Dramatis Personae:

方武 Fang Wu (a.k.a. Frederick Wentworth) Note: "Wu" means "military"

方文 Fang Wen (a.k.a. Edward Wentworth) Note: "Wen" means "academic"

蔡盈Cai Ying (a.k.a. Sophia Croft) Note: "Ying" means "lacks nothing"

Admiral Cai, nicknamed "Lao Cai 老蔡" i.e. "Old Cai" (a.k.a. Admiral Croft)

夏健 Xia Jian (a.k.a. Captain Harville) "Xia" is pronounced as "Har" in Cantonese

郑喜喜 Zheng Xixi (a.k.a. Henrietta Musgrove) Note: "Xixi" means "happy"

郑乐乐 Zheng Lele (a.k.a. Louisa Musgrove) Note: "Lele" also means "happy"

陈健明 Chen Jianming, also known as "小明 Xiao Ming" (a.k.a. Charles Hayter)

Nur Atiqah binti Eusoff (a.k.a. Anne Elliot)

Part I - Fang Wu

They had just run an English-language article entitled "The Best Is Yet To Be" in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, when Fang Wu, who was a star forward on Team China and a multiple domestic league champion with his club Shanghai Port, and who had also been a factor in both sides of the Canton Derby during his early pro career, announced his retirement from professional football.

The article wasn't wrong; he was, indeed, playing some of the best football of his career, and thus far, he had avoided being plagued by any major injuries. There really wasn't any reason for him to declare at this moment that the best was not only not to be, but never to be again, when he was arguably at his peak, save for his personal ego. But, as with many of his life decisions, pride drove him, and he wanted his fans to remember him at his very best, rather than to witness the inevitable decline that would surely happen now that he was over the age of 30. And he said just about as much to the press, seemingly oblivious that such bold-faced words would surely disappoint the fans who wanted more, when he announced his retirement at age 31 after an illustrious 10-year career in club and international pro football.

Nobody understood his decision: not his fans, who now spanned half the eastern coast of China after his transfer to Shanghai Port six years ago, nor his manager, who suggested that if he was tired of Shanghai, he could consider pursuing a transfer back to the rebuilt Guangzhou F.C., the original springboard of his career. Little did Fang Wu's management team know that, for reasons which he kept strictly to himself, that was the last thing that he wanted.

Perhaps the only people who even came close to understanding him were his two elder siblings: his sister Cai Ying (nee Fang Ying), who served with her husband in the Navy off its base in Sanya, and his brother Fang Wen, who had moved back to rural Hunan and lived in a village very similar to the one where they had grown up in, where he now taught primary school. They were the ones who knew that the base of Fang Wu's rootlessness had come not only when he switched clubs and moved north, but much earlier than that.

The sheer vastness of China meant that often, children were separated from their parents far too early in life for their own good. When he was barely 10, the Fang family had shipped Fang Wu out on a bus to the next bigger town at the behest of his fourth-grade teacher so that he could get the level of training and competition that he needed to fully develop his talent in football. Since then, he had never truly had a home, nor any satisfactory means to communicate properly with their illiterate parents.

When he had effectively been thrown out to shift for himself since he was 10, was there any wonder that he kept his own counsel and stuck to his own choices, no matter how bizarre they might seem to anyone else? Possibly even his stubborn pride had been born from his forced early independence, for in his new team, 10-year-old Fang Wu had been the runt of the litter, and the veneer of bravado was the only thing he had in his toolkit to deal with the inevitable bullying that came from the older boys.

But it was no use crying over spilt milk; whatever damage that had been done was water under the bridge long ago. If Fang Wu regretted retiring too early when he woke up in his trendy Shanghai apartment with its panoramic view of Hangzhou Bay, well, he had already made his statement with the press, and it would be too embarrassing to recant it. Retirement, it seemed, was dastardly in its effectiveness at uncovering the emptiness of his life. It forced him to wonder what he, a son of southern China, was doing up here in Shanghai, a booming commercial metropolis with a football club that sat at the very top of the Chinese Super League (the top domestic pro tier in China), but where he didn't know a single word of the local dialect.

When Fang Wu sat in one of the 'aesthetic' and 'Instagrammable' cafés that dotted Shanghai's downtown watching the bustling crowd pass him by, it sank into his very bones that a life devoid of activity and striving would leave him deeply dissatisfied. Disillusioned by the rat race, many of his generation had sunk into tangping 躺平 or "lying flat", which meant giving up on career progression and earning the bare minimum that they needed to survive, but just one day of doing tangping convinced Fang Wu that this would be no way for him to lead the rest of his life.

