Ninety-Seven Letters

Window Seat

**Letter. On the plane, somewhere over the sea, August 17, 1996**

Dear Por Por,

I am writing this on the tray table, which is the size of a school ruler and wobbles every time the man in front of me leans back to sleep. He has leaned back four times. Kenny is asleep against my arm with his mouth open and his breath smells of the peanuts they gave us. Mama is reading the same page of a magazine she has been reading since we took off. Baba is pretending to read the safety card so he does not have to look at Mama reading the same page.

I wanted to start a letter before we even land, so that the first thing I do in Canada is finish something I started in Hong Kong. That sounded better in my head.

Here is what I remember of this morning, so you know I was paying attention.

You woke me at four-thirty by standing in the doorway and coughing on purpose. The flat was still hot from yesterday. The fan in the corner was doing its clicking thing every time it turned left. You had already been downstairs. I could tell because your hair smelled of the charcoal and the gas, and because there was a bag of hot buns on the table with the paper going see-through from the butter. You said, "Eat in the taxi," and I said Mama said no eating in taxis, and you said, "Your mother is not the taxi."

We walked down the four flights with our cases bumping every stair. Mr. Yip from the ribbon shop was rolling up his metal shutter, and the noise of it went up the whole street like thunder that had changed its mind. The street was wet from the cleaners and smelled the way it always smells at that hour, of wet cardboard and dried shrimp and someone's cigarette. A minibus went past with its red sign lit and nobody in it.

The stall was already open. Of course it was already open. The tarpaulin was tied back and the big kettle was going and Uncle Fat was cutting the crusts off a mountain of white bread with the long knife, very fast, like he was angry at it. The plastic stools were stacked by the drain. You made me a milk tea through the stocking, the old brown one, and poured it from high up so it went thin and noisy into the cup, and you did not let me pay, and I said I never pay, and you said, "That's why you're so rich."

Then you put the cup in my hands and went back behind the stove and started frying eggs for the men from the electronics shops on Apliu Street, as if it were any Saturday. Mama stood by the taxi for a long time. You did not come out from behind the stove. Mama said, "Ma." You said, "Go, you'll miss it." That was all.

I want you to know I understand that you did that on purpose. I am not angry. I was a little angry for about an hour, over the harbor, but now I think it is the most you thing you could have done, and if you had come out and cried in the street I would have thought you were sick.

The plane is very cold. They gave us blankets that feel like the felt on a mahjong table.

When we climbed out of Kai Tak I looked for our building. You can't see Sham Shui Po properly from the left side but I saw the hills and the washing on the rooftops and a lot of water tanks, and then the clouds came, white and then gray and then nothing.

Please do not forget to water the bamboo on the windowsill. It is not dead. It only looks dead.

Your granddaughter,
Mandy

P.S. I know you can't read English. Mama says someone in the building will read it to you. Please choose someone who will read it in a nice voice and not Mrs. Tse.

---

**Diary. Markham, the first night**

Everything in this house smells of new carpet. It is a smell like glue and cardboard and the inside of a shoe box. Baba's cousin Uncle Hon rented it for us, a townhouse in a row of townhouses on a curved street called a crescent, which is a word I knew from books and never needed until today. All the houses are the same color, a kind of pale brown like milk tea with too much milk, and they all have the same garage door and the same little tree tied to a stick in the front.

The sky here is enormous. I do not know how else to say it. In Sham Shui Po the sky is a strip between buildings, and you know where it is because the laundry is hanging in it. Here the sky starts at your shoes and keeps going in every direction, and it is so blue it looks fake, and there is nothing in it. No laundry, no wires, no planes coming in low over the roofs with their wheels down. Kenny stood in the driveway with his head back for so long Baba thought he was going to fall over.

It was hot when we landed, which no one warned me about. Everyone in Hong Kong said Canada, Canada, snow, bring a coat, and I came off the plane in my jacket and walked into air that was hot and dry and smelled of cut grass. Not wet hot like home. Dry hot, like an oven with the door open. My lips are already cracking.

My room is in the basement. Kenny got the small room upstairs because he is nine and "afraid of the dark," which is a lie, he is afraid of nothing, he just wanted the window that looks at the street. My room has a window too, but it is high up in the wall and level with the grass, so when I lie on the mattress (no bed yet) I can see the bottoms of the little bushes and, once, the feet of a cat.

It is very quiet. I keep waking up because it is so quiet. At home there is always the fan, and Mrs. Tse's television through the wall, and the mahjong tiles from the flat across the landing going clack, clack, clack-clack like rain on a tin roof, and the trucks at night, and the man who coughs in the stairwell at two in the morning. Here there is nothing except the fridge upstairs humming one long note. I lay there and counted the hum. Then I got up and wrote this.

Mama has not cried. Baba made instant noodles in a pot we bought at the plaza and we ate them sitting on the boxes because there is no table. Mama said the noodles were too salty and then ate two bowls.

I have fifteen days before school. I have no friends. I have a basement.

---

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, August 28, 1996**

Dear Mandy,

This is your grandmother speaking. I am writing it for her because she says her hand is for cooking and not for this. My name is Chung Ka-lok. I live on the third floor of your grandmother's building, under your grandmother, in the flat with the green gate and the dog that is not allowed. You probably remember me as the boy who used to sit on the stairs with his schoolbooks. I am still that boy, only taller, and I am now also the boy who reads your letters, so please write neatly. [Your writing is fine. She told me to say that. I think she wants you to try harder.]

Your grandmother would like me to write this in English, because your mother said your English must become very good very fast, and because my English teacher says I need practice with a real person and not only with the book. So everything your grandmother says, I put into English. Anything in these square brackets is from me and not from her. She cannot read English, so she does not know about the brackets. Please do not tell her about the brackets. [This is my only freedom.]

Here is what she said.

"Your letter came on Tuesday. The postman brought it up the stairs himself because the stamp had a red maple leaf on it and he wanted to see what kind of person gets letters from Canada. I told him it was my granddaughter, who is very clever and has gone to live in a country made of ice. He said it is summer there also. I said not for long.

"I did not come out from behind the stove because the eggs were on. If you leave eggs, they burn. Everyone knows this. Your mother knows this. Nobody was crying in the street, that is correct, and I am pleased you noticed.

"The bamboo is alive. I watered it. I also moved it to the other window because it was too hot by the fan.

"Uncle Fat says his arm hurts from the bread. I told him your arm would hurt also if you cut that much bread, but you are not here to cut the bread, so his arm must do it. The new girl from Shek Kip Mei who washes the cups is slow. She is fifteen like you. She is not like you.

"Tell your mother not to put too much salt in everything. Tell your father to wear a hat in the sun, his head is not used to so much sky.

"Is the basement wet? Basements are wet. Put newspaper under your mattress. Put the mattress on boxes. If anything grows on the wall, tell me what color."

[That is the end of the part she said in order. Now she is telling me things to add while she peels garlic, which she does with her thumbnail faster than I can write.]

