement that the pale scholar and his beautiful love could marry if only, and only on that winter’s night, peach blossoms would open. In his child’s dream, the sturdy friend would rush in at dawn, shake the hunched, slumbering shoulders of his friend, and point hard, like a communist poster, to a very great tree