Second Sister Read online

  SECOND

  SISTER

  Also by Chan Ho-Kei

  The Borrowed

  SECOND

  SISTER

  CHAN HO-KEI

  Translated from the

  Chinese by Jeremy Tiang

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in Taiwan in 2017 by Crown Publishing Company

  First published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus, Ltd

  Copyright © 2017 by Chan Ho-Kei

  English translation copyright © 2020 by Jeremy Tiang

  The moral right of the author and translator to be identified as the author and translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781788547116

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788547123

  ISBN (E): 9781788547109

  Cover image © Shutterstock

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  SECOND

  SISTER

  CONTENTS

  Also by Chan Ho-Kei

  Title Page

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  EPILOGUE

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  WHEN NGA-YEE LEFT her flat at eight that morning, she had no idea her whole life would change that day.

  After the nightmare of the last year, she was sure better times were ahead if they just gritted their teeth and clung on. She firmly believed that destiny was fair, and if something bad happened, something good must naturally follow. Unfortunately, the powers that be love playing cruel jokes on us.

  A little after six that evening, Nga-Yee dragged her exhausted body homeward. As she walked from the shuttle bus stop, her mind busily calculated whether there was enough food in the fridge to make dinner for two. In just seven or eight years, prices had risen alarmingly while wages stayed the same. Nga-Yee could remember a pound of pork costing twenty-odd dollars, but now that barely got you half a pound.

  There was probably a few ounces of pork and some spinach in the fridge, enough for a stir-fry with ginger. A dish of steamed eggs on the side would complete a simple, nutritious dinner. Her sister Siu-Man, who was eight years younger, loved steamed eggs, and Nga-Yee often served this soft, silky dish when the cupboard was almost bare—a fine meal with chopped scallions and a dash of soy sauce. Most important, it was cheap. Back when their finances were even tighter, eggs got them through many a difficult moment.

  Although there was enough for that night, Nga-Yee wondered if she should try her luck at the market anyway. She didn’t like leaving the fridge completely bare—her upbringing had left her wanting a backup plan at all times. Besides, quite a few vendors dropped their prices just before closing, and she might pick up some bargains for the next day.

  Ooo-eee-ooo-eee.

  A police car sped past, the siren piercing Nga-Yee’s thoughts of discounted groceries. Only now did she notice the crowd at the foot of her building, Wun Wah House.

  What on earth could have happened? Nga-Yee continued walking at the same pace. She wasn’t the sort of person who liked joining in the excitement, which was why many of her secondary school classmates had labeled her a loner, an introvert, a nerd. Not that this bothered her. Everyone has the right to choose how to live their lives. Trying to fit in with other people’s ideas is pure foolishness.

  “Nga-Yee! Nga-Yee!” A plump, curly-haired, fiftyish woman waved frantically from among the dozen or so onlookers: Auntie Chan, their neighbor on the twenty-second floor. They knew each other to say hello, but that was about it.

  Auntie Chan sprinted the short distance toward Nga-Yee, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her toward the building. Nga-Yee couldn’t make out a word she was saying, apart from her own name—sheer terror made her voice sound like a foreign language. Nga-Yee finally began to understand when she picked out the word “sister.”

  In the light of the setting sun, Nga-Yee walked through the crowd and was finally able to make out the horrifying sight.

  People were huddled around a patch of concrete about a dozen yards from the main entrance. A teenage girl in a white school uniform lay there, tangled hair obscuring her face, dark red liquid puddling around her head.

  Nga-Yee’s first thought was, Isn’t that someone from Siu-Man’s school?

  Two seconds later she realized the still figure on the ground was Siu-Man.

  Her little sister was sprawled on the cold concrete.

  All the family she had in the world.

  Instantly, everything around her turned upside down.

  Was this a nightmare? If only she were dreaming. Nga-Yee looked at the faces around her. She recognized them as her neighbors, but they felt like strangers.

  “Nga-Yee! Nga-Yee!” Auntie Chan clutched at her arm, shaking her violently.

  “Siu … Siu-Man?” Even saying her name out loud, Nga-Yee couldn’t connect the object on the ground with her little sister.

  Siu-Man ought to be at home right now, waiting for me to cook dinner.

  “Move back, please.” A police officer in a neatly pressed uniform pushed through while two paramedics knelt by Siu-Man with a stretcher.

  The older paramedic held his hand beneath her nose, pressed a couple of fingers to her left wrist, then lifted an eyelid and shone a penlight at her pupil. This took just a few seconds, but Nga-Yee experienced every one of these actions as a series of freeze-frames.

  She could no longer feel the passing of time.

  Her subconscious was trying to save her from what would happen next.

  The paramedic straightened and shook his head.

  “Please step back, clear the way please,” said the policeman. The paramedics walked away from Siu-Man, looking somber.

  “Siu … Siu-Man? Siu-Man! Siu-Man!” Nga-Yee pushed Auntie Chan aside and dashed over.

  “Miss!” A tall police officer moved quickly to grab her by the waist.