"Mrs. Tse wanted to read your letter to me. I said no. I chose this boy because his mother sells buttons on Yu Chau Street and she is honest, and because he is good at English and bad at everything else, so he has time."

[I am not bad at everything else. I am bad at physics. Physics is not everything else.]

"Write back about the school. Write back about the food. Are there Chinese shops? Is there real rice? If you cannot find real rice, I will send it."

[She will not send rice. I told her you cannot post rice to Canada. She said, "Watch me." I am a little afraid.]

"When you write, write what things smell like. You were always good at that. When you were small, you told me the market smelled like a wet dog's birthday. I still don't know what that means but I know it is true."

That is all she said, and now she has gone down to start the stock for tomorrow and I am finishing alone in her kitchen. The fan is clicking on the left turn. You were right about that.

From your grandmother, Leung Siu-fong, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok.

[P.S. from me. Since I am writing to Canada anyway, could you tell me if the planes there come in low over the houses? Here I can see them from the roof with their wheels down, turning over the mountain, every few minutes. I count them when I should be doing physics. Yesterday I counted sixty-one. My father says when the new airport opens they will all go out over the sea and the sky here will be empty. I don't know why that bothers me. It's just planes.]

---

**Diary. Markham, the night the letter came**

I read it standing up beside the mailbox on the corner of the crescent, which is a big gray metal box with a lot of little doors and our key opens only one. Kenny wanted to open it. I let him open it. Then I took the letter and ran.

I read it four times. Then I read it to Mama at the counter while she was trying to figure out the new stove, which has glass on top instead of rings and she does not trust it. At the eggs, Mama laughed. It was a short laugh that went in the wrong direction and ended up somewhere near her nose. Then she said, "Who is this Chung boy," in her suspicious voice, and I said he is the stairs boy, and she said, "Oh, the stairs boy," and that was fine.

I did not read her the brackets.

I put newspaper under my mattress. I put the mattress on the boxes from the move. Nothing is growing on the wall yet. I will check every morning, so that I have something to report. If something green comes I will be happy, honestly, just so I can tell her.

The stairs boy. I remember him now. He used to sit three steps from the top with his books open and his knees up and he would move his feet for you without looking up. He had glasses that were too big. He once fixed Por Por's radio with a hairpin.

Sixty-one planes. I went out into the backyard after dinner when it was getting dark and the air finally got a little cool and the grass was wet on my ankles, and I looked up for a long time. There were stars, which in Sham Shui Po there aren't, not really. There was one plane, very high, very small, just a blinking light going across without a sound. Not coming in to land. Not going anywhere near us. Just passing.

I will tell him that. One.

Cedarwood Collegiate

**Letter. Markham, September 9, 1996**

Dear Por Por (and Lok, hello, I know you are reading this, the answer about the planes is in the P.S.),

School started last Tuesday. I have now been a Canadian high school student for five days and I can report the following.

One. The school is called Cedarwood Collegiate Institute, which is three words to say "school." It is one long low building made of orange-brown brick with a flat roof, and around it there is more grass than there is in the whole of Sham Shui Po. There is a field just for running in circles. There is a parking lot for the students who drive. Students drive here, Por Por. A boy in my math class who is sixteen drives a car to school that is older than my father.

Two. Nobody wears a uniform. On the first day I wore my white blouse and my navy skirt because nobody had told me otherwise, and a girl at the lockers asked me if I was going to a job interview. I said no. She said, "Cool," in a way that meant not cool. On the second day I wore jeans and the yellow T-shirt Auntie Mui gave me with the duck on it, and nobody said anything, which I think is the best that can happen.

Three. The lockers are metal and painted blue and they slam like Mr. Yip's shutter, all day, everywhere, bang, bang. Between classes everyone walks at the same time in the same direction like the crowd coming out of Prince Edward station, except louder, and taller, and everyone is chewing gum.

Four. I am in a class called ESL, which means English as a Second Language, for two periods a day. The teacher is Mr. Kowalczyk. His name has no vowels in the right places. He said we could call him Mr. K, and a boy from Taiwan said "Mr. Kay" and he said "Perfect" and wrote it on the board. He has a beard like a broom and wears sweaters even though it is still hot, and he laughs at his own jokes before he gets to the end of them, so you know when to laugh. There are nineteen of us. Seven from Hong Kong, four from Taiwan, three from Sri Lanka, two from Iran, one from Poland, one from Guyana, and one boy from Korea who has not said a word yet and draws dragons on everything.

My English is good, Por Por. In Hong Kong it was good. Here it is the wrong kind of good. I know what every word means but when I say them people lean forward a little and frown, like they are listening to a radio that is not quite tuned. And they talk so fast. They squash all the words together. "Whaddaya" is "what do you." "Gonna" is "going to." Nobody taught us gonna.

Five. Lunch is in a giant room called the cafeteria where everything smells of french fries and floor cleaner. I bring rice in the round container with the red lid. On the first day a boy at my table said, "What is that smell," and I said "Char siu," and he said, "Oh," and moved one chair down. On the second day a girl named Deepa sat next to me and said, "Don't mind him, he eats paste," and opened a container of rice and a yellow curry that smelled of curry leaves and mustard seeds and made my nose run from across the table. She is Tamil. Her family came from Sri Lanka when she was four. She has been here so long she says "gonna" without thinking. She wants to be the person on television who stands in front of the weather map and points at clouds. I asked her why and she said, "Because they always know what's coming and nobody blames them."

I like her very much.

Six. The air. In the morning it is cool now, really cool, and it smells of grass that has been cut and wet and of something sweet I can't name, maybe the trees. By three o'clock it is hot again and dry. My skin is tight all the time. Mama bought a giant bottle of lotion that smells of fake almonds and now our whole house smells like a cake that has never met an almond.

Please tell me what the street smells like this week. Is the mooncake man selling already? He always starts too early.

Love,
Mandy

P.S. for Lok. Planes here do not come low over the houses. They are very high and very small and silent. I counted one in a whole evening. You can have mine.

---

**Diary. Thursday, late**

There is a boy in my English class (not ESL, the real English class, with the Canadian kids) named Elliot Huang.

That's all. I'm just writing it down.

He sits by the window. He is Chinese but he was born here, and when the teacher called the roll and said "Huang" she said it "Hwang" and he didn't fix it. He wears a gray sweatshirt with a hockey team on it and he chews the end of his pencil until the paint comes off. Today we read a poem about a red wheelbarrow and the teacher asked what it meant and he said, "Maybe it doesn't mean anything, maybe it's just a wheelbarrow," and everyone laughed and the teacher said, "Interesting," in the voice teachers use for wrong.

I thought it was the smartest thing anyone has said all week.

At the end of class he dropped his pen and it rolled under my desk and I picked it up and gave it back and he said "Thanks" and I said "You're welcome" with my Hong Kong accent, very correct, every letter, like a girl reading the news, and I wanted to sink through the floor and come out in the basement.

That's all. I'm going to sleep.