Ever restless and nomadic – for the places that he had lived in spanned two-thirds of the length and breadth of China – Fang Wu's solution for his sense of emptiness came in travel. He packed up his bags – and his apartment (for what business had he now in a city where he had no roots after the fame and money had dried up?) – and headed to the places where the three most important people in his life were. Since age10, Fang Wu's sense of being had never again been tied to a specific place, only to people. When even those people were now scattered far and wide, it simply meant that he had nowhere to seek refuge, no one physical place to call his home. He'd buried that, coming to roost in any place that could bring him career success, but in retirement, even that was taken away from him.

There was his best friend, Xia Jian, who had literally grown up with him as a footballer. Guangzhou, the biggest metropolis in southern China, was the hub for all the best talent from the south, and Fang Wu had met Xia Jian in the Under-16 league when he moved there for senior high school. After emerging from the youth leagues, Fang Wu and Xia Jian had embarked on their pro careers side by side, competing first for Guangzhou City and then Guangzhou F.C., the #2 and #1 teams in the area which made up the Canton Derby.

Perhaps it was unfair that Fang Wu had played offense and Xia Jian had played defence, because it meant that Fang Wu took the lion's share of the limelight even though they had been nearly equally responsible for the success of their club. Although Guangzhou F.C. had been relegated from the top-tier Super League to the second-tier China League One in 2022, it had flourished in its new league placing third in 2024, which was a very heady achievement for a pair of 22-year-olds who came from humble beginnings. Surely, they had been convinced, this would be the start of a bright future.

The role of team captain was not an immutable status for the season but passed from one team member to another depending on the makeup of the starting XI and the strategy for the day. During the years when they had competed together, the captain's armband had been regularly traded between Fang Wu and Xia Jian, with Fang Wu perhaps edging Xia Jian out narrowly in the number of matches that he had captained. Indeed, the margin between their talent and their contributions had been only hair thin.

With that first taste of success, Fang Wu and Xia Jian had been hopeful that they might start drawing notice for bigger opportunities. While Fang Wu had fervently aspired to get to the Chinese Super League and even to play internationally, Xia Jian had shared his dream only to the extent that he could remain in Guangzhou, where he had lived all his life. Sadly, eight years ago in 2025, their Chinese Super League ambitions had been dashed through entirely no fault of their own when Guangzhou F.C. failed to pay up its debt and got expelled from professional football. From being third in their league, Fang Wu and Xia Jian had suddenly been thrown into a situation of not even having a season to look forward to.

They had dealt with that curveball in very different ways, driven by their different priorities. Then aged 23, Fang Wu had moved west to join Yunnan Yukun, the 2024 China League One champions who were newly promoted to the Super League for 2025, while Xia Jian had resolutely stayed in Guangzhou even though it meant demotion to China League Two.

For Fang Wu, moving almost clear across the country from the south-easternmost coast to the south-westernmost province bordering Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam had mattered very little, because he had been displaced so many times already. However, being Cantonese was a huge part of Xia Jian's identity. The Cantonese dialect, known by the Chinese as yue yu 粤语, was so distinctive that it was nearly considered to be a language of its own. This was because even though Cantonese shared the same written script as standardised Mandarin (the national language across China), it had unique intonation and idioms that formed the backbone of its character. And except in Hong Kong, it was not taught in schools but passed down the generations through daily family immersion. Fang Wu might have moved on, but Xia Jian, a Cantonese born and bred, would never leave Canton, even though the unfortunate local club situation unjustly relegated him to football obscurity.

Fang Wu and Xia Jian's paths had diverged even further when, a few years later, Xia Jian suffered a debilitating knee injury that left him with a lifelong limp and ended his career in pro football. It hadn't hurt their friendship one bit, but it did send them along very different life trajectories.

Xia Jian now lived in Foshan, or "Fatt-san" as it was pronounced in Cantonese, together with his wife and children. Unlike the neighbouring Guangzhou, it didn't have the shine of being one of the major world-class Chinese cities. Still, it was part of the thriving Pearl River Delta metro region on China's southeastern coast, full of opportunities for the next generation. After quitting football, Xia Jian had moved here because he wanted his children to grow up with the Cantonese dialect as the native language of their daily lives, rather than standardised Mandarin. That could never happen in Guangzhou, the capital of Canton, because too many non-Cantonese people had moved there for economic reasons.

Once upon a time, Cantonese had been the lingua franca for everyone in Canton. In recent decades, that had changed because of the use of standardised Mandarin (also known as guoyu 国语 i.e. the national language) in the national education system. It didn't help that it was very difficult for non-native Cantonese (or even some of the younger natives) to learn the dialect, because it had seven tones whereas standardised Mandarin had only four. As a result, a whole generation of Cantonese people were slowly losing their roots.

