“Lah” for emphasis-no lah, sorry lah-wasn’t English. “I go already” to mean “I went,” that was wrong, though I understood it fine after the first few days. The week I started, they told me the common features of Hong Kong English and said to correct the children when they used them.

That evening I used most of the money to book a flight to Hong Kong and a room for the first month, and started applying for teaching jobs. For as long as I lived in Ireland, and for as long as abortion was illegal there, I’d have to keep my dead time locked up. Weeks of my life were in that savings account. While they were handing out the papers, I counted how many hours I’d waited tables. Just before leaving for Hong Kong, I sat for my final exams. The richer I got, the harder it would be for anyone to force me to do anything. I got the money together by waitressing, then kept adding to it after I had enough for a procedure in England. I knew some women who saved with their friends, and they all helped whoever was unlucky. Throughout college back in Ireland, I’d kept a savings account that I charmingly termed “abortion fund.” It had €1,500 in it by the end. Aside from anything else, I hadn’t quit over their racist recruitment policy, so it would have been weird to leave just because I couldn’t piss whenever I wanted. “I need to go to the toilet between classes. When Benny came at the end of July to pay me, I said I was thinking of leaving.

The buck stopped with him, a reflection of his general distaste for parting with currency. He spoke of this last as “back” in Connemara, a place neither of us had been, though I supposed that enhanced the poetry of it. Hong Kong–born, Canadian-educated, repatriated, and thriving, he owned a dozen other schools and-evocatively, I felt-an Irish seaweed company. Our director, Benny, was forty and wore a baseball cap backwards, either to look like he loved working with kids or to stress that he was his own boss and dressed to please no one, not even himself.

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