1898, HONG KONG.
ELIZABETH LEE: Born in Hong Kong as the only daughter of an extremely wealthy man and his concubine, Elizabeth is disposable. A pawn to be bought, sold, and traded - specifically, for the drug, opium, the business in which her fath...
MY EXTENDED FAMILY, ALL FIVE OF MY FATHER'S YOUNGER brothers and all six of his younger sisters, were present at the feast. Loud chatter and the sounds of wine pouring as well as clacking mahjong tiles filled the parlour, four of my aunts gathered in a game as their fingers moved the green and white ivory tiles with practiced ease. Their children--my cousins--were underfoot, dashing to and fro as they tried to steal food from the kitchens. There would be abalone, lobster, crab, and all manner of fresh seafood spread out before the guests. I just wished I had the appetite to eat it. Unfortunately, that and all enjoyment of this event had been snatched away by the day's events. Only one thing was on my mind: Frederick.
My dead older brother. Technically, he was my half-brother, or... he had been. The memory of him, his dark tousled hair and deep brown eyes, his lanky build and his protective nature, made me want to cry even more. But my father had already glared at me once for doing so on the way back home, and I did not want to disappoint him any more than I already had by disturbing the party. So I simply sat in the corner and watched my mother--no, Frederick's mother--order around the servants in the kitchen as she pretended I hadn't lost my brother and she had not lost a son a year ago.
Really, technically, we had lost Frederick long before that. He had been too smart for his own good, always getting in trouble with his tutors for making jokes and proving them wrong. When he finished his education he had been meant to work in my father's shipping business--one of the many industries he had his fingers in--and help coordinate the shipping of ice from America to Hong Kong. I still recalled the few times that he would let me tag along to the icehouses and had chipped off a piece of pure, cold ice for me, so transparent you could read a book through it. He'd laughed when I said it tasted good, remarking that it was only water. To me, when snows in Hong Kong were few and far between, a sprinkle of flakes that quickly melted, the ice had seemed like magic.
He, my older brother, had seemed like magic. He charmed his way through life, relying on good looks and his father's money, I knew that now. But when I had been eight years younger than him he had seemed like a lot more than another silver-spooned boy making a mess of his life. And he had made a mess of himself. He had wound up running with the wrong crowd. Passing out in gambling parlours all over the city and especially in the walled city, Kowloon as well as Lan Kwai Fong. Then, he had started smoking opium.
I had heard somewhere that opium was so addictive that it could hook a man who only consumed it four times. I disagreed. Frederick had been addicted to one thing from the day he was born: trouble. Trouble, and causing his mother every type of heartbreak. It still touched me that she had raised me, the daughter of her husband's second wife, while her son was out in the city raising all kinds of hell. When he had returned home on the odd night that was not spent at a parlour, a friend's place, or worse, a brothel, he had been hollow-cheeked and bright-eyed from the opium, his once-strong body now wasted from the drug.
The drug, that, I had learned from my father, was smuggled into China by the British. The British, who would do anything to get their hands on Chinese tea for a better price than silver.
That thought was bitter in my mouth, and while I wanted to drink more wine to cover it, I knew from my brother's experiences that it would be a bad idea.
"Elizabeth." There was only one person in this room who would call me by my English name. My parents would address me with daughter; my aunts and uncles would call me zut luey. (1) My little cousins would call me biu jie. (2) "May I speak with you?"
I leaned back against the wall and pushed my glass away from me, sliding it across a sideboard draped in a silk cloth. I felt slightly dizzy, perhaps a side effect of intoxication, and I definitely should not drink any more than I already had. "If you must."
"I do not have to," he said lowly, and though I shut my eyes and did not look up at him I could feel his presence, smell the cologne he wore, feel the heat radiating off of him. "I want to."
"And concerning what do you want to speak to me?" I asked him, keeping my eyes closed. It was probably the liquor that made me want to lean back against him and be held in his arms.
"Why you were crying," he stated. Never mind. The rational part of my mind now wanted to run as far away from him as possible. "Earlier, at the cemetery."
"I miss my brother," I said softly, unwisely. You're giving him ammunition with which to hurt you later. That seemed to be all men ever did to me, after all.
"I miss mine, too," he said. Not, I didn't know you had one, which would have required lengthy, painful explanations. But just an admission that he felt the same.
It was enough.
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