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HE: The steady pouring rain
opened a new page of the raging night.
SHE: Our electricity paused; we forgot where we kept the batteries for the
radio. Nobody could tell us which streets had been flooded.
HE: We did not know the time, but we thought we must make sure the Cheungs
living next door had enough food for the evening.
SHE: So I thought I'd cook. I never realized before how little food, how
little
anything, how little everything, we kept. We might as well have been
living on
a railway platform, drinking tea and eating noodles out of styrofoam, as
to
call home this place we squatted like refugees, migrants,
beggars and
thieves.
HE: I told my wife there was no time for cooking. We should just go over
to
their place and see what we could do. Hard times were many and the old
folks
cared for us and lent us the little money they had with open
arms, unknitted
brows.
SHE: That's when I realized how little he had ever thought like me. Like--how
can I say it without sounding awful--like us. Like normal people.
When Mrs.
Cheung let us in, she almost cried because without power, she could not
boil
water and offer her guests tea.
HE: The first thing I noticed was Mr Cheung's armchair. He always sat on
it and
I would sit opposite him and we would chat about the temperature or about
women. That night he wasn't sitting on the armchair.
SHE: Mrs. Cheung said, "He's in the street, measuring the depth of
the rain. He
says he cannot remember what happened when it last rained so hard, but that
I
should pack everything worth saving into a suitcase light enough to carry
in
one old man's hand.
HE: It was then that I thought perhaps we needed to pack as well. I looked
out
of the window and saw his shadow rippling on the flooded street. He was
waving
to someone but there was no one else in sight.
SHE: But when we brought his woman downstairs, he was nothing
but a hand out a
taxi window. He loved her most, but he saved his old bones.
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