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around the grounds looking for horseshoes, shouting with triumph whenever one of us found one, even though it was crumbling with rust and left that iron-blood smell on our hands which still lingered after persistent scrubbing.
     
     
In the normal course of events I would never have inherited all these things. My father had four children and I was the last. I never thought much about the question of Istana’s future ownership. But I did love the house. Its graceful lines and history touched me strongly and I loved exploring every part of it, sometimes even, despite my fear of heights, climbing up to the roof through a door in the attic. I would sit and look out over the landscape of the roof, like a tickbird on the back of a water buffalo, and feel the house beneath me. I often asked my father to tell me the stories behind the portraits that lined the walls, and the dusty trophies won by people related to me, the inscriptions on them linking me to these long-gone pieces of my flesh and bone.
     
     
Much as I loved the house, I had a greater love for the sea—for its ever-changing moods, for the way the sun glittered on its surface, and how it mirrored every temperament of the sky. Even when I was a child the sea whispered to me, whispered and spoke to me in a language I assumed only I understood. It embraced me in its warm currents; it dissolved my rage when I was angry at the world; it chased me as I ran along the shore, curled itself around my shins, tempting me to walk farther and farther out until I became a part of its unending vastness.
     
     
I want to remember it all, I told Endo-san once. I want to remember everything that I have touched and seen and felt, so that it will never be lost and brushed away. He had laughed, but he had understood.
     
     
My mother, Khoo Yu Lian, was my father’s second wife. She was Chinese and her father had joined the mass exodus to Malaya from the Hokkien province in China in search of wealth and a chance to survive. Thousands of Chinese came to work in the tin mines, escaping famine, drought, and political upheaval. Her father had managed to become wealthy from his mines in Ipoh, a town two hundred miles away to the south. He had sent his youngest daughter to the Convent School in Light Street in Penang, far away from the coarse coolies he employed.
     
     
My father had been a widower when he met my mother. His wife Emma had died giving birth to Isabel, his third child, and I suppose he was also looking for a surrogate mother for his three young children. Yu Lian met my father at a party held by the son of the Chinese consul general, Cheong Fatt Tze, a Mandarin sent from Peking. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-two.
     
     
My father scandalized Penang society when he married my mother, but his wealth and influence partly eased the way. She died when I was seven and, except for a few photographs in the house, I have only faint memories of her. I have tried to hold on to those fading recollections, those softening voices and disappearing scents, augmenting them with what I heard from my two brothers and sister and the servants who had known her.
     
     
The four of us Hutton children grew up virtually as orphans: after my mother’s death my father retreated into his work. He went on frequent trips to the other states to visit his tin mines, his plantations, and his friends. He took the train down the coast to Kuala Lumpur regularly, spending days there while he oversaw the office just behind the court buildings. His only consolation in life, it seemed, was the company, but my brother Edward once told us that he kept a mistress there. At that young age I had no idea what he was talking about, though William and Isabel had giggled. For days afterward I pestered them about it and eventually our amah heard me mentioning the word, and warned me, “Aiyah! Stop saying that terrible word or I’ll beat your backside!”
     
     
Our father had instructed that we were to be addressed