I met Zyl in Hong Kong during the Winter of 75-76. I was teaching at the Alliance Française, she was studying Cantonese and we both lived around Shatin. I actually forgot how I first met her. My earliest memory is an evening with her in Taiwai during that Winter; she had been invited by some local young men to eat dog meat (which was illegal) and she had asked me to join them. That was the first of many great evenings with her.

Ah Lung had met her a few years earlier in Paris when she was teaching French in Jussieu and she was the first of our common friends but she was not exactly a friend. She was family. There were years when we met several times, often in Hong Kong, sometimes in Paris; others years when we did not see each other or even write or phone but it did not matter as we could always resume the conversation where we had left it. And it did not matter because we believed that she would always be here with her laughter and immense generosity and that we would grow old together. Little did we know…

Hong Kong