---

**Diary. Saturday**

A parcel came. A small brown box, very heavy for its size, tied with red plastic string the way the dried-goods shop on Pei Ho Street ties everything. Por Por's address on the outside in Lok's writing, which is very square, every character standing up straight like it's waiting for a bus.

Inside there was a cassette tape with a strip of masking tape on it that said FOR MANDY in English and then something in Chinese I had to look at twice: "Leung Siu-fong speaking, recorded with her permission, on her own kitchen table, 3 September 1996." Lok wrote that. Of course Lok wrote that. Who else would put a label like a library on a tape from your own grandmother.

But I liked it. It made it look important, like something that should be kept.

Under the tape there was a small bag of dried tangerine peel, and a packet of the haw flakes I used to eat in the stairwell, and a folded newspaper, and inside the newspaper a plastic bag of rice. Real rice. About two cups. With a note in Lok's square writing: [I told her. She said watch me.]

Mama stood at the counter weighing the rice in her two palms as if she were buying it. Then she poured it into the jar with our Canadian rice and shook the jar so you couldn't tell which was which.

I have Baba's old tape player, the black one with the cracked lid. I listened to the tape in my basement with the door closed.

---

**Tape. Transcribed by Mandy, as close as I can, in English**

[Click. A lot of noise like someone dragging a chair. The fan. Somebody breathing very close to the microphone.]

LOK: It's on. It's going. You can talk.

POR POR: It's on? The little red light?

LOK: The little red light is on.

POR POR: Why is it so close to my face?

LOK: So it can hear you.

POR POR: I'm not whispering. It can hear me from the door.

[Sound of the tape player being pushed across the table.]

POR POR: Mandy. This is your grandmother. You know that. Lok says I should say the date. It's Tuesday. It's hot. The bamboo is alive. There.

[Long pause. The fan clicks.]

POR POR: I don't know what to say into a machine. Usually I say things to a person and the person says something back, and then I know if what I said was stupid.

LOK: You can pretend she is here.

POR POR: She is not here. That's why we're doing this.

LOK: Pretend.

POR POR: I'm too old to pretend. Ask me something.

LOK: Ask you what?

POR POR: You're the one with the machine. Ask me something.

LOK: Okay. Um. What did you sell today?

POR POR: What did I sell. Two hundred and something milk teas. The toast with condensed milk. The macaroni with ham. Fat says we used eleven loaves before nine o'clock. That is because the electronics men had a big delivery on Apliu Street and they all came at once like pigeons. A man ordered his eggs runny and then complained they were runny. I said, you asked for runny. He said, not this runny. I said, there is only one runny.

LOK: [laughing] That's good. Keep going.

POR POR: Don't laugh into the machine, she'll hear you.

LOK: She'll hear you too.

POR POR: She's supposed to hear me. Mandy. The street is the same. Mr. Yip has new ribbons, gold ones, for the Mid-Autumn. The mooncake man has started already. Too early, every year, I tell him, nobody wants a mooncake in August. He sold out of the lotus seed by Friday.

[A dog barks somewhere downstairs.]

POR POR: That's the dog that isn't allowed.

LOK: He's very quiet usually.

POR POR: He is not quiet usually. Mandy, the dog that is not allowed barks all night. Lok's mother says it's the neighbors' radio.

LOK: Please don't tell her that.

POR POR: She can't hear me, she's on Yu Chau Street with the buttons. Mandy. Listen. Your mother called on Sunday. Your mother said you are sad. I said Mandy is not sad, Mandy is new. These are different things. When you are sad, you sit. When you are new, you walk around and look at everything and your feet hurt. Your feet hurt, that's all.

[Pause.]

POR POR: That's all. Is it still going?

LOK: It's still going.

POR POR: How do you stop it?

LOK: I'll stop it.

POR POR: Wait. Tell her about the rice.

LOK: She'll see the rice.

POR POR: Tell her I said she should eat it slowly.

[Click.]

---

**Diary. Same night**

I listened to it three times. The third time I lay on the mattress with the tape player on my stomach and closed my eyes and the fan was clicking on the left turn and I could hear the dog that isn't allowed and for about four minutes I was not in a basement.

"Mandy is not sad, Mandy is new."

My feet do hurt. The school is so big. I walked the wrong way around the whole building twice on Wednesday looking for the music room.

Mama came down while I was listening and stood on the stairs. I thought she would say lights out. She sat on the bottom step and listened to the end of it, the part about the rice, with her chin on her knees, the way Kenny sits. When it clicked off she said, "She sounds well." I said she sounds exactly the same. Mama said, "That's what I mean."

Then she said, "Don't record over it." As if I would.

I am going to write the date on every tape she sends, and who is talking, the way Lok did. I am going to keep them in the shoe box from my school shoes, standing up in a row like books. Lok was right. If you are going to keep something you should say what it is.

I am going to send her a tape back. I don't know what I will say either.

Mooncake Weather

**Tape. Recorded in the basement, Markham, September 26, 1996. Mandy speaking. Kenny interrupting. With everyone's permission, mostly.**

MANDY: Por Por, this is Mandy. It's Thursday. It's night. Tomorrow is the Mid-Autumn Festival, and here it is just a Friday, so tomorrow I have a math test. Nobody here knows it's the Mid-Autumn except us and the Chinese plaza on Highway 7, where they have built a tower of mooncake boxes taller than Baba near the door, and a man in a red vest hands out pieces of lotus paste on toothpicks.

KENNY: I had six.

MANDY: He had six. The man told him to stop.

KENNY: He didn't tell me to stop, he just looked at me.

MANDY: That's telling you to stop. Por Por, I want to tell you about the trees. You asked me what things smell like. The trees here are turning. It started last week. You know how in Hong Kong a tree is green and then it is still green? Here, one morning a tree on our crescent was green, and the next day the top of it was orange, like it had caught fire just at the top. Now there are trees on Kennedy Road that are completely red. Red like the boxes for red packets. Red like the plastic stools at the stall. The leaves are falling off and they're all over the sidewalks and they crunch when you step on them and they smell like... I don't know. Like tea leaves after you've used them and left them in the pot overnight. Sort of brown and sweet and a little like a wet cupboard.

KENNY: Tell her about the squirrel.

MANDY: You tell her about the squirrel.

KENNY: Por Por! There are squirrels here, they're like rats with big tails, but they're not dirty, and they live in the trees and one of them came on our back step and took my cracker right out of my hand. He looked at me first. Like he was asking. And then he took it anyway.

MANDY: That's Kenny.

KENNY: That's the squirrel.

MANDY: Go upstairs.

KENNY: Mama said I could be on the tape.

MANDY: You were on the tape. Go upstairs. Por Por, I'm going to put some leaves in the next letter. Red ones. Deepa says you press them in a heavy book so they stay flat. I'm using the dictionary.

[Pause.]

MANDY: I don't know what else to say. I'm doing okay. My feet hurt less. I know where the music room is. Mama says to tell you she is fine and Baba says to tell you he bought a hat.

[Pause.]

