Two English Words That Nearly Broke a Triad Boss During Wartime#

Namchoi hadn’t seen Dichen in four months.

Four months. The number lodged in his chest like a stone he couldn’t cough up. He counted the days the way a gambler counts losses—obsessively, pointlessly, knowing the number won’t change a damn thing but unable to stop. A hundred and twenty-three days since they’d last been in the same room. A hundred and twenty-three days since Dichen walked out of the flat on Waterloo Road and vanished into the wreckage of the invasion like everyone else.

He didn’t know if Dichen was alive.

That’s the part that made his hands shake. Not grief—grief would’ve been manageable, because grief is final. This was worse. This was the gap between knowing and not knowing, wide enough to crack a man open. Dichen could be dead. Dichen could be in a labor camp. Dichen could be in Macau, or Canton, or a ditch somewhere in between. Dichen could be perfectly fine and simply unreachable. Every possibility was equally real, equally unbearable.

~

He started asking around. Carefully at first—coded questions through middlemen, the kind of sideways talk the triad had perfected. Seen this person? Know where he went? The questions were dressed up casual, as if Dichen were a business contact, a debtor, someone whose location mattered for practical reasons only.

Nobody bought it. Ah Sang, who’d known Namchoi for twenty years, watched him ask the same question three times in a single afternoon—reworded each time, as if the phrasing were the problem—and said nothing. What could he say? The boss was looking for someone, and the looking had a quality that went well beyond business. The quality was desperation. And desperation, in a man who’d built his entire life on the illusion of control, was more revealing than any confession.

Namchoi knew he was being obvious. He didn’t care. Or rather—he cared the way you care about a dripping ceiling while your house is on fire. The fire was bigger. The fire was not knowing.

~

In the second month, he did something reckless. He asked Yamaguchi.

Not directly. He framed it as a favor—a small matter, a nobody, someone who owed him money. Could the Lieutenant’s office check the internment records? The detention lists? A personal kindness, nothing more.

Yamaguchi looked at him across the table with an expression that was either sympathy or amusement—with Yamaguchi, the two were tough to tell apart. “A debtor,” he said. “Of course.” He wrote down the name Namchoi gave him. Dichen’s full name, in characters, on a Japanese military notepad. Blue ink. Cream-colored paper. Such a small thing—a name on a scrap of paper—and yet Namchoi felt like he’d just handed over something he’d never get back.

Three weeks later, Yamaguchi’s translator brought a note. Dichen had been located. Alive. In a civilian detention facility on the island side—Stanley, most likely, or one of the makeshift camps near Aberdeen. Details were thin. But “alive” wasn’t thin.

Namchoi read the note standing in the doorway of the dried-seafood shop. Read it twice. Hands steady. Breathing normal. He folded it, slipped it into his pocket, thanked the translator, and shut the door. Then he sat down on a crate of dried abalone and pressed his palms against his eyes until the dark behind them burst into color.

~

The postcard showed up three days later.

A boy delivered it—one of the camp runners, kids who ferried messages between the detention facilities and the outside world for a price. The card was small, playing-card size, cut from rough brown paper that might’ve been a bag in a previous life. The handwriting was Dichen’s—that careful, slightly tilted script Namchoi could’ve picked out from across a crowded room.

The message was short. In Chinese, it said almost nothing: a date, a line about being in good health, a request for medicine if any could be found. Bureaucratic. Safe. The kind of thing you write when you know someone’s reading over your shoulder.

But at the bottom, in English—and Dichen’s English wasn’t good, which made it worse, which made it everything—two words.

“Dear Namchoi.”

And at the end, after the Chinese text: “Yours.”

~

“Dear.” Namchoi stared at the word for a long time. He knew enough English—enough for business, enough to order a drink at the Peninsula bar, enough to tell when a British officer was insulting him politely. But “Dear” was slippery in a way Chinese wasn’t. In a Chinese letter, you’d write the person’s name, maybe a title. Formal. Clean. But “Dear”—was it just a formality? The way the English started every letter, even to people they hated? “Dear Sir, I regret to inform you that your dog has been shot”? Or was it—

He couldn’t finish the thought. He folded the postcard and slid it into his jacket, the inside pocket, against his chest. Then he took it out and read it again.

“Yours.”

What did “Yours” mean? Yours as in “Yours truly,” an English sign-off as empty as a period at the end of a sentence? Or yours as in—yours. Belonging to you. I am yours.

Namchoi had spent his whole life reading people—faces, hands, silences. He could tell when a man was bluffing at mahjong from how he touched his tiles. He could smell fear in the angle of a shoulder. But this—two English words on a scrap of brown paper—he couldn’t read. The ambiguity was maddening and precious. He wanted to know. He was terrified to know.

He kept that postcard in his inside pocket for the rest of the war.

~

That night, Namchoi sat alone in his room and did something he’d never done before. He wrote back.

Not a practical reply—no talk of medicine or food or escape plans. A real reply. He sat at the table with a sheet of paper and a pencil stub and tried to write what he felt, and the pencil wouldn’t move. He sat there an hour. The paper stayed white.

What do you say to someone you might never see again? What do you say when saying the wrong thing—or the right thing—could get you both killed? What do you say when the most honest sentence in any language would be: I can’t live without knowing where you are, and I don’t know if that’s love or something worse?

He didn’t write that. He wrote what Dichen had written—a date, a health update, a vague reassurance. Safe words. Cage words. At the bottom, in English, because English gave him the same hiding place it had given Dichen, the same cover between formality and feeling:

“Dear Dichen.”

And at the end:

“Yours.”

He handed the reply to the camp runner the next morning, along with a packet of sulfanilamide tablets he’d bought on the black market for a price that would’ve fed a family for a week. The boy took the letter and the medicine and took off, bare feet slapping the pavement, and Namchoi watched him until he rounded the corner and was gone.

~

After the postcard, something shifted. The searching didn’t stop—it got worse. Now that he knew Dichen was alive, the not-seeing became more unbearable, not less. Before, there’d been the chance that Dichen was dead, and that chance, awful as it was, carried a kind of finality. You can grieve the dead. You can’t grieve someone who’s alive and suffering and three miles away and completely out of reach.

Namchoi started taking risks that made no sense. He walked to Stanley—on foot, through checkpoints, armed with a made-up story about a construction job—just to see the camp from the outside. He stood on a hillside and looked down at the barbed wire, the squat buildings, the tiny figures drifting between them, and tried to pick out Dichen from two hundred meters away. He couldn’t. They all looked the same from up there—small, thin, faceless.

He went back three times. Each time, same hillside, same indistinguishable figures, same feeling: a rage with no target, a helplessness with no fix, a love that had curdled into something closer to hunger. Not hunger for food. Hunger for control. To know. To see. To have.

Fat Kei noticed. “Boss, you’ve been going to the island a lot.”

“Construction business.”

“There’s no construction on the island.”

Namchoi looked at him. Fat Kei looked back. Neither said another word.

~

“All is well.” That’s what the postcard said, if you translated the Chinese loosely. A stock phrase. The kind of thing you write when nothing’s well, when everything’s gone sideways, but you want the person on the other end to stop worrying.

Namchoi kept the postcard in his inside pocket. At night, alone, he’d take it out and read it again, as if the words might rearrange themselves, might say something new, might finally give him the one thing he needed—certainty.

They never did. “Dear” stayed ambiguous. “Yours” stayed ambiguous. And Namchoi stayed on that hillside, staring down at a camp full of identical figures, unable to tell which one was the person who’d signed a postcard with a word that might mean everything or nothing at all.

All is well. All is not well. In the gap between those two sentences, a man was falling apart.