Xia Jian and his wife had grown up in Guangzhou, the biggest beating heart of Canton. Their families had been there for generations, so there were few people who could be considered more Cantonese than them. And yet, they had been taught in school with only standardised Mandarin, which was also the language that they used to communicate with their friends (including Fang Wu), who came from all over China. They now considered themselves Chinese first and Cantonese second, despite their fervent loyalty to the Canton province. Adopting the common language of the country had been an imperative when it meant that they could network with people from other parts of China, which was essential for getting the best job opportunities.

Now, having gotten the economic leg up that came from plugging into the burgeoning Chinese national economy, Xia Jian and his wife's priorities had changed. They wished for their children to become Cantonese first and Chinese second, just as their parents and grandparents had been. If everybody went on speaking standardised Mandarin at the expense of Cantonese, their dialect would become extinct in less than two generations. Even if he hadn't gotten injured, Xia Jian would have wanted to quit football prematurely so that he could move wherever he wanted by the time his eldest daughter started school. Only a move to a more localised area of Canton, outside the city of Guangzhou, could ensure that Xia Jian's children picked up enough Cantonese to pass it on to future generations. It was Xia Jian's sole option to salvage a heritage that didn't deserve to die off after having existed for centuries.

So, Xia Jian and his family were happily situated in a flat near a metro station in Foshan. Despite his disability, Xia Jian hadn't subscribed to the concept of tangping either. While he had never been particularly good at academics, he was an extremely accomplished woodworker and earned more than a living wage selling his wood carvings online.

"小健，你是我的偶像, (Xiaojian, you're my idol,)" Fang Wu said, and while he was known for sometimes being outright facetious, this time he was dead serious. It might be true that unlike him, Xia Jian had never tasted any international football glory (no matter how equally deserving he might have been), but he had an occupation that would last him a lifetime and a firm grasp on his roots. Both were #goals that Fang Wu now belatedly found himself sadly lacking in.

"大哥，你在开玩笑吧? (Big Brother, you're joking, aren't you?)" was Xia Jian's incredulous reply. And, to his later shame, Fang Wu didn't disabuse him of that notion, didn't admit to Xia Jian just how much he truly envied Xia Jian's success in life outside football. It was his pride, all over again, that didn't allow him to let go of the hierarchy that had ruled ever since Fang Wu and Xia Jian had started competing together. He, Fang Wu, had been Da Ge 大哥, the "big brother", and he had always addressed Xia Jian by the affectionate diminutive of "Xiaojian" 小健 or "Little Jian". Even if the margin between their football prowess had been razor thin, their nicknames established and reinforced to everyone within earshot that they were nearly brothers, but Fang Wu was clearly the elder and Xia Jian the younger.

Visiting Foshan had been a simple metro ride from Guangzhou Baiyun Airport with a couple of line transfers. That was a testament to the rapid infrastructure development that spanned the 22,000 square mile Guangdong – Hong Kong – Macao Greater Bay Area. In contrast, getting to where Fang Wu's elder brother Fang Wen lived was much more arduous, involving a flight to Changsha, the capital of Hunan, and many hours of bus rides deep into the countryside.

The village that Fang Wen now called home was not much different from what Fang Wu remembered of his earliest childhood. People lived in dilapidated little one-or two-room houses, and the children, who trudged to school wearing identical track suits with their little red scarves tied around their necks, relied on state-provided school breakfast and lunch for their main meals. Like his own younger self, most of them had neither father nor mother in their daily lives, with most of their parents having decamped to the cities to seek a living, leaving them here with their elderly grandparents.

Once a week, Fang Wen would make a round of his pupils' homes, speaking to the mostly illiterate grandparents in their native Hunan dialect, to update them on the children's progress in school and convey important announcements. Now that Fang Wu was here for a visit, Fang Wen immediately dispatched him in the role of little brother by sending him off to the local market to buy enough fresh fish and prawns to distribute to all his students and their families as a treat. Seafood, always considered as a delicacy in China, was an extremely rare extravagance in that impoverished village in landlocked Hunan, but the return of a beloved brother after years of separation merited a huge celebration.

"恭喜，恭喜 (Congratulations, congratulations)," most of the elderly village folk wished Fang Wen as he paraded Fang Wu on his rounds, and while Fang Wu felt the irony of being feted for his fade out to obscurity, he gladly obliged all the requests from the children for his autograph. After all, he had been like them once, and perhaps this might inspire some of them to aspire to better things in the future, just as he had.

After his stop in Hunan, Fang Wu flew out from Changsha to Sanya, the naval city at the southern tip of Hainan Island that was home base for Cai Ying and her husband, Admiral Cai, whenever they were on shore.