MANDY: I miss the stall. I miss sitting on the stool by the drain doing homework while you shout at Uncle Fat. Is that a weird thing to miss? I miss the noise. Okay. That's all. Bye. How do I stop this. Kenny, how do I

[Click.]

---

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, October 8, 1996**

Dear Mandy,

This is your grandmother, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok again. She has heard your tape. I have heard your tape too, because she made me play it eleven times, which is a lot of times for a person who has physics homework. [I liked your tape. I liked your brother. Please tell him about squirrels from me. We do not have them. We have something on the roof at night that I hope is a cat.]

Here is what she said.

"The Mid-Autumn was good. Mr. Yip's grandchildren came and hung the lanterns on the shutter rail outside his shop, the rabbit ones and a star with a candle, and one of them caught fire at about eight o'clock and he put it out with my tea, which was not empty, so he owes me a tea. Your mother's old friend Bik-yuk came to the stall with her twins. They are tall now. They asked about you. I said you are in Canada eating leaves.

"The mooncake man is still trying to sell me his leftover yolks. I said I am not taking your yolks. He said, then I will throw them out. I said throw them out. I took the yolks.

"I am glad there is a plaza. I am glad your brother had six. Don't let him have eight.

"Tell your mother the stall had a good September, we were busy because of the heat, everybody wanted iced lemon tea, Fat squeezed so many lemons his hands went white and wrinkled like a dead man's.

"You asked if it's weird to miss the noise. It's not weird. When your grandfather and I came here, everything was too loud. I didn't sleep for a month. Then I didn't sleep in the village when we went back to visit, because it was too quiet. You learn the noise. Then you need it. Put a fan on in your room. Not for the wind. For the noise.

"Send the leaves."

[That is all she said in order. Then she said one more thing, while she was wiping the table, not to me but sort of to the window, and I asked her if I should write it and she said "Write what you want, you write what you want anyway." I think she knows about the brackets.]

[What she said was: "Your mother thinks we came on a train." That's all. She didn't say anything else. I asked her what she meant and she told me to go and do my physics.]

From your grandmother, Leung Siu-fong, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok.

[P.S. from me. I have to choose my subjects for after the exams in spring. My father wants me to do accounting because his friend's son did accounting and now has a car. I want to do something with airplanes, but I don't know what, and I'm bad at physics, which is the airplane subject. Is there something for people who like airplanes and are bad at physics? Do you have that in Canada?]

---

**Diary. October 15**

"Your mother thinks we came on a train."

I asked Mama at dinner, very casual. "Mama, how did Por Por and Gung Gung come to Hong Kong?"

She was cutting up the steamed fish with the side of her chopsticks. "From the village. In sixty-two. On the train, with papers. Gung Gung's uncle sponsored them."

"Did you come too?"

"I was two. Of course I came too. Why?"

"No reason."

Baba looked at me over his rice. Baba knows when I say no reason it means a reason.

I didn't tell Mama what Lok wrote. I don't know why. It felt like it was Por Por's thing to say, not mine. And she didn't say it to me, she said it to a window.

---

**Letter. Markham, October 20, 1996**

Dear Por Por,

Here are three leaves. The big red one is from the tree outside the school library, which is a maple, the same as the leaf on the stamp. The orange one is from our crescent. The yellow one with the long thin shape I picked up by the river. There is a river here, the Rouge River, which runs through a park so big that you can walk for an hour and not see a house. Deepa's family took me on Sunday. Her grandmother came too, Aachi, who is tiny and wears a cardigan over her sari and sneakers on her feet, and walked faster than all of us. The river is brown and quick and cold, you can see stones at the bottom, and the banks are steep and slippery with leaves. It smells of mud and leaves and something that Deepa's grandmother said was deer. I didn't see any deer. Aachi said they saw us first.

Aachi does not speak English either, only Tamil. Deepa translates for her. Deepa's English is perfect and her Tamil is, she says, "kitchen Tamil." She can say "pass the salt" and "I'm not hungry" and "stop it." She says when she was little Aachi would tell her stories at night in Tamil and she understood all of them and now she understands about half and she pretends the rest. Aachi says a whole long thing to her and Deepa just nods.

I asked Deepa what she does when she doesn't understand and she said, "I nod. And I feel bad."

I don't want that. I don't want to nod.

That is why I am going to ask you to do something. Please tell Lok to write the Chinese too. Not instead of the English. Underneath it. Your words, the way you say them, in Chinese, and then his English. I can read most of it. I'll get faster. If there's a character I don't know I'll circle it and send it back and he can tell me.

Is that too much work for him? Tell him I will think about airplanes for people who are bad at physics.

Love,
Mandy

P.S. What did you mean about the train?

---

**Diary. October 31**

Halloween. I knew about it from movies but I didn't believe it was real. It's real. Children walk around in the dark in costumes knocking on every door and everyone gives them candy. Strangers! Mama said in Hong Kong this would never work, you'd get mugged on the first floor. Baba bought a giant bag of small chocolate bars and sat on the front step in his new hat and gave them out and loved it so much it was embarrassing. He said "Very scary!" to every child. Even the princess.

Kenny went as a hockey player, with a stick borrowed from the neighbor boy, Ryan, who is ten and has a pond in his backyard that they freeze in winter and play hockey on, apparently. Kenny now wants to be Canadian more than anything in the world.

Every house on the crescent had a pumpkin on the step with a face cut into it and a candle inside, and the whole street smelled of hot pumpkin and wet wool and the sugar on Kenny's breath. Mr. Dunphy next door had a plastic skeleton sitting in a lawn chair with a mug in its hand, which Mama said was in very poor taste and then went back twice to look at.

It rained. Cold, thin rain that went sideways. My first cold rain. In Hong Kong rain is warm. You get wet and you're a bit wet. Here you get wet and your whole body says no, very loudly, all the way to the bones of your fingers.

Deepa made me come to the school dance in a raincoat. Her idea of a costume. She said, "You're a weather forecaster in the field." She was the weather forecaster in the studio, in a blazer, with a pointer. We were a set.

Elliot Huang was there. He was dressed as a ghost: a gray sweatshirt with the hood up and a sheet with holes over his shoulders. He looked like a laundry pile. He came over to the punch table where Deepa and I were dripping and he said, "What are you guys supposed to be?" and Deepa said, "The weather," and he said, "Oh. Cool. Is it gonna snow?" and Deepa said, "Next week," with total confidence, and pointed at me with the pointer, and I said, "Yes, heavy snow, everybody stay home," in my news reader voice, very serious.

And he laughed. Not at me. With the joke. I think.

Then he said, "You're in my English class. You're the one who said the poem was about being stuck."

Last week, when we were reading the one about the man in the snowy woods with promises to keep, I said I thought the man wanted to stay but he had to go, and that it was about being stuck between two places. I said it really fast because my face was hot.

"Yeah," I said.

"That was good," he said. "I didn't get it till you said that." Then his friend called him and he went and the sheet fell off one shoulder.

Deepa looked at me with her pointer under her arm and her eyebrows all the way up.

"Shut up," I said.

