“We can’t do that,” Ping said seriously as she struggled with the basket of fruit. “If we are doing this for Father, we have to do it right. We have to stay there for at least fifteen minutes. Or maybe twenty.”

  “Oh, whatever … ”

  I was disappointed and gave in, too young to have a precise understanding of time. Ping was two years older than me. Let her decide.

  As soon as we got to our grandparents’ home, I checked the time on their old-fashioned clock and waited for the fifteen or twenty minutes to pass. I played a waiting game, but the clock got the upper hand. Its needles crept and crawled and the world stood still. I became restless and tried hard to sit still on an oversized wooden armchair facing my grandfather.

  My grandfather was a slight, quiet man who had not spoken a word since we came. He simply nodded when he saw us, sitting on the edge of the bed smoking. Every time I saw him, he was smoking. He smoked so much that the top part of his right index and middle fingers had turned yellowish brown. Now, with his head tilted, his chin pointed upward, and his eyes half-closed, he was again puffing happily, his mind carried away by the ascending smoke.

  I turned to Ping, but couldn’t get her attention. Poor Ping. She was overwhelmed by Grandmother Ya Zhen, who bombarded her with one question after another. I wanted to come to her rescue, but couldn’t. No one could answer all her questions.

  “Remember the beggar story I told you? I tell you it’s that beggar’s doing again. You don’t believe me? You should if you don’t want that beggar to follow you around for the rest of your life—trouble, trouble, nothing but trouble!”

  Ping became quiet. I didn’t want to respond to her, either.

  “So, where is your father now?”

  I wish someone had an answer to that question.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “When will he come back?”

  “Is your mother working?”

  “How can you live without an income?”

  I wonder about that, too, I thought silently. And I wonder why you never helped us.

  I could hardly keep quiet. I would howl at my grandmother if only I could. But not today. Today, we came here for our father. I jumped down from my chair and headed straight for the window facing the park across the street. Beyond the park, I could see a cluster of blue domes on top of an old Russian Orthodox church. I took a long, deep breath, trying to focus my eyes on the golden, thin rods at the very top. What a meaningless trip! I knew it was time for me to take charge and rescue Ping from this trap or I might explode. But I didn’t have to.

  Stamp. Stamp. Stamp. The wooden stairs outside the apartment shook so violently I feared they might collapse.

  “Is anyone home? Anyone?!” A voice boomed all the way to the top of the staircase, and a stranger appeared. “I have important news … Is anyone home?”

  I turned around, and there was the fattest woman I had ever seen in my life. In the 1960s, everyone lived on rice and cabbage. No one could afford to get fat. You almost never saw fat people and none as big as this woman. She’d have to squeeze herself through the narrow door, I bet myself. Her face was baby-tender. Her skin was stretched thin by the abundant fat underneath.

  The woman was my grandfather’s sister-in-law, the wife to his only brother—the one who owned the charcoal store.

  My grandfather broke off contact with them twenty years ago when he freed his young family from the servitude of his brother’s store. His brother kept their parents and all their remaining wealth—whatever was left after the Japanese burned down my great grandfather’s factory. The rumor was that when my great grandmother came to her son’s charcoal store, she had so much gold jewelry that she used two silk scarves as parcels to carry them. Obviously, they all did well, except for my grandfather.

  “Oh, my dear brother-in-law, your mother is returning to the Heavenly Kingdom.” the woman said excitedly. Oddly, she was smiling as she delivered this news.

  Does my grandfather have a mother? I wondered as the woman brushed past me and went straight for Grandfather. She wrapped her arms around his neck as if they were very close to each other, even though they had not seen each other for twenty years.

  “Don’t feel bad,” the woman cooed soothingly, looking down at my grandfather’s moist eyes and hunched, stiff back. “We have treated her so well over the years. She just had her ninetieth birthday. Lao Shou Xing, our Old Longevity Star mother, wants to see her great-grandchildren from your side of the family. I am here trying to fulfill her last wish.”