Back in their childhood days, Fang Ying had skipped town just a few months after Fang Wu did to enlist in the Chinese Navy after her gaokao 高考 (high school graduation / university entrance exam). She had been enamoured of the Navy since she was just a little child, and one of Fang Wu's first memories as an infant was the sound of his nine-year-old sister's voice singing him to sleep with the age-old Chinese song Jun Gang Zhi Ye 军港之夜, or "A Night At The Naval Port". When the song was re-popularized during the 2019 season of the variety show "Our Song" (我们的歌) by Na Ying, the biggest mainland Chinese international singer of the '90s, and Xiao Zhan, one of the biggest young contemporary acting heartthrobs of the time, people in the audience had said that the song was nostalgic to them because their grandparents had sung them to sleep with it. Well, the then-17-year-old Fang Wu wouldn't admit it, but he still sang himself to sleep with it every night in his mind, remembering the beloved sister who had been home and anchor to him when he was just a baby.

"你看，你现在给我们作榜样了, (You see, we're now following your example,)" Cai Ying quipped.

"你这句话是什么意思? (What do you mean?)" asked a confused Fang Wu. His success might have swelled his head enough that he was constantly bossing Xia Jian, but no matter how red-hot his career got, Cai Ying had never allowed him to forget who was boss between them. In fact, everyone who knew both Fang Wu and his big sister deduced that the reason why Fang Wu was so stubborn had to be because he and Cai Ying had likely inherited that common trait from an ancestor somewhere up the line.

"你退休，我们也退休! (You're retiring and we're retiring too!)" exclaimed Cai Ying joyfully. "你说这样爽不爽? (Isn't that a blast?)"

"无所事事的，你还说爽? (How could you say being idle all day is fun?)" remarked Fang Wu dubiously. "你还是别让我诱惑你了，以免我误导你的下半辈子, (You'd better stop letting me be a negative influence on you, or else I'll mislead you in the latter part of your life)," he warned.

"呸，你胡说八道些什么? (Fie! What kind of nonsense are you talking?) 我们都一大把年纪了；我也得接受，退休是天经地义、理所当然的事儿。(We are getting on in years, and I must accept that retirement is a natural and logical thing.) 更何况，我们还要环游世界呢! (Furthermore, we want to travel the world!)"

Fang Wu facepalmed big-time when Cai Ying announced that the first destination on the cards for her and her husband, Lao Cai 老蔡 (i.e. "Old Cai"), was Spain, where they would embark on a month-long hike called the Camino del Norte. If Canton had the honour of being the ground of the biggest joy and heartbreak in his professional life, Spain held that very same distinction for his personal life.

During the downtime that switching clubs last-minute had given him, Fang Wu had gone there eight years ago to unlock the secret of how the major European nations stayed at the very top of football rather than to stay at home warming the bench. Instead, he had come out unleashing the biggest folly of his life. How could he have ever been naïve enough to be mesmerised and blinded by the spell of a 19-year-old football prodigy who was utterly beautiful, utterly talented, and utterly virtuous… but also utterly Muslim?

At twenty-three, he had been a full-grown adult, and he ought to have realised that it was a non-starter from the very beginning. Instead, he had nearly committed himself to exploring a possible conversion to Islam down the road, a thing that was nearly unheard of among the majority Han population in China, a huge shift in his own cultural paradigm, and a clear message that marriage was his long-term intention. He had done all that only to be told, just one day later, that it had all been a game.

Of course it was a game. Everybody knew that Malay people were Muslim by default. And Chinese people were, well, Chinese, with their eclectic blend of Buddhism and Taoism and agnosticism but all bound by the common teachings of Confucius. Yes, there were Muslims in China, but they were mainly from two minority ethnicities: Hui and Uighur, so it would be highly unnatural for either him or her to try assimilating into any of those communities. So, Fang Wu maintained that everybody should consider it elementary knowledge that a relationship between a Chinese and a Muslim was impossible. Yet he had been caught in a fog of blindness, which he could only attribute to Chinese TV having influenced him into an over-romanticisation of his time in Europe.

If Cai Ying and Lao Cai found his travel recommendations for Spain rather lacklustre, they politely chose not to mention it. Besides, Fang Wu was highly supportive of their travels in all other ways. For a week, Fang Wu helped them with shopping for their trip and packing their backpacks, and he even saw them off at Sanya Phoenix International Airport.

After Cai Ying and Lao Cai left, Fang Wu felt a now-familiar sinking feeling returning to his stomach. Xia Jian, Fang Wen, and Cai Ying, the three people who held his roots and his sense of home, all had their own lives and a clear sense of purpose, while he had… nothing.

