Free A Different Sky by Meira Chand

Mei Lan’s mother wore a small jade pendant as a protective amulet; it had been taken from amongst the bones of her grandmother during the cleaning of her grave, long after her flesh was rotted and gone. Jade was a stone of magical properties prized above all else, Grandfather Lim Hock An had told Mei Lan. He had bought his first piece decades before with the initial profit he earned from his tin mine.
    Lim Hock An had been a tall, muscular man when he arrived in Malaya from China at the turn of the century, to work as a coolie in a tin mine near Ipoh. His intelligence was apparent to everyone; he rose quickly to the position of coolie supervisor and eventually began to prospect for tin on his own. As he hacked his way through the jungle with little relief from heat or the throttling vegetation, his slender resources were soon exhausted; he was ready to give up when he struck his first deposit. After that he had the luck to strike it again and again. Soon he was the owner of several large tin mines and employed coolies of his own. When his parents died he brought his wife Chwee Gek from China to join him. She handled the money, paid the coolies and did the accounts for she had some slender education. An American missionary couple in her home village had opened a school for girls; Chwee Gek had been allowed to go for a while to learn about numbers and letters. In later years, Lim Hock An got himself teachers and more education than his wife. He had a zeal for education that only the uneducated know. Although he never learned to read or write fluently, he sent his son to study in England and built schools that bore his name in China. He belonged to a generation that left their homeland in order to survive, but wherever they landed and lived, always looked back to China. Singapore was never more than a temporary place to acquire wealth before returning home. Now, trailing after Ah Siew,Mei Lan passed the closed door of the Jade Museum and thought of the green magic pulsating within.
    Lim Villa appeared pinned to the ground by its four octagonal turrets. In the upper rooms of these towers the Lim family had their separate quarters. Lim Hock An occupied one tower and Second Grandmother another; Mei Lan with her family lived in a third. Although the fourth turret lay empty for the use of guests, it was said that Lim Hock An was merely biding his time and soon this area would house a new wife. Such gossip was not mentioned before Second Grandmother – any thought of an additional wife in the house drove her to shout dementedly and claw at her slave girls until their blood ran.
    Second Grandmother’s rooms exuded a powerful smell of heady French perfume, the medicated lineament rubbed on to her arthritic limbs and the opium she regularly smoked. One by one Mei Lan liked each of these smells, but together they combined to make her head ache. When at last Mei Lan and Ah Siew entered her quarters, Second Grandmother was waiting for them seated on a black lacquer chair, regal in embroidered silk. At the sight of Mei Lan her face creased in a smile, revealing her many gold teeth. Mei Lan approached for the kiss Second Grandmother expected, and was forced to examine her at close range. Tobacco discoloured her remaining teeth and her breath was soured by opium. Mei Lan concentrated on the smell of the perfume that was always strongest about her ears. As Second Grandmother held her close and whispered words of affection, Mei Lan tried to remember the impossible name of her perfume. Schiaparelli. Sometimes she managed to remember the whole name, and sometimes there was no more in her head than a Schia . . . and nothing could get her beyond it. A forest of embroidered pink peonies covered Grandmother’s long sam and matching trousers; jade earrings green as spinach and lit with diamonds hung from her ears. Jade covered her wrists and more diamonds her fingers; pins of silver filigree speared her upswept hair. Second Grandmother