"I didn't say anything," she said. "I'm just forecasting."

It is not going to snow next week. Deepa made that up. She says that's the job.

Pineapple Buns at Six

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, November 2, 1996**

Dear Mandy,

[New rule. Your grandmother agreed. Every letter now has her words in Chinese first, written by me exactly the way she says them, even the bad words, and then my English underneath. This doubles my homework. I am doing it because she gave me a free bowl of satay beef noodles every day this week and because I want to see if you can really read it. I am betting you cannot read her handwriting even when it's mine.]

[I will only copy the English here. You have the Chinese on the other page. Circle what you don't know.]

"The leaves came. I put them on the wall by the fridge with tape, the red one in the middle. Mrs. Tse came to borrow soy sauce and asked if I had taken up painting. I said these are from Canada, they grow like that. She didn't believe me. She touched them to see if they were plastic.

"So it is cold now. Good. You will learn what cold is. Wear the brown sweater from Auntie Mui. Not the pretty one. The ugly one is warmer.

"About the train. Not now. I will tell you when I want to tell you. Don't ask your mother. Your mother was two. A two-year-old does not know how she got anywhere. You don't know how you got to the park when you were two. Your father carried you. Ask him.

"The shop people say everyone is leaving. The tea cafe on the corner, the brother went to Vancouver, the sister to Sydney. The man at the newspaper stand says his son is in Australia and his daughter is in a place called Calgary, which I have never heard of. I told him my daughter is in Markham. He had never heard of Markham. We felt very modern.

"I am not leaving. I have said this to your mother. I will say it to you also so you don't waste a stamp asking. I have a license for this stall. The license is in my name and your grandfather's name and no one else's. If I go, the stall goes. They don't give new ones. The pots stay here. The stove stays here. The stall can't fly."

[She said that last part three times while scrubbing the wok, a little louder each time, like the wok was arguing.]

"Tell me about your days. Not the school. The days. What time do you get up. What do you eat first."

From your grandmother, Leung Siu-fong, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok.

[P.S. Thank you for thinking about airplanes. I liked the list. Air traffic controller (needs math, I'm okay at math). Airplane mechanic (needs physics, but the hands kind, maybe I'm better at the hands kind). Weather person at an airport (your friend Deepa's idea? Tell her thank you. I didn't know that was a job). I am going to ask my teacher about all three. My father says all three sound like jobs where you wear a uniform with your name on it, which he thinks is good.]

---

**Letter. Markham, November 12, 1996**

Dear Por Por,

I got a job.

Don't tell Mama I told you first. Actually Mama already knows, she drove me to the interview, but I wanted to tell you myself, in a letter, because it feels more true written down.

It's at a bakery called Lucky Moon in Market Village, which is a mall on Kennedy Road that is full of Chinese shops. Real ones. There is a shop that sells only dried seafood and smells exactly like the corner of Pei Ho Street where the old man sits with the scallops, so strong that the first time I went in I had to stand there for a minute with my eyes closed. There is a herbal tea counter, a shop that sells karaoke machines, a stationery shop with erasers shaped like dumplings, a man who fixes watches in a box the size of a closet, and a dim sum restaurant upstairs where on Sunday the line goes down the escalator. Everybody speaks Cantonese. Old aunties shout at each other across the hall about the price of oranges. I walked in there with Mama the first time and I almost cried, not because I was sad but because my ears relaxed.

The bakery is owned by Mrs. Szeto, who is from Tai Po and has a voice like a drill. She studied me across the glass case for a whole minute without talking, the way you look at fish. Then she asked if I could count change in my head. I said yes. She asked if I could count it in English and in Chinese. I said yes. She asked if I would come at six in the morning on Saturdays and Sundays. I said yes. She said, "Your mother says you're shy." I said I'm not shy, I'm new.

She hired me.

Here is my day, since you asked.

Saturday I get up at five-fifteen. It is completely dark. The basement window is black and there is frost on the outside of it now, white and feathery in the corners like someone breathed on it. The floor is so cold I put on two pairs of socks before I put my feet down. I eat a bowl of the rice congee Mama leaves in the thermos and one piece of tangerine peel from your parcel to suck on in the car, because it makes my mouth taste like your kitchen. Baba drives me because there is no bus that early. He wears his hat. The car's heater smells like burning dust for the first five minutes and the windshield is covered in ice and Baba scrapes it with a plastic thing and swears very quietly in Cantonese so I can't hear, and I can hear.

The mall is closed at six. We go in a back door by the garbage bins, where a man named Jimmy who does the cleaning smokes and nods at me. The bakery is the only light on in the whole hall. Uncle Szeto has been there since four. He is very thin and very quiet and covered in flour up to his elbows and he has a radio on the shelf playing Cantonese oldies, the old love songs you hum when you're frying. The whole shop is so hot from the ovens that I take off my coat and my sweater and stand there in a T-shirt in November while outside the parking lot is white with frost.

The smell, Por Por. There aren't enough words in either language. Butter and sugar and egg and that toasted smell when the tops of the pineapple buns go brown and crack. Coconut from the cocktail buns. The custard for the egg tarts, which is yellow and sweet and smells like the inside of a warm egg. And under all of it the smell of the flour, which is dry and dusty and gets in your nose so you sneeze.

My job. I fold the boxes. I fill the trays in the glass case, which have to be in rows, all the same way, the tops of the buns facing the window. Uncle Szeto showed me how to brush the egg wash on the pineapple bun tops, with a wide soft brush, one stroke, not two, two makes it streaky. I did it wrong eight times. On the ninth he said, "Mm." That was it. "Mm." I was so happy I could have run around the mall.

At seven-thirty the first customers come. Old men with newspapers who buy one bun and stand at the window eating it, looking out at the parking lot, like it's a view. A lady who buys twelve egg tarts every Saturday and tells me each time that they are not as good as the ones from the shop by the ferry in Macau. A man named Mr. Medeiros who is Portuguese, from the Azores, which are islands in the middle of the ocean, and who buys two egg tarts and eats them right at the counter with his eyes shut and then tells me which one was better and why. He says our egg tarts and his grandmother's tarts are cousins. He says the pastry is the same idea, but his is crispier, more burnt on top, and ours is smoother, like a pond. He said that, "like a pond." He fixes furnaces. He has very big hands with scars and he holds the tart like it's a bird.

At one o'clock I'm finished. My feet hurt. My hair smells of butter all afternoon and Kenny follows me around sniffing.

So that is my day. What do you eat first? I know already. A piece of toast with no butter standing up at the stove while the kettle boils. I know because I watched you for fifteen years.

Love,
Mandy

---

**Diary. November 17, Sunday night**

Uncle Szeto said three words to me today. Four if you count "mm."

He was shaping the dough for the pineapple bun tops, the crumbly sweet crust that goes on top, rolling small balls in his palms and flattening them with the heel of his hand and laying them on the round buns like caps. Quick, quick, quick. He didn't look at his hands at all. He looked at the radio.