Bereft of house and home – for neither Shanghai, Guangzhou, Yuxi, nor Hunan had enough for him to truly feel as if he belonged in any of those places – Fang Wu was at a loose end about what to do with the rest of his life. Shanghai, the place where his international and domestic football careers had seen their zenith, had ceased to be relevant. It was likewise for Guangzhou, which had been the birthplace of his professional football career and his friendship with Xia Jian, but which held even less significance for him than it did for Xia Jian now. At least Xia Jian considered himself Chinese first and Cantonese second, but Fang Wu, who had moved to Guangzhou solely for the sake of football, was solidly Chinese but by no means Cantonese. And Yuxi, his home for the two years when he had played with Yunnan Yukun, was several provinces away from all the people whom he cared about.

There was still Hunan, the place of his birth and early childhood, the province where he had lived until his middle teens or thereabouts. He scarcely remembered when he had left it behind nearly for good. But his old village could only be a place of memories, not a viable place to live a life, when he had gotten used to modern flats with all the amenities of the city. To go back to living in a one-room shingle-and-plaster house without even the benefit of central heating would be a privation to him, even if it wasn't to his brother Fang Wen.

What could he do with his life that would still give it meaning? While he had never admitted it outright, he admired Fang Wen, impoverished though his brother's life might still be. Fang Wu and his siblings had once been children living in the deep heart of rural agrarian China, watching their parents practically break their backs through unending physical toil. Now, Fang Wen had made his life's mission to ensure that the next generation would have a better future than that, just as his teachers at school had once done for himself, Cai Ying, and Fang Wu. "师者, 人之模范也 Shi zhe, ren zhi mo fan ye (Teachers are the example of mankind)" was an established piece of wisdom in the Chinese language, and didn't he still have his football skills, which he could impart to the next generation?

And yet, coaching gigs, like everything else in China, were immensely competitive. Fang Wu didn't know if he could adjust to becoming simply a digit in this vast country of 1.4 billion people where many stars burned bright and fizzled out just as quickly. After football, the only thing that remained of his identity was that he was a son of southern China, and as generations of southern Chinese people before him had done for centuries, one path remained: to seek his fortunes in Southeast Asia, also known to the Chinese community as 南洋 nan yang, 'the South Sea'.

He had heard good things about Singapore: it was often the first overseas destination for middle-class Chinese when they could afford international holidays. When Xia Jian expanded his business overseas, it was one of the first countries that he shipped his woodwork to. A plethora of Chinese businesses were setting up shop there to bring a taste of home to the hordes of people who migrated there from China, be it for a season or for years, to make a living. Furthermore, Chinese players and coaches were considered as a vaunted source of talent for almost every sport.

It also happened to be the place where she lived, to the best of his knowledge, but what could that matter? A population of six million was nothing compared to the nearly 25 million in Shanghai, or the nearly 100 million across the Greater Bay Area region. Still, it was big enough that running into her would be as unlikely as finding a needle in a haystack.

A major international move involved enough logistics to keep Fang Wu busy for quite a while. Firstly, he needed to find work, and secondly, he also needed a place to stay. If he had to choose an estate (for that was what the government-built public housing communities where 80% of the people in Singapore lived were called), why shouldn't he go for la crème de la crème? 精益求精 Jing yi qiu jing, or 'keep striving for the best', was an established Chinese saying after all. Being used to years of garnering accolades over accolades, for him, only an award-winning place would do: Tampines, the public housing new town that had won the 1992 UN World Habitat Award. It was so excellent that it had even vaulted Singapore from the developing to the developed nation category! That she lived there, or at least she had when he last spoke to her – eight years ago – did not signify. At least, he had to convince himself that it didn't.

There was a thing that years of living in Canton did to you – it made a body, every single body, inordinately obsessed with superstitions involving numbers. In the Cantonese dialect, the number four was pronounced as 'sei', which also was (albeit with slightly different intonation) the word for 'death'; and the number eight, pronounced as 'bahtt', came close enough to the word for 'prosperous', or 'fatt', for the two to become synonymous. Eradicating all block and unit numbers with fours in them and going for the maximum number of eights and sixes (another number that denoted prosperity in Cantonese) landed Fang Wu with Block 866, #08-188, and he immediately offered a rent for the unit that his would-be landlord could not refuse.

A month in, everything was falling into place. He had a job teaching PE at a neighbourhood school in Singapore's HDB (Housing and Development Board) heartland, and while that wasn't exactly the same level of sacrifice that Fang Wen had made to become a village teacher, he was using football to reach out to ordinary, even disadvantaged, children that the system might otherwise have overlooked. The weather was hot and humid, but not worse than it would have been in Shanghai or Guangzhou in July and August. It helped that his flat was large and airy, bigger than the one he had in Shanghai, and situated on a high enough floor for the breeze to blow through it.