  Somehow, tears readily flowed out of her smiling eyes when she mentioned “last wish.”

  Her eagle vision swept around the room and suddenly fell on Ping and me.

  “What!? Whose kids are these?” she asked. “An Chu’s? The very ones she wanted to see!”

  She looked ready to snatch us up in her greedy claws.

  I was scared of this woman. I looked away when she looked at me. But Ping and I had to go with her because our great grandmother wanted to see us—a great grandmother we had never known, who only wanted to see us when she was dying. And this fat woman needed us to fulfill a dying woman’s wish—a foolish superstition. If a dying person’s wish could not be satisfied, that person could turn into a ghostly spirit and bring trouble.

  We followed the waddling woman out of our grandparents’ apartment into the alley, onto a main street, and then several side streets, until we stopped in front of a very old, two-story row house. We walked through the front door and were immediately submerged in total darkness. I blinked and tried hard to make my eyes work, but I couldn’t see a thing. The smell of cooking oil, garlic, dust, and stale night air floated my way as the big woman led us with the sound of her heavy footsteps up a flight of stairs. I heard the stairs groan and was afraid that the woman would fall backwards onto me or a stair would give way under her. I felt every step with my hands and then climbed up on all fours, making sure that there was wood under me.

  Finally, we reached a landing. We stopped there, and waited in the darkness for an unsettling amount of time until the woman found and turned on a light.

  A bare bulb suspended on a wire gave out a weak, yellow light, revealing a bed perched on the corner of the landing. A tiny woman lay curled up on the mattress. She looked no bigger than a child. Her hair was white, smooth, and silky. Her feet were as small as mine but with odd lumps on top. She had bound feet! This must be our great grandmother, I thought.

  The big woman announced what I was thinking: “Bow, children, and pay your respects! This is your tai zu mu.”

  The white-haired child reacted to the sound and opened her eyes. She stared at the ceiling, her face as pale as the walls, and her arms thin as sticks.

  “Mother, Mother, I have brought you An Chu’s children. They are your great grandchildren … too bad they are all girls,” the big woman said in a sickeningly sweet voice with a touch of sarcasm.

  She grabbed my great grandmother like a hawk snatching a chicken and sat her up against a pile of pillows.

  Great Grandmother’s eyes became level with ours. She suddenly came to her senses.

  “Move closer, my precious,” she whispered in a trembling voice. “Let me have a good look at you.”

  Ping and I tried to move toward her. She looked us up and down several times. Her lips trembled and her mouth opened, but no words came out. Soon she stopped blinking and slipped back into her dreams.

  The big woman abruptly herded us back down the deep, dark stairs.

  “Well, now that Great Grandmother has seen you,” she said. “I’ll take you back to your grandparents.”

  Ping and I walked quickly down the staircase, helped by the light and mindful of the large, threatening boulder behind, ready to crush us if the rickety stairs gave in.

  “The minute … I saw you … I knew exactly … who you were,” she wheezed as she fell from step to step, painfully poking me with a fat finger. “You are an exact copy of your father when he was my charcoal boy.”

  I was glad to get out of that place. As soon as she guided us through the maze of alleys back to the main avenue, we said zai jian and hurried home. We had a lot to tell Mother.

  When she heard our story, Mother was indignant that anyone would let a ninety-year-old woman live in the dark corridor without sun, air, and windows.

  “Your great grandmother is a very gentle woman, too gentle to stand up for herself,” Mother sighed. “It’s a pity they treat her that way.”

  The next morning, we received the news that our great grandmother was, in fact, dying, and had expressed her wish to receive all the members of her family one last time. Mother got us dressed in our best clothes. Instead of sending us to school, she took all four of us to see our great grandmother.

