The Headmaster’s Wager. Vincent Lam

were protesting against Prime Minister Ky’s military government.

      Percival’s spirits lifted. Were the monks setting themselves alight once again? He had often remarked that he couldn’t understand these bonzes—they killed themselves to criticize the government, but surely the government must be glad that some of their critics were dead. After news of an immolation, Percival was always relieved to see the one-eyed monk in the square, for he was fond of that one, who seemed to have the intensity that a martyr would require. The suicides by fire attracted a great deal of attention, though, so now Percival listened with hope. Surely, those in Saigon who watched for dissent would take more interest in a new spate of Buddhist trouble than in some trivial incident at a Chinese school in Cholon. Percival turned to Dai Jai. “I will meet with your mother tomorrow. Do you see how serious this is?”

      “I’m sorry, Father. I thought it would make you proud.”

      What to say, that he might have been, if the incident had remained Cholon gossip rather than Saigon trouble? But even if that had been the case, he would have had to instruct the boy nonetheless, that he must learn to pair his best impulses with canny quiet. Percival said, “I will fix this. Until then, you cannot leave Chen Hap Sing.”

      “I need to go out tonight. I need—”

      “No!”

      “Ba, I have to buy larvae for my fish. They need to eat every day.”

      Percival was tempted to ask whether Dai Jai was planning to buy fish food from a pretty Annamese fellow student, but that didn’t seem so important now. “Someone might be outside, waiting to arrest you. I will send one of the servants for your larvae.”

      Later that evening, Percival went out on the second-floor balcony where Dai Jai kept his tanks. The boy made no acknowledgement of his father’s appearance, but continued to skim the water clear with a flat net. Yes, for the boy to be so moody about staying in, it must have been a rendezvous with the girl. Ever since he was very small, Dai Jai had nurtured gouramis and goldfish, kissing fish and fighting fish. In recent years Dai Jai had renounced most of his childhood toys and games in favour of soccer with his friends, stolen cigarettes, and a French lingerie catalogue that one of the sweepers had found hidden in his room, and which Percival had directed be placed back exactly where it was found with nothing more to be said about it. The one fascination that persisted from boyhood was the fish.

      Percival held out two lotus-leaf cones of live mosquito larvae in water. “For you, Son.” He had gone out himself to buy them, but did not say so. This was the hour that the casinos were becoming busy and filled with people he knew, but Percival had no urge to gamble tonight. He must stay close by, in case something happened.

      Dai Jai took the cones with quiet thanks, and gently tore off a corner to let the fluid out. He began to pour the food into each tank. The fish darted amongst the water plants to take their meal. Dai Jai went from one tank to another, feeding the fish until the whole row of tanks was a shimmering display.

      “How do you know the song ‘On Songhua River’?” asked Percival. Why would the boy know that old tune of the Chinese resistance against Japan’s occupation? It was not a modern melody.

      “You often hum it.”

      That was what Percival had thought. “What you did was foolish, but I appreciate the spirit in it.”

      Dai Jai put down the net. “Father, you always say that wherever we Chinese go in the world, we must remain Chinese.” The words Percival had spoken many times now rang back in echo. Beneath the sky’s thick gloom, points of light appeared in the square below. The first lamps on the night vendors’ carts were being lit, their flames dancing and spitting briefly until they were trimmed into a steady light. People emerged from their houses, chatted happily and walked with new energy in the cool hour.

      “Son, a man can think without acting, or act without being seen. A son should be dutiful. Not reckless.”

      “Yes, Father.”

      “We are wa kiu.” They were overseas Chinese, those who had wandered far from home. “We are safer when we remain quiet.” The lamps in the square glowed into brightness—one after another. It happened quickly, as if each lamp lit the next. Cholon was most alive, sparkling with energy, in the early evening. Dai Jai’s fish pierced the water’s surface and took the tiny larvae into their mouths, leaving behind rippled circles. “Until I have dealt with the problems you have caused, don’t leave the house anymore. Don’t go to the cinema or the market. Don’t go to the Teochow school. Don’t even attend school here. Be invisible.”

      “Yes, Father.”

      “If there are visitors from Saigon, hide yourself well, but stay in the house. You are safer here.” The old house had many dark hallways and secret nooks. It was the house that Chen Kai had built. It would be safe.

       CHAPTER 3

      AT THE CERCLE SPORTIF, HAN BAI pulled up in the circular drive fronting the club’s entrance, stopped the car beneath the frangipani, and went around to Percival’s door. The headmaster was not in the habit of waiting for his driver to attend to him, and in most places he would simply open the door himself and step out of the car. However, at the club, Han Bai knew that the headmaster waited for his driver.

      Percival ascended the canopied stone steps, nodded to the bows of the doormen, went through the clubhouse, and out to the pavilion that looked over the tennis courts. Since their divorce eight years earlier, this was where he and Cecilia met to talk. The roof of the pavilion was draped with bougainvillea, which reminded Percival of Cecilia’s old family house in Hong Kong.

      A waiter pulled out a chair, his jacket already dark in the armpits. At nine in the morning, one game of tennis was under way. The Saigonese and the few French who remained from the old days played before breakfast, but some Americans were foolish enough to play at this hour. Cecilia was on the court in a pleated white skirt, playing one of the surgeons from the U.S. Army Station Hospital in Saigon. She had always cursed the city’s climate, but now did most of her money-changing business with Americans so played tennis when they did. She displayed no feminine restraint as she lunged across the court to return a serve. The surgeon had his eye more on his opponent than the white ball, and Percival could not help feeling the familiar desire.

      “For you, Headmaster Chen?” said the waiter.

      “Lemonade.”

      “Three glasses?”

      “Two.”

      How typical of Cecilia, to arrange a game of tennis with an attractive foreign man when she had asked Percival to meet her at the club. In reply, he stared in the other direction. There was no way to turn his ears from the players’ breathy grunts, quick steps, and the twang of the ball ringing across the lawn.

      Cecilia had played tennis since she was a child in Hong Kong, years before Percival ever saw a racquet. Her name had been Sai Ming until she was registered by the nuns at St. Paul Academy as Cecilia, and thereafter eschewed her Chinese name. When they had been students, he at La Salle Academy, and she at its sister school, St. Paul, she once offered to teach Percival how to play. He was even more clumsy with a racquet than he was on the dance floor. Cecilia had laughed at his ineptness, and Percival declared tennis a game of the white devils.

      Percival had come to Hong Kong in the autumn of 1940, just a few months after a fever had ravaged Shantou. During that contagion, Muy Fa became hot, then delirious. Despite the congee that he spooned between his mother’s cracked lips, and Dr. Yee’s cupping, coin-rubbing, and moxibustion, one morning Muy Fa lay cold and still on the kang. The years of his father’s absence had put coins in the family money box, but now the silver seemed cold and dead to Chen Pie Sou. It had paid for a doctor, but not saved his mother. There was no question of a Western-trained doctor or medicines, for the Japanese occupation of Guangdong province was two long years old. Chen Pie Sou sent both a telegram and a formal letter of mourning to his father in Indochina, and paid ten silver pieces