There were lots of made-for-China food, too. To his surprise, he didn't find large Western supermarkets like Sam's Club, Costco, Carrefour and Aldi here, the way he had in Shanghai. But unexpectedly, there were neighbourhood supermarkets and minimarts stocked with imported snacks from China. Fang Wu's stint in Spain had taught him that pickled fish and fried crab flavoured Lay's potato chips most likely weren't available anywhere outside China, but he could find them here. Better still, he could actually indulge in junk food like this now, whereas he had needed to control his diet strictly while he was playing.

Fang Wu's needs were simple, really. While theoretically he liked big-city life because there were nice flats, good shopping, pop concerts from international stars, a vibrant sports scene, all the latest movies, and a slew of cafes and restaurants, the asceticism of his lifestyle as a professional athlete meant that the only one of those things that factored into his day-to-day life was the presence of high quality authentic Chinese food, a thing that Singapore had in abundance. He could – no, he had – convinced himself that he was contented and happy.

Every day, he fell into a stable, if unvarying, routine. Well before dawn, he would walk the five hundred metres from his block to the school where he worked, because in Singapore, school started at 7:30 AM and pupils often reported to school at 7:15 or earlier. His day might get broken up by a quick lunch at the school canteen, but overseeing co-curricular activities (CCAs) often meant that he stayed in school until 5 PM or later.

And then, he would drop by a neighbourhood hawker centre or coffeeshop to pick up a simple takeout meal before heading back to his flat to partake of it in front of the TV. CGTN (China Global Television Network), the international arm of China Central Television, aired news and documentaries on local cable, albeit in English rather than in Mandarin, and he was able to access episodes of mainland Chinese dramas and variety programmes through YouTube or streaming to supplement the local fare of Singapore-produced Mandarin-language content and a mix of Mandarin or Mandarin-dubbed dramas coming from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. It wasn't quite home, but he was in a fair way getting to making a life here.

He had fallen into this pattern for about two-and-a-half months when the September school holidays hit, which meant that he could work very light hours for a week and explore more of his neighbourhood. Being out and about at times when he was usually working meant that he discovered things which he normally wouldn't, and one of them was the highly unusual sound he heard at the void deck of his block while coming home from lunch one day.

Void decks were another thing that existed here which were alien to him in China – some of the public housing flats, especially the ones that were closest to the town centre, had shops and community facilities on the ground floor, but the vast majority of them simply had open spaces occupied only by the bare foundation pillars and a vast floor of bare concrete, which created areas for residents to congregate and ensured that everyone had privacy because their homes were all above ground level. In fact, they were pretty good spaces for children to kick a football, except that the government had implicitly banned that through installing temporary barricades and imposing fines, which meant that mostly, they served as gathering places for local senior citizens.

Today, the lilting female voices that he heard speaking rapidly in the Hunanese dialect, which few in Singapore understood, were definitely not local, and neither did they sound like they belonged to senior citizens. Yes, Singapore was positively teeming with Chinese people. They made up more than 70% of the total population, in fact. However, they spoke Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Hainanese, or Hakka, if they spoke any dialect at all. Disappointingly, many Chinese Singaporeans were even incapable of speaking coherent standardised Mandarin, because English was the medium of instruction in the local schools with Mandarin taught as a second language. Fang Wu could only conclude that was the main reason why the ethnic Chinese people in Singapore conversed in creoles called Singlish and Singdarin that mixed highly ungrammatical English, Mandarin, Malay, and Hokkien in random proportions with accents that sounded outlandish to him. Indeed, the likelihood of him finding someone speaking in his native dialect was nil or next to nil most of the time.

"各位小姐，请问贵姓？我也是湖南人, (Ladies, what are your names? I'm also from Hunan,)" he said, approaching the two ladies and bearing his most charming smile. He wasn't a player and seldom flirted, but the fact that he had met two other people from his province at the very block where he lived, indicated that it had indeed been an extremely auspicious choice. Here he was, quite ready to make a foolish match, and anybody from Hunan between the ages of twenty and thirty may have him for the asking.

"喂！姐，你看，他是方武呀! (Hey Sis, look! He's Fang Wu!)" exclaimed the younger of the two women. They looked very close in age and nearly identical, with the same long straight jet-black hair, pale skin, and slender build that characterised hordes of Chinese women in their twenties. But who was Fang Wu to be particular? The sticking point was that they were Chinese, and they had come from the same province as him, and they had serendipitously shown up in his neighbourhood, so what more of kismet could he wish for? It certainly didn't hurt that in this place where everybody was crazy about the EPL (English Premier League) and none of the locals watched Chinese football, they still recognised him anyway (which was also because they were Chinese! From China!).

Wryly, it occurred to Fang Wu that such tribalistic thoughts must mean that he was catching onto the local mindset, because the ethnic Chinese majority in Singapore called themselves 华人 hua ren (ethnic Chinese) in Mandarin and simply 'Chinese' in English, but they specifically referred to him and other Chinese people who had come straight from China, as opposed to being born in Singapore, as 'China Chinese', or 'PRC Chinese'.

