He takes a careful breath, thinking through his patchy memories of his mother and trying to separate them from what he'd been told after her death. That she was a mistake, that she ruined his father, that she was a cautionary tale.

"Warm. Affectionate," he says, trying to focus of the warmth of her sitting alongside him as he read to her from his school books rather than the cold of kneeling in front of her dark home time and time again. "Not permitted to see her often, but looked forward to it. Think she was a little like Wei Ying. Would try and hug me but I wouldn't allow it. Not dignified," he says, voice pained at the memory. It is one of his biggest regrets, though he suspects his mother understood.