  When we got there this time, the stair was lit and the bed in the corridor had been removed. Everything looked neater and the place more spacious. We found Great Grandmother on a comfortable bed in one of the rooms. In front of her, there was a quiet receiving line of relatives, which we joined. Great Grandmother held hands with everyone as she whispered her last words.

  “She cannot see anymore,” someone in the line explained. “That’s why she touches everyone.”

  I wondered how she lost her sight overnight and how she knew that she was dying, since she did not look any different today than she did yesterday. I had never seen anyone who was dying before. In fact, it had never, ever, occurred to me before yesterday that people could die. I did not know what happened when someone died. Perhaps, it was the same as when chickens, ducks, or fish died. I thought about the dead chicken in our yard and followed the people ahead of me until it was my turn.

  I was not scared when I touched Great Grandmother’s hand. It felt like a bunch of bones under wobbly skin. Just when I was going to withdraw my own hands and step aside, she held them tight and started to feel them with her fingertips.

  “This is the softest pair of hands I have ever touched,” Great Grandmother exclaimed. “This child has lucky stars over her! This child is blessed!”

  I did not know how a dying old lady could talk so loudly. She scared me. I wanted to pull my hands free and run away from her.

  Everyone stared at me with awe and jealousy, but Mother came to my rescue. She rushed to my side, hugging me with one arm and extending the other toward Great Grandmother. Great Grandmother only let go of me when Mother touched her. She then took Mother’s hands and mumbled: “You are having a hard life. Don’t worry. Everything will get better … better.”

  Having spent the last bit of her energy, the rest of her “goodbyes” were subdued, more like a deathbed scene, with no words of wisdom or exclamations, no whispers, just touches, gentle touches from her waiting relatives, her expressionless face as gray as old white cotton sheets. As I stood in a corner and watched unfamiliar people come and go, my grandmother, Ya Zhen approached me. She had a strange look in her eyes as she stationed her head inches from my face. She squinted and looked me up and down for quite a while. I was very embarrassed by how close we were and couldn’t understand what she was doing. “Grandma,” I finally managed to say.

  “So, you are the one who got your father’s good luck,” she said in a disappointed voice. “No wonder he is in detention. Now that you’ve taken his luck away from him, he will never be able to get out of all these troubles!”

  I stood in awe.

  She was agitated by my silence. “Your father is doomed!”

  I still didn’t know how to answer.

  “And you’re not even a boy!” she hissed between her teeth and left.

  My face burned as if I were sitting next to a hot stove.

  On the way back home, I was unusually quiet and kept my thoughts to myself. Could a dying person see things and tell the future? How did Great Grandmother know Mother was having a hard life? Why did she say I had lucky stars over me? If, indeed, I had all these lucky stars, shouldn’t I be able to get Father out of jail? Did I take away my father’s lucky stars? If I could, I would trade all my lucky stars to get him back.

  Oh, Father, how I missed him.

  Chapter IX

  Eggs as Medicine

  A nd then, out of the blue, Father was allowed to come home. It was a complete surprise that started with a loud knock at the front door.

  “Is this An Chu Sun’s house?” someone shouted. “Open the door!”

  I did and just stood there. I could hardly recognize him, my own father: He had lost a lot of weight. His cheekbones held up his face, as pale as death itself. His eyes were closed. He breathed heavily and his chest heaved up and down beneath his torn, inside-out jacket.

  Two men held onto his arms so he would not fall down. They dragged him into our house like a sack of vegetables, threw him on one of our beds along with his bundle of belongings, and left.

  “Mom, Dad is home! Dad is home!”

  Mother dashed into the room, along with my sisters. With her soapy hands, she helped him to sit up. “What happened to you, An Chu?” she asked. “What have they done to you?”

  Leaning against a stack of quilts, Father motioned to us children not to get too close to him. In a thin voice, he told us that he had contracted a highly contagious form of something called hepatitis while he was in one of the detention cells only the size of a bathtub.

  I did not know what hepatitis was, but I knew it was deadly. It had sucked the life out of my father.