  “Siu-Man!” Nga-Yee struggled futilely, then turned to beseech the officer, “That’s my sister. You have to save her!”

  “Miss, please calm down,” said the policeman in a tone that suggested he knew his words would have no effect.

  “Please save her! Medics!” Nga-Yee, all color drained from her face, turned to implore the departing ambulance crew. “Why isn’t she on your stretcher? Quick! You have to save her!”

  “Miss, are you her sister? Please calm down,” said the policeman, his arm around her waist, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible.

  “Siu-Man—” Nga-Yee turned back to look at the broken figure on the ground, but now two other officers were covering her with a dark green tarp. “What are you doing? Stop that! Stop that now!”

  “Miss! Miss!”

  “Don’t cover her, she needs to breathe! Her heart is still beating!” Nga-Yee leaned forward
, her energy suddenly gone. The policeman was no longer holding her back, but propping her up. “Save her! You have to save her! I’m begging you … She’s my sister, my only sister …”

  And so, on this ordinary Tuesday evening, on the empty ground in front of Wun Wah House, Lok Wah Estate, Kwun Tong District, the normally voluble neighbors fell silent. The only sound among these cold apartment buildings was the heartbroken weeping of an older sister, her sobs rushing like the wind into each person’s ears, filling them with a sorrow that could never be wiped away.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1.

  “Your sister killed herself.”

  When Nga-Yee heard the policeman say these words in the mortuary, she couldn’t stop herself from blurting out, her speech slurred, “That’s impossible! You must have made a mistake, Siu-Man would never do such a thing.” Sergeant Ching, a slim man of about fifty with a touch of gray at his temples, looked a little like a gangster, but something about his eyes told her she could trust him. Calm in the face of Nga-Yee’s near hysteria, he said something in his deep, steady voice that silenced her:

  “Miss Au, are you really certain your sister didn’t kill herself?”

  Nga-Yee knew very well, even if she didn’t want to admit it to herself, that Siu-Man had ample reason to seek death. The pressure she’d been under for the last six months was much more than any fifteen-year-old girl should have to face.

  But we should start with the Au family’s many years of misfortune.

  Nga-Yee’s parents were born in the 1960s, second-generation immigrants. When war broke out between the Nationalists and Communists in 1946, large numbers of refugees began surging from the Mainland into Hong Kong. The Communists emerged victorious and brought in a new regime, cracking down on any opposition, and even more people started arriving in the safe haven of this British colony. Nga-Yee’s grandparents were refugees from Guangzhou. Hong Kong needed a lot of cheap labor and rarely turned away people who entered the territory illegally, and her grandparents were able to put down roots, eventually getting their papers and becoming Hong Kongers. Even then, they led difficult existences, doing hard manual labor for long hours and low wages. Their living conditions were terrible too. Still, Hong Kong was going through an economic boom, and as long as you were prepared to suffer a little, you could improve your circumstances. Some even rode the wave to real success.

  Unfortunately, Nga-Yee’s grandparents never got the chance.

  In February 1976 a fire in the Shau Kei Wan neighborhood on Aldrich Bay destroyed more than a thousand wooden houses, leaving more than three thousand people homeless. Nga-Yee’s grandparents died in this inferno, survived by a twelve-year-old child: Nga-Yee’s father, Au Fai. Not having any other family in Hong Kong, Au Fai was taken in by a neighbor who’d lost his wife in the fire. The neighbor had a seven-year-old daughter named Chau Yee-Chin. This was Nga-Yee’s mom.

  Because they were so poor, Au Fai and Chau Yee-Chin didn’t have the chance for a real education. Both started work before coming of age, Au Fai as a warehouse laborer, Yee-Chin as a waitress at a dim sum restaurant. Although they had to toil for a living, they never complained, and they even managed to find a crumb of happiness when they fell in love. Soon they were talking of marriage. When Yee-Chin’s father fell ill in 1989, they wed quickly so at least one of his wishes could be fulfilled before he died.

  For a few years after that, the Au family seemed to have shaken themselves free of bad fortune.

  Three years after their marriage, Au Fai and Chau Yee-Chin had a daughter. Yee-Chin’s father had been an educated youth in China. Before his death, he’d told them to call their child Chung-Long for a boy, Nga-Yee for a girl—“Nga” for elegance and beauty, “Yee” for joy. The family of three moved into a small tenement flat in To Kwa Wan, where they lived a meager but contented existence. When Au Fai got back from work each day, the smiling faces of his wife and daughter made him feel that there was nothing more he could ask for in this world. Yee-Chin managed the household well. Nga-Yee was bookish and well-behaved, and all Au Fai wanted was to earn a little more money so she could go to university one day rather than having to get a job halfway through secondary school as he and his wife had had to do. Academic qualifications were now necessary to get ahead in Hong Kong. In the 1970s and ’80s you could get a job as long as you were willing to work hard, but times had changed.

