FRIDAY, MAY 5

SIS HAS COME TO SEE us for a few weeks. She strokes my arm with her soft fingertips, down to my wrist and then back up. She holds still at my scar. We’re lying so close together that our foreheads touch. So close that Hong Kong feels only a wink away.

She tells me about the beautiful islands of the city where she now lives, about how they house so many people in such little space, how she feels the skyscraper she lives in moving when the weather is stormy. She tells me about the job she found and her bitchy boss, about a friend who won a marathon in the Gobi Desert, about delicious fried eggplant swimming around in a big bowl at a Chinese restaurant, about a market called the wet market and the horrible way turtles are treated, about how the Chinese are so much smaller than she is but still always seem to block her way. About hiking in the New Territories, how I can’t imagine the beauty, hours of jungle and then a clear blue bay to dive into at the end of the trail. About a Chinese girl named Lucienne who she met at a dinner party and who I should meet.

She looks and sounds so grown-up. Living a grown-up life with her boyfriend in a faraway city, wearing elegant suits and heels. Her life sounds like a dream to me. And it confuses me. What am I doing here when the world is out there? But which world? Hadn’t I just decided that my world is here, in between my loved ones?

Whatever it is, I can’t wait to go and see it all myself.