It was markedly different from his own worldview of Chinese people, where he would have called them 华裔 hua yi, or ethnic Chinese diaspora with non-Chinese citizenship, whereas he belonged to both the categories of 中国人 zhong guo ren (i.e. mainland Chinese nationals) and 中华民族 zhong hua min zu (i.e. ethnic Chinese, encompassing also the people of Taiwan and the diaspora). Strangely enough, although the people of Hong Kong were also ethnic Chinese who spoke the same Cantonese dialect as the Cantonese natives of Guangdong (Canton) province (albeit with some local variations), they called themselves 香港人xiang gang ren (Hong Kongers) and refused to subsume themselves under the broader umbrella of the Chinese ethnicity.

Indeed, the notion of Chinese identity was fraught in many layers: language, ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, and politics. It was a whole plethora of nuance that got swept, rather simplistically, into the English concept of 'Chinese people'. Back in China, Fang Wu had never thought about unpacking the many facets of being Chinese. All his life, being Chinese and framing his entire existence around China had been as natural as breathing. Hence being in Singapore, where the ethnic majority identified themselves as Chinese but thought about the West more often than they thought about China, challenged Fang Wu's paradigm of being Chinese more than he liked.

In this country full of diaspora, it was inevitable that someone from his province was the closest to "his own people" that he could get. That was all it took for Zheng Xixi and Zheng Lele to become something of a standing fixture in his life. As luck would have it – didn't he always say he was lucky? – they lived in his block, albeit on the fourth floor. "都是乡下人嘛 (We're all from the same hometown anyway)" was as good an excuse as any for him to call on their flat with alarming regularity (after he had furnished them with autographs, of course).

Eagerly, Fang Wu plied the sisters with an abundance of Chinese food. Practically at their doorstep, there already were outlets of the massively popular and highly international Taiwanese Din Tai Fung 鼎泰奉 and Sichuanese Haidilao 海底捞chain restaurants. These were situated at Tampines Central, their local town centre, which was a mere ten-minute feeder bus ride away from their block. If they took the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) to the neighbouring towns of Bedok and Pasir Ris, they could even get a taste of their native food at Xiang Xiang Hunan Cuisine 湘香湖南菜. Distances in Singapore were much smaller than they were in sprawling Shanghai, so Fang Wu didn't mind a once-a-week metro ride to farther-flung parts of the island for good Chinese food, when such journeys out of Tampines to other parts of Singapore took a mere five to ten minutes at best and thirty to forty-five at worst.

Dinners out soon progressed to dinners in, where Fang Wu, trained by two decades of living alone and fending for himself, whipped up traditional Hunan dishes that he couldn't obtain easily outside his hometown. Xixi and Lele had grown up affluent in Changsha, and even though they had lived in Singapore for years now, ever since the start of their respective undergraduate studies at the National University of Singapore, they still didn't cook much at home, preferring to pick up takeout instead. After all, street food was so ubiquitous, and so affordable!

Naturally, having a hot former national footballer cooking for them was insanely hard to resist. It was no wonder that Xixi and Lele promptly latched on to the habit of having weekly home-cooked dinners which alternated between Fang Wu's flat and theirs, the aroma of the stir-frying billowing out and tantalising the neighbours.

With the hot weather, they often left the front door open when Fang Wu cooked, both to allow the breeze to pass through, and to let the inevitable fumes that came from the intense stir-frying escape the flat. Singapore was such a safe place, and there was still the metal outer gate to prevent anyone coming along the common corridor from entering the flat, even though everyone who walked past could see clear into the living room when they did that. But nobody cared, really - a Chinese man hanging out with two Chinese sisters was nothing unusual.

Initially it was just the three of them, until Xixi invited her longtime boyfriend, a nerdy local guy named Chen Jianming, to make these effectively double dates. Or at least, anyone looking in on them could construe them to be dates, regardless of what Fang Wu considered these gatherings to be. Thus far, he hadn't yet felt the wish to make any physical moves on Lele, but he certainly met up with her frequently enough that he knew he was creating the impression of being romantically interested in her. Well, what alternatives did he have, anyway? He wouldn't be able to find a better cultural match than a fellow Hunan native, and her eyes told him that she was clearly attracted to him, so even if he wasn't quite feeling that the attraction was fully mutual, he would by no means resist.

They were cooking up a storm and laughing, with Lele insisting that Fang Wu hold her hand and teach her how to cook, when a voice called at the door. Dang, how could that voice be still so recognisable, when he hadn't heard it for eight years?

