She is famous, born of a well-known couple, the mother a Portuguese beauty, the father a Shanghai millionaire with fortunes in trading and money lending.

“Finally, someone new! We can tell right away, you know. I’ve been stuck with those old bags for ages. We’re very good at sniffing out new blood since the community is so wretchedly small and we’re all so dreadfully sick of each other. We practically wait at the docks to drag the new people off the ships. Just arrived, yes? Have a job yet?” she asks, having sat him on the edge of the tub while she reapplies her lipstick. “Is it for fun or funds? ”

“I’m at Asiatic Petrol,” he says, wary of being cast as the amusing newcomer. “And it’s most certainly for funds.” Although that’s not the truth. A mother with money.

“How delightful! ” she says. “I’m so sick of meeting all these stuffy people. They don’t have the slightest knowledge or ambition.”

“Those without expectations have been known to lack both of those qualities,” he says.

“Aren’t you a grumpy grump?” she says. “But stupidity is much more forgivable in the poor, don’t you think?” She pauses, as if to let him think about that. “Your name? And how do you know the Trotters?”

“I’m Will Truesdale, and I play cricket with Hugh. He knows some of my family, through my mother’s side,” he says. “I’m new to Hong Kong and he’s been very decent to me.”

“Hmmm,” she says. “I’ve known Hugh for a decade and I’ve never ever thought of him as decent. And do you like Hong Kong? ”

“It’ll do for now,” he says. “I came off the ship, decided to stay, rustled up something to do in the meantime. Seems pleasant enough here.”

“An adventurer, how fascinating,” she says, without the slightest bit of interest. Then she finishes up her ablutions, snaps her evening bag shut, and, firmly taking him by the wrist, waltzes—there is no other verb; music seems to accompany her—out of the powder room.

Conscious of being steered around the room like a pet poodle, her momentary diversion, he excuses himself to go smoke in the garden. But peace is not to be his. She finds him out there, has him light her cigarette, and leans confidentially toward him.

“Tell me,” she says. “Why do your women get so fat after marriage? If I were an Englishman I’d be quite put out when the comely young lass I proposed to exploded after a few months of marriage or after popping out a child. You know what I’m talking about?” She blows smoke up to the dark sky.

“Not at all,” he says, amused despite himself.

“I’m not as flighty as you think,” she says. “I do like you so very much. I’ll ring you tomorrow, and we’ll make a plan.” And then she is gone, wafting smoke and glamour as she trips her way into the resolutely nonsmoking house of their hosts—Hugh loathes the smell. He sees her in the next hour, flitting from group to group, chattering away. The women are dimmed by her, the men bedazzled.

“She’s Eurasian, is she? ” Simonds says. “Watch out there. It’s not as bad as dating a Chinese, but the higher-ups don’t like it if you fraternize too much with the locals.”

“That is an outrageous statement,” Will says. He had liked Simonds up to that point.

“You know how it is,” Simonds says. “At Hong Kong Bank, you get asked to leave if you marry a Chinese. But this girl sounds different, she sounds rather more than a local girl. It’s not like she’s running a noodle shop.”

“Yes, she is different,” he says. “Not that it matters,” he adds as he answers the phone. “I’m not marrying her.”

“Darling, it’s Trudy Liang,” she says. “Who aren’t you marrying? ”

“Nobody.” He laughs.

“That would have been quick work.”

“Even for you? ”

“Wasn’t it shocking how many women there were at the party yesterday?” she says, ignoring him. The women in the colony are supposed to be gone, evacuated to safer areas, while the war is simmering, threatening to boil over into their small corner of the world. “I’m essential, you know. I’m a nurse with the Auxiliary Nursing Service! ” The only way women had been allowed to stay was to sign up as an essential occupation.

“None of the nurses I’ve ever had looked like you,” he says.

“If you were injured, you wouldn’t want me as a nurse, believe me.” She pauses. “Listen, I’ll be at the races at the Wongs’ box this afternoon. Do you care to join us? ”

“The Wongs? ” he asks.

“Yes, they’re my godparents,” she says impatiently. “Are you coming or not? ”

“All right,” he says. This is the first in a long line of acquiescences.

Trudy pulls him to one side.

“Oh, dear,” she says. “You’re just as handsome as I remember. I think I might be in trouble. You’ve never had any issues with women, I’m sure. Or perhaps you’ve had too many.” She pauses and takes a theatrical breath. “I’ll give you the lay of the land here. That’s my cousin, Dommie.” She points out an elegant, slim Chinese man with a gold pocket watch in his hand. “He’s my best friend and very protective, so you better watch out. And avoid her, by any means,” she says, pointing to a slight European woman with spectacles. “Awful. She’s just spent twenty minutes telling me the most extraordinary and yet incredibly boring story about barking deer on Lamma Island.”