He saw me watching and he held out a ball of the topping dough. I took it. It was cool and soft and gritty with sugar and it stuck to my fingers. I flattened it. It cracked at the edges. He took it back, rolled it into a ball again in one second, gave it back.

"Warm hands," he said. "Too warm."

I put my hands on the steel counter to cool them. He nodded.

I did twelve. They were ugly. He put them on the buns anyway and the buns went in the oven and came out cracked and golden and you couldn't tell which ones were mine, except I could.

I'm writing this down so I remember how the crust felt, cool and gritty, and how his hands didn't look like they were doing anything.

---

**Diary. November 21**

It snowed.

Not a lot. Deepa was very annoyed because she had said "next week" at Halloween and it took three weeks, so she was wrong, but also right, she says, "eventually."

I was in math class. Someone by the window said "Oh," just like that, "oh," and the whole class turned and the teacher sighed and turned too. It was falling straight down, slow, big flakes, the size of the white flower petals on the trees at Boundary Street in spring. The parking lot went white in about ten minutes. Everything went quiet. You could hear the quiet through the window.

After school I stood in the field with my mouth open. It tastes like nothing. Like cold air with a shape. It landed on my sleeve and I could see each one before it melted, each one a little star with arms, all different, like they say in science, which I thought was a story they tell children. It's not a story. They're really all different.

My nose was running. My ears hurt like someone was pinching them. Deepa came out with her hood up and said, "Welcome to Canada, you're gonna hate it by February," and threw a handful at me, and it was dry and powdery and went down my collar and I screamed so loud a teacher came out.

Elliot Huang was by the bike rack with his friends, throwing it too, and when I screamed he looked over and laughed, and then he waved. Just a little wave, with his glove.

I waved back.

I came home and wrote to Por Por and told her about the snow but not about the wave. I'm putting the wave here.

---

**Diary. November 24**

Mama was going through the box of old photos tonight, the brown album with the cracked cover we brought from the flat. She wants to put some in frames for the living room so the walls don't look "like a hotel."

I sat with her. Most of the photos have nothing written on the back. Mama knows who's in most of them. Por Por and Gung Gung at the stall when it was new, with the old canvas roof, and Gung Gung so thin in a white undershirt holding up a ladle like a trophy. Mama in a school uniform at Lai Chi Kok beach. Me as a baby on the stall counter in a plastic tub, which Mama says is where I was washed when the water in the flat was off.

But there was one Mama didn't know. Very small, black and white, with a jagged edge. A woman standing next to a stall, a different stall, older, with a cloth roof and a long bench. She has her hair tied back and her sleeves rolled up and she's holding a little girl on her hip. The little girl is crying. Behind them there is a big pile of bowls.

"That's me," Mama said. "That's me crying. But that's not Por Por. I don't know who that is."

I asked if she knew where it was.

"Sham Shui Po, it has to be," she said. "Look, that's the old corner of Pei Ho Street. But I don't know that stall." She turned it over. Nothing. She frowned at it a long time.

I took a pencil and I wrote on the back, very lightly, "Mama, about two years old, crying, with a woman we don't know, Sham Shui Po, at an old stall." Mama watched me do it.

"Why did you write we don't know?" she asked.

"So when someone does know, they can fix it."

I'm going to put it in the next letter. No. I'm going to ask Lok to describe it to her first, in case she doesn't want me to send it. I don't know why I think that. I just think it.

The First Real Snow

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, December 3, 1996**

Dear Mandy,

[I did what you asked. I didn't read her your letter about the photo straight off. I waited until the afternoon lull, when the lunch men had gone and the stools were stacked and she was sitting by the drain with her feet up on the gas cylinder, drinking the tea she never finishes. I said, Mandy found a photo. Then I described it, the way you wrote it: the cloth roof, the bench, the pile of bowls, the woman with her sleeves rolled up, the little girl crying on her hip.]

[She sat with her tea going cold and watched the dog that isn't allowed sniff along the drain. Then she put her tea down on the gas cylinder. Then she said the following, and I wrote it right there on the back of an order pad, so it's all in her words.]

"That's Kwan. Kwan Yuk-lan. Auntie Kwan, you would have called her, but she died before you were born, so you didn't call her anything. That was her stall. It was on the corner before ours was. The bowls are the bowls I washed. Your mother is crying because she always cried at that time of day, she was tired and the noise was too much. I'm not in the photo because I'm behind the camera. No. I'm not behind the camera. Who had a camera? A man came round taking photos of the stalls for something, a newspaper, and he gave Kwan one. She kept it in her apron. I didn't know your mother had it.

"Send me a copy. Keep the real one. Write on the back of the real one that it's Kwan Yuk-lan and her stall, about 1962 or 1963, and that the girl is your mother and she was crying because she was tired. Write that I said so. Write my name.

"Is it cold? You didn't say if it was cold. You said it snowed. Snow is cold, I know that, I'm not stupid. But how cold. Tell me in a way I'll understand."

[That's all she said. Then she got up and started chopping spring onions very fast and told me to go home and study. But at seven, when I came back down for my noodles, she gave me an extra egg and asked me how you spell Kwan in English. I showed her. She traced the letters on the order pad with her fingernail, twice.]

From your grandmother, Leung Siu-fong, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok.

[P.S. Mock exams next week. If I fail physics, I am going to become a weather person at the airport and blame Deepa.]

---

**Diary. December 7**

Baba's cousin Uncle Hon has a printing shop on Steeles Avenue in a little plaza between a driving school and a place that sells kitchen cabinets. It smells of hot paper and ink, a smell like when you open a new textbook, but stronger, and there's a hum from the big machines that you feel in your chest. Uncle Hon prints menus for half the Chinese restaurants in Markham and wedding invitations in red and gold, so the floor is covered in strips of gold-stamped paper like confetti. He also has a machine that copies photographs. It reads the picture with a bright light that goes along under the glass and then you can print it out, bigger, clearer, on thick shiny paper.

I brought Auntie Kwan's photo. Uncle Hon lifted it by the edges like it was an egg and put it face down on the glass and closed the lid and the light went along under it, slow, green-white, humming. Then he printed two copies, a little bigger than the real one. When they came out of the machine they were warm.

In the copy you can see things you can't see in the real one. You can see the pattern on Auntie Kwan's apron, little checks. You can see her face. She's not smiling. She's looking right at the camera like she's annoyed it's taking so long. She has a gold tooth. You can see that Mama, crying, has one shoe off. You can see, on the bench behind them, a pair of chopsticks stuck in a bowl and a newspaper folded in quarters.

You can see, at the very edge of the picture on the left, a hand, holding a stack of bowls. Just a hand and a wrist. A thin wrist with a red string tied round it.

I showed Mama. She held it close to the lamp, then far away. She said, "That's Ma's hand."

"How do you know?"

"I just know."

I wrote on the back of the real one, in pencil, small, what Por Por said: Kwan Yuk-lan at her stall, Pei Ho Street corner, Sham Shui Po, about 1962 or 1963. The girl is Ho Wai-ling (Mama), about two, crying because she was tired. The hand on the left is Leung Siu-fong (Por Por). Names given by Leung Siu-fong, December 1996. Hand named by Ho Wai-ling.

