Hong Kong, 1945 Raymond told the post-war years in a different register from the rest of the history. Less pride in it, I think. Or perhaps not less pride but a different kind — the pride of a man recounting a period that tested something in him and found it sufficient, but only just. He told me the last piece of it on the final evening of that week, sitting in the study after the house had gone quiet. He poured two glasses of brandy — the first time in my presence, the first time he treated the occasion as something to be marked rather than taught. I understood that as a signal of some kind. I didn\’t know yet what it was signalling. \”My father came home from the war to a city that looked like itself,\” Raymond said, \”but wasn\’t.\” He turned the glass in his hand. \”The buildings were still there. Most of them. The streets had the same names. But the people who had lived through the occupation had been changed in ways that the city\’s surface didn\’t show, and some of those changes had produced men who deserved to answer for what they\’d done.\” \*…