“Really? ” he says, looking at her oval face, her large golden-green eyes.

“And he,” she says, pointing to an owlish Englishman, “is a bore. Some sort of art historian, keeps talking about the Crown Collection, which is apparently something most colonies have. They either acquire it locally or have pieces shipped from England for the public buildings—important paintings and statues and things like that. Hong Kong’s is very impressive, apparently, and he’s very worried about what will happen once the war breaks loose.” She makes a face. “Also a bigot.”

She searches the room for others and her eyes narrow.

“There’s my other cousin, or cousin by marriage.” She points out a stocky Chinese man in a double-breasted suit. “Victor Chen. He thinks he’s very important indeed. But I just find him tedious. He’s married to my cousin, Melody, who used to be nice until she met him.” She pauses. “Now she’s . . .” Her voice trails off.

“Well, here you are,” she says, “and what a gossip I’m being,” and drags him to the front where she has claimed the two best seats. They watch the races. She wins a thousand dollars and shrieks with pleasure. She insists on giving it all away, to the waiters, to the bathroom attendants, to a little girl they pass on the way out. “Really,” she says disapprovingly, “this is no place for children, don’t you think? ” Later she tells him she practically grew up at the track.

“You can call me Prudence, though,” she says. Her long arms are draped around his shoulders and her jasmine scent is overwhelming him.

“I think I won’t,” he says.

“I’m terribly strong,” she whispers. “I hope I don’t destroy you.”

He laughs.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. But later, he wonders.

“But I do so enjoy the feel of the sun on me,” she says, reaching for a kiss.

The Liangs’ house is spread out on a promontory where it overlooks a placid sea. They keep chickens for fresh eggs—the hen house far away, of course, because of the odor—and a slightly fraying but still belligerent peacock roams the ground, asserting himself to any intruders, except the groundskeeper’s Great Dane, with whom it has a mutual treaty. Trudy’s father is never there; mostly he is in Macau, where he is said to have the largest house on the Praia Grande and a Chinese mistress. Why he doesn’t marry her, nobody knows. Trudy’s mother disappeared when she was eight—a famous case that is still unsolved. The last anyone had seen of her she had been spotted stepping into a car outside the Gloucester Hotel. This is what he likes most about Trudy. Having so many questions in her life, she never asks questions about his.

Dominick is a fine-chiseled boy-man, a bit effeminate, with a long string of lissome, dissatisfied girlfriends. Will is never invited to Trudy’s dinners with Dommie. “Don’t be cross. You wouldn’t have fun,” she says, trailing a cool finger over his cheek. “We chatter away in Shanghainese and it would be so tedious to have to explain everything to you. And Dommie’s just about a girl anyways.”

“I don’t want to go,” he says, trying to keep his dignity.

“Of course you don’t, darling,” she laughs. She pulls him close. “I’ll tell you a secret.”

“What?” Her jasmine smell brings to mind that waxy yellow flower, her skin as smooth, as impermeable.

“Dommie was born with eleven fingers. Six on the left hand. His family had it removed when he was a baby, but it keeps growing back! Isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? I tell him it’s the devil inside. You can keep pruning it, but it’ll always come back.” She whispers. “Don’t tell a soul. You’re the first person I’ve ever told! And Dominick would have my head if he knew! He’s quite ashamed of it! ”

Hong Kong is a small village. At the RAF ball, Dr. Richards was found in the linen room of the Gloucester with a chambermaid; at the Sewells’ dinner party, Blanca Morehouse had too much to drink and started to take off her blouse—you know about her past, don’t you? Trudy, his very opinionated and biased guide to society, finds the English stuffy, the Americans tiresomely earnest, the French boring and self-satisfied, the Japanese quirky. He wonders aloud how she can stand him. “Well, you’re a bit of a mongrel,” she says. “You don’t belong anywhere, just like me.” He had arrived in Hong Kong with just a letter of introduction to an old family friend, and has found himself defined, before he did anything to define himself, by a chance meeting with a woman who asks nothing of him except to be with her.

“I thought you thought tans were vulgar,” he says.

“Shut up,” she says.

He hears her talking to Angeline. “I’m just wild about him,” she says. “He’s the most stern, solid person I’ve ever met.” He supposes she is talking about him. People are not as scandalized as one might think. Simonds admits he was wrong about her. Although the Englishwomen in the colony are disappointed. Another bachelor taken off the market. Whispered: “she did swoop down and grab him before anyone even knew he was in town.”

For him, there have been others, of course—the missionary’s daughter in town in New Delhi, always ill and wan, though beautiful; the clever, hopeful spinster on the boat over from Penang—the women who say they’re looking for adventure but who are really looking for husbands. He’s managed to avoid the inconvenience of love for quite some time, but it seems to have found him in this unlikely place.

