After her parents were killed by an out-of-control truck, her boyfriend vanished with all their money on the eve of registering their marriage, and Lin Yunshu finally died of exhaustion at her keyboard after another late night at work.
When she opened her eyes again, she had transmigrated to a broken woodshed in a remote mountain village in southern China in the 1950s. Her parents were dead here, too, and she also had a cruel older brother and sister-in-law who leeched off her.
Clutching the kindling knife she had secretly hidden, Lin Yunshu decisively joined the villagers fleeing famine.
Clinging to a coal train racing at full speed and crammed into the foul-smelling hold of a fishing boat, she struggled all the way to Hong Kong.
But what awaited her was not the dazzling neon of Victoria Harbour, but the hard life of the squatter settlements.
From gambling dens deep inside Kowloon Walled City to restaurant kitchens and boats at Central Pier, she was always on the move.
When Typhoon Ida's winds tore through the city under a No. 3 Signal, she stood on the roof of a church hospital and watched the Bible flutter in the torrential rain like a banner summoning the dead.