"Xi Xi, Le Le, where are you? I got Old Chang Kee curry puffs for you, come!"

It was a very Malay voice, he reflected, and when there weren't many Malay people in China, there was only one way he could have known that. Yet of course, just as surely as being Chinese wasn't a monolith, being Malay shouldn't be one either –

What was he kidding himself with? He would have recognised that voice from anywhere, Malay or not.

Nur Atiqah binti Eusoff, football prodigy and the former love of his life, stood just outside the metal gate holding two paper bags of greasy curry puffs. He hadn't tasted Old Chang Kee before he came to this country, but like many things uniquely Singaporean, the widely beloved signature curry puffs were growing on him too. And he was certain that in the one bag that Atiqah intended for Xixi and Lele, there wouldn't be enough to have one for him.

She looked different, too. Eight years ago, when she had been a Under-19 youth player and the Chinese Super League phase of his pro career had yet to blossom, T-shirts, Bermudas and flip-flops had been the order of the day when they weren't training. While he'd never known if make-up had been strictly forbidden because of her Muslim faith, he had thought that for her, it would anyway have been superfluous.

This Atiqah wore slim-fit jeans, a pair of low-heeled strappy sandals, and on top – well, he couldn't see her top at all, because her head and shoulders were covered under a mint-green head scarf that did double duty as a shawl, enveloping her body from the crown of her head almost to her waist. It was adorned by a cute little pin, and did she have on makeup? They called this scarf the tudung, a new piece of vocabulary that he had picked up in Singapore, and it was worn primarily by the most devout of Muslim women, although in Singapore, which was relatively liberal because it wasn't an exclusively Islamic country, they often allowed it to do double duty as a fashion accessory. Which Atiqah was clearly doing now, as was plain to see. To him, seeing her in the tudung was like a slap in the face – a stark reminder of how, in the folly of his youth, he had once thought in impossibilities.

"Atiqah! Come, please come in, and we can eat together!" He knew Lele well enough to know that she could be effusive, but he hadn't any idea that Lele and Atiqah were such fast friends. "Atiqah, this is my boyfriend, Xiaowu 小武 (i.e. Little Wu)." It was also the first time he heard her using that diminutive with his name, which indicated extreme affection and familiarity.

Her boyfriend. That was not a thing that they had overtly discussed, not that he minded if it ended up happening somewhere along the way. But to be introduced as such – to frame the situation, as it were, as if he and Atiqah were strangers, even if to all intents and purposes they now were – that felt wrong, and he couldn't let Lele continue in his vein.

"Atiqah and I already know each other," he clarified. "We met while we were training in Spain."

"Spain? I never knew you went to Spain," gushed Lele. "How romantic!"

"It's football training," pointed out Fang Wu grumpily. "Nothing romantic."

"That's still exciting," insisted Lele, "Come, sit and tell me everything about it!" The gate was already unlocked and Lele slid it open, gesturing for Atiqah to come in.

"Sorry," Atiqah apologised. "I need go home to my dad. And I didn't know you were here, let me get one more curry puff for you." Deftly she opened the other paper bag and pulled out a curry puff from it with her fingers, dropping it into the bag that she handed to Lele.

And in a whiff, she vanished, too quickly for Fang Wu to realise that she had just given the curry puff that she had bought for herself to him. Even so, he did realise that he had uttered her name for the first time in eight years, but she hadn't addressed him by his.

Notes

Here are the deliberate canon parallels between Wentworth's Navy career and Fang Wu's pro football trajectory, linked to real-world Chinese club football events:

1. Young Wentworth joins the navy - FW leaves his parents' home permanently at the age of 10 to train in football

2. Battle of San Domingo (Wentworth achieves initial success) - Guangzhou F.C. achieves 3rd place in China League One, the #2 domestic league

3. Wentworth is temporarily thrown ashore despite having better prospects - Guangzhou F.C. is expelled from pro football because of its debt

4. The Asp, Wentworth's first command - FW transfers to Yunnan Yukun which was just promoted to the Chinese Super League from China League One

5. The Laconia, Wentworth's second command that brings him much success - FW transfers to Shanghai Port (2023 and 2024 China Super League champions in the real world) - the coincidental nautical reference also helps as an Easter egg!

And Harville (Xia Jian) is just as intricately paralleled as Wentworth (Fang Wu):

1. He has attained the status of "Captain", which means that he was either a Captain or a Commander when he was active in the Navy. This is reflected in Xia Jian's role as the next most important person on the team, sharing the captain's armband with Fang Wu, when they played together on the same team.

2. He's a reflection of what Wentworth might have ended up like if he'd not been as lucky.

3. Despite his difficulties, he has built a full and happy life for himself and his family.

4. Just like in canon, he's not a reader but is great at woodworking.