Women don’t like Trudy. “Isn’t that always the case, darling?” she says when he, indiscreetly, asks her about it. “And aren’t you a strange one for bringing it up?” She chucks him under the chin and continues making a pitcher of gin and lemonade. “No one likes me,” she says. “Chinese don’t because I don’t act Chinese enough, Europeans don’t because I don’t look at all European, and my father doesn’t like me because I’m not very filial. Do you like me? ”

He assures her he does.

“I wonder,” she says. “I can tell why people like you. Besides the fact that you’re a handsome bachelor with mysterious prospects, of course. They read into you everything they want you to be. They read into me all that they don’t like.” She dips her finger in the mix and brings it out to taste. Her face puckers. “Perfect,” she says. She likes them sour.

Little secrets begin to spill out of Trudy. A temple fortune-teller told her the mole on her forehead signifies death to a future husband. She’s been engaged before, but it ended mysteriously. She tells him these secrets then refuses to elaborate, saying he’ll leave her. She seems serious.

He never grows used to them. They completely ignore him, always talking to Trudy about him, in front of him. They tell her he has a big nose, that he smells funny, that his hands and feet are grotesque. He is beginning to understand a little of what they say, but their disapproving intonation needs no translation. Ah Lok cooks—salty, oily dishes he finds unappealing. Trudy eats them with relish—it’s the food she grew up with. She claims Mei Sing cleans, but he finds dust balls everywhere. The old woman also collects rubbish—used beer bottles, empty jars of cold cream, discarded toothbrushes—and stores it underneath her bed in anticipation of some apocalyptic event. All three of the women are messy. Trudy has the utter disregard for her surroundings that belongs to those who have been waited on since birth. She never cleans up, never lifts a finger, but neither do the amahs. They have picked up her habits—a peculiar symbiosis. Trudy defends them with the ferocity of a child defending her parents. “They’re old,” she says. “Leave them alone. I can’t bear people who poke at their servants.”

She pokes at them though. She argues with them when the flower man comes and Ah Lok wants to give him fifty cents and Trudy says to give him what he wants. The flower man is called Fa Wong, king of flowers, and he comes around to the neighborhood once a week, giant woven baskets slung around his brown, wiry shoulders filled with masses of flowers. He calls out, “fa yuen, fa yuen,” a low, monotonous pitch for his wares, and people wave him up to their flats from the window. He and the amahs love to spar and they go at it for ages, shouting and gesticulating, until Trudy comes to break it up and give the man his money. Then Ah Lok gets angry and scolds Trudy for giving in too easily, and the old lady and the lovely young woman, their arms filled with flowers, go into the kitchen, where the blooms will be distributed into vases and scattered around the house. He watches them from his chair, his book spread out over his lap, his eyes hooded as if in sleep—he watches her.

Discipline, he thinks, don’t fall down that rabbit hole. But it’s useless. She’s always there, ringing him on the phone, ready with plans for the evening. When he looks at her, he feels weak and happy. Is that so bad?

“Why do they let these awful companies have advertisements? ” she asks. “Listen to this one—‘Why suffer from agonizing piles?’ Is there a need for that? Can’t they be a bit more oblique? ” She shakes the newspaper at him. “There’s an illustration of a man suffering from piles! Is that really necessary?”

“My heart,” he says. “I don’t know. I just don’t k now.” A displaced Russian in a dinner jacket plays the piano behind him.

“Oh,” she says, as if it’s an afterthought. “My father wants to meet you. He wants to meet the man I’ve been spending so much time with.” She is nonchalant, too much so. “Are you free tonight? ”

“Of course,” he says.

“My mother was a great Portuguese beauty—her family had been in Macau for ages. They met there. My father was not as successful then, although he came from a well-to-do family. He had just started up a business selling widgets or something. He’s very clever, my father. Don’t know why I turned out to be such a dim bulb.” Her face lights up. “Here he is! ” She leaps off the stool and rushes over to give her father a kiss. Will had expected a big, confident man with the aura of power. Instead, Mr. Liang is small and diffident, with an ill-cut suit and a sweet air. He seems to be overwhelmed by the vitality of his daughter. He lets Trudy wash over him, like a force of nature, much like everyone else in Hong Kong, Will thinks. The maître d’ seats them with much hovering and solicitous hand waving, which neither Trudy nor her father seems to notice. They speak to each other in Cantonese, which makes Trudy seem like a different person entirely.

They do not order. Their food is brought to them, as if preordained. “Should we order?” he ventures and their faces are astonished. “You only eat certain dishes here,” they say. Trudy calls for champagne. “This is a momentous occasion,” she declares. “My father’s not met many of my beaus. You’ve passed the first gauntlet.”

