Chapter 1
The Weight of Small Keys
The keys arrived before the grief did.
They came in a brown envelope soft as cloth from being handled, hand-delivered to Mei Foong Cheong by a lawyer’s clerk who apologised twice for the traffic and once, obscurely, for the weather. Inside was a ring of seven brass keys, each worn to the colour of honey, and a single sheet of paper in her grandfather’s upright, patient hand. Meimei tipped the keys into her palm and felt how little they weighed. It seemed wrong. Whole buildings were supposed to be heavier than this.
She had flown up from Kuala Lumpur that morning for the funeral, and the funeral had been exactly as her grandfather would have wanted, which is to say brief, well-attended by people she did not know, and slightly too warm. Old men in short-sleeved batik shirts had held her hands in both of theirs and told her that Cheong Ah Sang was the best projectionist in Perak, that he never once let a reel run out mid-scene in thirty years, that when the Rex closed a part of the town closed with it. She had smiled and thanked them and understood perhaps a tenth of what they meant.
Now, in the too-quiet hotel room, she unfolded the letter.