  When Nga-Yee was six, the god of fortune smiled on the Au family: after years on the waiting list, it was finally their turn to get a government flat.

  In land-scarce, overpopulated Hong Kong, there wasn’t enough subsidized government housing to meet demand. Au Fai got the notification in 1998 that they’d been allocated a unit in Lok Wah Estate, just in the nick of time. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis, Au Fai’s company had done a big restructuring, and he was one of the workers let go. His boss helped him find a position elsewhere, but his wages were much lower, and he struggled to pay Nga-Yee’s primary school tuition. The letter from the Housing Authority was manna from heaven. Their new rent would be less than half of what they were currently paying, and if they were frugal, they might even be able to start saving.

  Two years after moving into Wun Wah House, Chau Yee-Chin was pregnant again. Au Fai was delighted to be a father twice over, and Nga-Yee was old enough to understand that becoming an elder sister meant she’d have to work hard to help share her parents’ burden. Because his father-in-law had left only one name for each sex, Au Fai was stuck for a second girl’s name. He turned to their neighbor, a former schoolteacher, for help.

  “How about calling her Siu-Man?” the old man suggested as they sat on a bench outside their building. “Siu as in ‘little,’ and Man as in ‘clouds colored by twilight.’”

  Au Fai looked to where the old man was pointing and saw the setting sun turning the clouds a dazzling array of hues.

  “Au Siu-Man … that’s a nice-sounding name. Thanks for your help, Mr. Huang. I’m too ignorant to have ever come up with something so beautiful on my own.”

  Now that there were four in the household, the Wun Wah flat began to feel a little cramped. These were designed for two to three people and had no internal walls. Au Fai put in an application to move somewhere larger. They were offered places in Tai Po or Yuen Long, but when the couple talked it over, Yee-Chin smiled and said, “We’ve gotten used to living here. Those places are so far away. You’d have a nightmare commute to work, and Nga-Yee would have to change schools. This place might be a bit of a squash, but do you remember how much smaller our wooden hut was?”

  That’s the sort of person Chau Yee-Chin was, always content with her lot. Au Fai scratched his head and couldn’t think of a single argument, although he still hoped to give his daughters their own rooms before they started secondary school.

  He couldn’t have known that he wouldn’t live to see it.

  Au Fai died in a workplace accident in 2004. He was forty years old.

  After the 1997 financial crisis and the SARS outbreak in 2003, Hong Kong’s economy was in the doldrums. In an effort to cut costs, many employers outsourced operations or started hiring on short-term contracts, thus avoiding the burden of employee benefits. A big company would hire a small one to carry out certain operations, and the small company farmed the job out to even smaller ones. After each of them had taken their cut, the workers’ wages were much lower than before, but in this precarious climate they had to no choice but to quietly accept what they were given. Au Fai made the rounds of these contractors, jostling with the other laborers for the few available jobs. Luckily, he’d been at the warehouse long enough to have acquired a forklift license, which gave him the edge when it came to distribution or dockside jobs. With the latter, it wasn’t goods he was moving, but cables. The mooring lines used by the cargo ships were too thick and heavy to be secured by hand and had to be hauled by forklift. To maximize his income, Au Fai was working two jobs at once, moving goods at a Kowloon warehouse as well as unloading ships at
Kwai Tsing Container Terminals. He wanted to earn as much as he could while he still had the energy. He knew his strength wouldn’t last forever, and the day would come when he wouldn’t be able to work his body this hard even if he wanted to.

  One drizzly evening in July 2004, the manager of Kwai Tsing Dock Number Four noticed that a forklift was missing. Au Fai had been driving toward Zone Q13, and there his coworkers found a post that had been badly scraped along one side. The shreds of yellow plastic on the ground next to it were immediately recognizable as part of the forklift, which Au Fai had accidentally driven into the water, ending up pinned between the vehicle and its prongs, both of which were half buried in the seabed twenty feet deep. By the time they hauled the forklift out with a crane, Au Fai was long dead.

  Nga-Yee was twelve when she lost her father, and Siu-Man was four.

  Even though Yee-Chin was heartbroken at her beloved husband’s passing, she didn’t allow herself to sink into grief, for her daughters were now completely dependent on her.

  According to labor law, the family of anyone killed at work ought to receive sixty months’ wages in compensation, which Yee-Chin and her daughters could have lived on for a few years. Sadly, the Au family’s bad luck struck again.

  “Mrs. Au, it’s not that I don’t want to help, but this is all the company can offer you.”

  “But Ngau, Fai worked hard for Yu Hoi for so many years. He left the house when it was still dark and didn’t get home till the girls were in bed. He hardly ever got to see his own daughters. Now I’m a poor widow with two fatherless girls. We don’t have anyone to help us. And you’re saying we can only have this tiny bit of money?”

  “The company isn’t much better off, to be honest. We might have to close our doors next year, and if that happens, we couldn’t even give you this small sum.”

  “Why would the money come from you? Fai had worker’s insurance.”

  “Fai’s claim … It seems there’s a problem with it.”