Wan Kee Liang does not ask Will about his life or his work. Instead, they exchange pleasantries, talk about the horse races and the war. When Trudy excuses herself to go to the powder room, her father motions for Will to come closer.

“You are not a rich man,” he says.

“Not like you, but I do all right.” How odd to assume.

“Trudy very spoiled girl, and wants many things.” The man’s face betrays nothing.

“Yes,” Will says.

“Not good for woman to pay for anything.”

Trudy’s father hands him an envelope.

“Here is money for you to take Trudy out. Will cover expenses for a long time. Not good for Trudy to be paying all the time.”

Will is utterly bemused.

“I can’t take that,” he says. “I’m not going to take your money. I’ve never let Trudy pay for a meal.”

“Doesn’t matter.” The man waves his hand. “Good for your relationship.”

Will refuses and puts the envelope on the table, where it sits until they see Trudy approaching. Trudy’s father puts it back in his suit jacket.

“Not meant to be insult,” he says. “I want best for Trudy. So best for her means best for you. This means little to me, but might make difference for you two.”

“I appreciate the thought,” Will says. “But I can’t.” He lets it go at that.

He is a little irritated, but not so much, more bemused than anything. He puts the letters in a drawer. He supposes that to Wan Kee Liang everyone looks like a pauper, looking for handouts. The Chinese are wise, he thinks. Or maybe it’s just Trudy’s family.

The Greek who runs the Parisian Grill, his name is now Henri, changed from God knows what, loves Trudy, views her as a daughter, and his wife, Elsbieta, treats Trudy like a sister. She goes there for first drinks almost every night, often ends evenings there as well. Henri and Elsbieta are polite to him, but with a certain reserve. He thinks they have seen too many of Trudy’s beaus. He wants to protest that he is the one in danger, protest over the red vinyl banquettes, the smoky white candles burned down to smudgy lumps, but he never does.

They meet everyone at the Parisian Grill. It is the sort of place one goes to when one is new in town, or old, or bored. Hong Kong is small, and eventually everyone ends up there. One night, they have drinks at the bar with a group of visiting Americans and then are invited to dinner with them.

Trudy tells their new friends that she loves Americans, their open-handed extravagance, their loud talk and braying confidence. When someone brings up the war, she pretends not to hear, ignoring them and instead going on about the qualities she feels all Americans have. They have a sense of the world being incomparably large, she says, and a sense that they are able to, not colonize, but spread through all countries, spending their money like water, without guilt or too much consciousness. She loves that. The men are tall and rangy, with long faces and quick decisions, and the women let them be, isn’t that wonderful, because they’re so busy with their own committees and plans. They invite all and sundry to their events, and they serve marvelous items like potato salads and ham and cheese sandwiches. And, unless there is a very special type of Englishman present (she tips her head toward Will), they tend to diminish the other men in the room. It’s very odd, but she’s seen it. Haven’t you noticed that? If she had it all to do over, she says to the dinner table, she would come back as an American. Barring that possibility, she’s going to marry one. Or maybe just move there, if someone objects to her marrying an American, said with eyes cast demurely down as a joke. Will thinks back to when she complained that they were tiresomely earnest and just smiles. She has free will, he says simply. He would never do anything to stop her from doing what she wanted. The Americans applaud. An enlightened man, says a woman with red lips and an orange dress.

“You’re doing us a favor! ” they cry, as they pour more champagne.

“You really are, Will,” Trudy says. “No one in all Hong Kong would agree to do anything so nice for the Chens, you know. They’ve awful reputations around here, that’s why they’re leaving.”

“Be that as it may,” Will says, “I have to pay something.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” the Chens say, but they never do. Instead they drink four splits of champagne and end up going to the beach at midnight to hunt for crabs by candlelight.

May Road is different from Happy Valley, his old neighborhood. Filled with expatriates and housewives and their servants, it is a bourgeois suburb of England, or how he’d always imagined them to be. Children walk obediently next to their amahs, matrons climb into the backs of their chauffeured cars, it’s much more quiet than the chattering bustle of his old haunt. He misses Happy Valley, the vitality of it, the loud, rude locals, the lively shops.

“Isn’t this nice?” she says, lavishing him with kisses at the door. “Isn’t it delicious that you’re so close and not in that dreadful Happy Valley? I do think the only time I’d go there before I met you was when I needed plimsolls for the beach. There’s this wonderful shop there . . .”

And then she’s on to something else, crying out to Ah Lok that the flowers are browning, or that there’s a puddle in the foyer. At Trudy’s, there’s no talk of war, no fighting except squabbling with the servants, no real troubles. There’s only ease and her sweet, lilting laugh. He slips gratefully into her world.