  Later, we learned the details: Father’s company had been enraged by his “lack of cooperation,” or in plain words, unwillingness to confess to their made-up “anti-revolutionary crimes.” In his cell, Father read Chairman Mao’s quotations, copied the quotations, and wrote humorous essays, but made no confession. He maintained his innocence and held onto his faith in Chairman Mao and his country. Nothing could bend Father’s spirit. His captors felt helpless and finally decided to give him a more severe punishment.

  When another prisoner who had developed hepatitis was transferred out, Father was put in the infected cell. He became terribly sick. Weak as a child and physically incapable even of getting out of his own bed, he was allowed to go home to recuperate or die.

  Mother put all her money together, and called a pedicab to take Father to the hospital, only to find they were tailed by two men. As soon as Father sat down with a doctor, the men approached the doctor, showed their IDs, and whispered something into the doctor’s ear. The doctor looked intimidated. He was sympathetic but resolute.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “You are suffering from a form of political deviation. It’s purely psychological. It’s beyond my ability to help your condition. I cannot treat you.”

  Looking at the frightened doctor and the two men standing threateningly with their arms crossed, Mother knew she was wasting her time there. She would never be allowed to buy the medicine that could help him. Struggling to prop him up, she hauled Father back to the house and started her own rescue mission.

  Mother went to the farmers’ market and traded our rice ration coupons for several hens. We brought them home and put them in our backyard, where they wandered freely and were fed with scraps of anything we had. All Mother wanted from them were eggs with their yolks of liquid gold swimming in glistening, transparent protein. We marked every egg with the date it was laid and stored all of them carefully in an old wooden jar that in better days had been another of Mother’s proud family possessions. The mahogany-colored container had a carved imperial lion on its lid and faded golden interior. When our food had run low, she had tried to sell it, along with five others, but even the pawn shop refused to buy it.

  “It has a crack,” the store clerk said to Mother, pointing to the defect. “We don’t take broken things. Do you want me to throw it out?”

  “No, no, please don’t throw it out. I’m sorry. Please give this one, yes, this broken one, back to me.”

  On the way home, Mother told me that those jars came from Grandpa Ho De’s family estate. She said she didn’t see any crack before and maybe the jar just didn’t want to leave her. Now this lucky wooden jar took on the most important job in our house, for it stored not just eggs, but our every hope for Father to get better.

  No one believed Father could recover without a doctor’s care or real medicine. But he did under Mother’s unrelenting supervision. Every morning, following her instructions, Ping and I left home with six pennies and came back with a pot of steaming hot soy milk. Mother cracked a couple of our eggs and whisked them into the liquid along with generous amounts of sugar. Father always got a big bowl of it for breakfast every day instead of our normal watery rice. Mother believed that her nutritious soy milk concoction could inject life into even a dying man.

  “Soy is protein,” she explained to me while she was cracking the eggs. “And a newborn egg contains all the essence of life. If it can bring about birth, why shouldn’t it be able to restore health? Your father has to get better.”

  Smart Mother. I could always count on her. It sounded so convincing, anyway, even though I wasn’t exactly sure what she was saying.

  Gradually, we started to raise more young hens. We were very tender toward our chicken friends because we counted on them to make Father better. Soon, we named all of them: Black Tail, Dove, Golden Claws, White Wings, Speedy, Sesame, and Bandit. Each name described either a physical feature or the personality of a hen, and we knew all their quirks by heart. We could tell which one had just laid an egg in her nest by the type of “cluck” she made and fought to be the first one to reach the coop, fetch the warm egg, and give it to Mother. She marked the date on it with a pencil and cautiously lowered it into our wooden jar. More liquid gold for Father. We felt very rich and contented. That hen was instantly rewarded with a small, precious handful of raw rice. We kept all the other hens away, watching in envy while our star enjoyed her banquet and triumphantly pecked up every grain. That would give the hen enough energy to produce the next egg.