Mama leaned over to read it and laughed, and then didn't laugh. "You sound like a museum," she said.

"Lok started it."

"The stairs boy," Mama said, and went to stir the soup.

---

**Letter. Markham, December 15, 1996**

Dear Por Por,

Here is the copy of the photo. Uncle Hon made it at his shop. Do you see your hand? Mama knew it was your hand straight away. Is it? Is that a red string? You never told me about a red string.

You asked how cold. I've been thinking about how to explain it.

You know when you open the big freezer at the back of the stall, the one where Uncle Fat keeps the luncheon meat and the fish balls, and you put your whole head in to find something at the bottom? And the cold hits your face and goes up your nose and your eyes water and you pull your head out fast? Imagine that, but you can't pull your head out. The whole world is the freezer. And the wind is blowing the freezer at you.

That's December.

Last Tuesday there was a real storm. It started in the afternoon, in history class, and by the time school finished the snow was up past my ankles and still coming, sideways, little hard flakes that sting your cheeks like sand at the beach when the wind blows. The bus was forty minutes late. I stood at the stop with Deepa with our scarves over our noses and our eyelashes went white. Actually white. Frozen. Deepa's eyebrows froze too and she looked like an old man and I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe and the cold air went in my lungs and hurt.

When I got home the snow was up to my knees in the driveway. Baba was outside with the shovel he bought from the hardware store, a big orange one, and his hat with the flaps over the ears, and his face was red and he was breathing out clouds. He shoveled the whole driveway and then the man next door, Mr. Dunphy, who is retired and has a machine that blows snow, came out and blew our driveway again, properly, while Baba stood there with his shovel. Then Mr. Dunphy said, "You did a good job, buddy, you just need the right tool," and Baba said "Thank you very much," and they shook hands with their gloves on and Baba came inside and said, "The Canadians are very kind and I am going to buy that machine."

Kenny goes to Ryan's backyard every day after school. Ryan's dad flooded the yard with the garden hose and it froze into a rink. Kenny has skates from the secondhand sports shop and falls down every two seconds and gets up every two seconds. His knees are blue. He's very happy. He says "eh" at the end of sentences now. Mama hates it.

The bakery is crazy for Christmas. Everyone wants the cream cakes, the round sponge ones with the whipped cream and the strawberries on top, and Mrs. Szeto makes us write MERRY CHRISTMAS on them in red gel, and my handwriting was so bad she said I write like a chicken that has been in an accident. So now I'm only allowed to put on the strawberries. I'm very good at strawberries.

Christmas here is very big. Everyone has lights on their houses, all colors, and the snow makes them glow, and our crescent looks like a street of birthday cakes. Mr. Dunphy has a reindeer made of white lights on his lawn whose head goes up and down. Baba bought a small string of white lights and put them round our front window and stood outside to look at them for ten minutes in the snow, very proud.

We don't really have Christmas, but we had dinner together at Uncle Hon's, roast duck from the plaza and a lot of his wife's sweet and sour pork, and Uncle Hon's kids watched hockey on the television and screamed. Mama made the soup with the dried tangerine peel you sent and the whole house smelled of you.

How was the stall? Is it cold there? I know what you'll say: "Fifteen degrees is cold." I'm laughing.

Love,
Mandy

P.S. I'm sending a small box. There's a hat in it. Don't laugh. It has a ball on top. Deepa chose it.

---

**Diary. December 21**

Elliot Huang came into the bakery today.

I want to write this down carefully because I don't want to remember it wrong later.

It was around eleven, the busy time, and the line was out the door and I was boxing a dozen egg tarts for the Macau lady, who was explaining the ferry again. And the door opened and the cold air came in, and it was Elliot, in a big blue winter coat, with snow on his shoulders, holding the arm of a tiny old lady in a puffy purple coat and a knitted hat. She came up to his chest. She walked with a cane with a rubber end that squeaked on the wet tiles.

He saw me. His face went red. Not from the cold. I could tell the difference.

When they got to the counter his grandmother leaned in and said something to me, very fast, in a kind of Cantonese that was not my Cantonese. The tones were different, flatter and then up in the wrong places, and some of the words were different words. I understood about half. Coconut. Two. And something about her teeth.

Elliot said, "She wants, uh. She wants the, um." He pointed. He pointed at the wrong tray.

"Cocktail buns," I said. "Two. Soft ones, because of her teeth."

His grandmother looked at me and said, in her Cantonese, "This girl understands," and then she looked at Elliot and said something else that made him look at the floor.

I put the two softest cocktail buns in a bag, the ones from the middle of the tray. His grandmother asked me where I was from. I said Sham Shui Po. She said, "Ah, the city," like it was far away and a little shameful. Then she said she was from Toishan, and her husband's father had come to Toronto when he was fourteen, a long time ago, before the war, and opened a laundry on Elizabeth Street, which is gone now, they built the city hall on it, and Elliot's father was born above a grocery on Dundas Street, and nobody in the family can talk properly any more.

She said that last part looking straight at Elliot. Then she patted his arm.

I didn't translate it. He didn't ask.

When they left he said, "See you in English," and I said, "See you," and he held the door for his grandmother very carefully and she squeaked out with her cane into the snow.

Mrs. Szeto said, "Who's that?"

"A boy from school."

"Mm," she said, exactly the way Uncle Szeto says it, and gave the Macau lady her change.

I keep thinking about the face he made when his grandmother spoke to him and he didn't understand. It wasn't embarrassed exactly. It was the face Deepa makes when Aachi tells a long story. Like when you're standing outside a window looking into a warm room.

---

**Diary. December 31**

New Year's Eve. Baba and Mama went to Uncle Hon's to play mahjong and I stayed home with Kenny, who fell asleep at ten on the couch with his skates still on.

A package came today. Small and soft, wrapped in the red plastic string. Inside, a tape, labeled in Lok's square writing: "Leung Siu-fong speaking. Recorded with her permission. Sham Shui Po, 20 December 1996. For Mandy only. (She said 'only'. She said it twice.)"

Also, a pair of red knitted gloves. Too small for me. Exactly right for Kenny.

I'm going to wait until everyone is asleep and listen to it in the basement. Outside it's minus nineteen. The window is all white feathers. I can hear the fan. I put it on for the noise, like she said.

Not on a Train

**Tape. Leung Siu-fong speaking. Sham Shui Po, December 20, 1996. Transcribed by Mandy, January 1, 1997, 2:40 in the morning, in the basement. Translated by me. Some words I'm not sure of, I put a question mark.**

[Click. No fan this time. A clock ticking. Someone pouring water from a kettle, the hiss of it into a glass. The street far down below, a minibus horn, then quiet.]

LOK: It's on.

POR POR: Go and sit on the stairs.

LOK: I have to stop it at the end.

POR POR: I'll call you. Go sit on the stairs. Close the gate.

[Footsteps. The metal gate of the flat sliding and clanging shut. A long time of only the clock.]

POR POR: Mandy. It's late. The stall is closed. I've had my bath. I'm sitting at the table by the window in your grandfather's chair, which I never sit in, so you know this is serious.

Your mother thinks we came on a train. Your mother thinks this because I told her that when she was six and asked, and then I told her again when she was twelve, and after that she stopped asking and I stopped telling. It is easier to say train. A train is clean. On a train you have a ticket and a seat and you look out of the window and you arrive.

We walked.

[Sound of her drinking. Glass on the table.]

It was the spring of sixty-two. You know about the hungry years? You don't. They don't teach you that in Canada. They didn't teach you that here either. It doesn't matter. In our village there was no rice. I mean there was no rice. People ate the bark of the trees. We ate the leaves of sweet potato, and then the stems. Your grandfather was so thin you could see his heart going in his chest when he took his shirt off. Your mother was a year and a half and she didn't cry any more, which was the worst thing, because babies cry when they're hungry and she was too tired to cry.

And then in May a rumor came. People said the road south was open. People said if you walked to the border, you could go through. Nobody knew if it was true. Your grandfather's cousin came back from the market town and said a whole village up the river had gone, everyone, even the old ones, they left the doors open and the chickens in the yard.

Your grandfather said we go. I said we go. His brother Sang said he would come too. He was seventeen. He brought a cooking pot because he thought we would need a cooking pot. We had nothing to put in it. He carried it the whole way.

[Long pause. The clock.]

I had a quilt cover from my wedding, red cotton with a pattern of lotus, faded, the only good thing I owned. I cut it up with the scissors the night before and sewed it into a sling. A long strip with two straps. I sewed all night by the lamp, very small stitches, double, because I didn't know how far we were going and I didn't want it to break. In the morning I tied your mother into it on my back. She was so light. That's what I remember. How light. Like carrying a bag of clothes.

We left before it was light. We didn't tell anyone. We didn't close the door either.

[She laughs, a short one.]

I always thought about that. The door. What happened to the door.

We walked for two nights and the day between. We walked on the paths between the fields and then up into the hills, because on the roads you would be turned back. There were so many people, Mandy. You think it was us alone in the dark like a story? No. It was like Nathan Road on a Saturday. People everywhere, walking in lines in the dark, nobody talking, babies on backs, old men with sticks, a woman carrying a sewing machine on her shoulder. A sewing machine! I still think about her. I hope she got it through.

We ate raw sweet potato that Sang dug out of a field we passed. It was not ours. I'm telling you that so you know. We stole it. It was hard and white and it tasted like dirt and water. Your mother sucked on a piece. She didn't have enough teeth to chew it.

The hills were steep. Red earth, all stones, slippery. It rained the second night. Not a big rain, a thin cold rain, and everything was mud. I fell down three times. The third time I fell forward onto my hands so I wouldn't fall back on your mother, and I cut my hand on a stone, here, the left one, you know the mark. You asked me when you were small and I said it was a knife at the stall.

It wasn't a knife.

[Pause.]

Your grandfather carried the water. We had one bottle, an old glass one with a cork, and he kept it inside his shirt so it wouldn't break. At the top of the last hill you could see lights. Far away, down below, lights. Many, many lights, yellow and white, more lights than I had ever seen in my life. I thought it was a fire. Your grandfather said no. He said that's Hong Kong. That's where we're going.

[A long silence. Then she clears her throat.]

That's enough for tonight. My voice is tired. I'll tell you the rest when I want to tell you.

Mandy. This is for you. I'm telling you because you asked, and because you write things on the backs of photographs. Don't play this for your mother. Not yet. When I want her to know, I'll tell her myself. She is my daughter. That's my job.

Lok. Lok! Come and turn the machine.

[Gate. Footsteps.]

LOK: Are you okay?

POR POR: I'm fine. Go home. Did you hear?

LOK: No.

POR POR: Liar.

[Click.]

---

**Diary. January 1, 1997, 4:10 a.m.**

I can't sleep.

I listened to it four times. The fourth time I wrote down every word I could. There are words I don't know. Bark. I know the word for bark but the way she said it was a village word, I think. I put a question mark.

I keep thinking of the mark on her left hand. It's a white line across the palm, at the bottom, under the thumb. When I was small I used to trace it with my finger when she held my hand to cross Cheung Sha Wan Road. She always said: the big knife, the one Uncle Fat uses for the bread, it slipped. I believed her for fifteen years.

I keep thinking of the woman with the sewing machine.

I keep thinking of Mama at a year and a half, so light, like a bag of clothes, too tired to cry.

Mama is asleep upstairs. Baba's snoring comes down through the floorboards like a slow saw, and the furnace just came on, it goes whump and then the air comes out of the vents smelling of hot dust. Everything here is so warm and so safe and there's so much food in the fridge that Mama throws some away every week.

"Don't play this for your mother."

I don't know if I can keep that. I don't know if it's fair. It's Mama's story too. She was there. She was on Por Por's back. But she was two, and a two-year-old doesn't know how she got anywhere.

Por Por said she'd tell her herself. I believe her. She doesn't say things she won't do.

I'm putting the tape in the shoe box, standing up, at the end of the row. Label in my writing under Lok's: "Part one."

---

**Letter. Markham, January 6, 1997**

Dear Por Por,

I listened. I wrote it all down. I haven't played it for Mama. I promise.

I have questions. You don't have to answer them now. I'm writing them down so they don't fall out of my head.

What was the name of the village? I know it, I think, but I want you to say it so I spell it right.

What happened to the water bottle?

What happened to Sang's pot?

Did you ever find out about the woman with the sewing machine?

Is the sling still somewhere? Did you keep it?

What color were the lights? You said yellow and white. Were they moving?

How old were you? I worked it out. Twenty-four. Is that right? That's only nine years older than me.

I'm not going to ask what happened next. I'll wait.

Love,
Mandy

P.S. The hat, does it fit? Lok, tell me if she's wearing it. Tell me the truth.

---

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, January 18, 1997**

Dear Mandy,

[She is wearing the hat. Not on her head. On the gas cylinder. She says it keeps the dust off the valve. Every morning she takes it off the cylinder and puts it on the counter and every night she puts it back. The ball on top is gray now from the smoke. Uncle Fat calls the gas cylinder "Canada."]

"I got your list. You are like a policeman. I will answer what I want.

"The village was called Sha Lan. I don't know how you spell it. Lok will spell it. It's not there any more, it's all factories now, your mother's cousin went to look in eighty-eight and she couldn't find the well.

"Twenty-four is right.

"The pot. Sang carried the pot until Hong Kong and then he sold it in Sham Shui Po for the bus fare. Later, when he had money, he went back to the same shop and tried to buy it back and the man had sold it already. He's in San Francisco now, you know Uncle Sang, he sends the calendars. He still talks about the pot.

"The lights were not moving. They were still. The moving lights were the cars, very small. I didn't know what cars were at night. I thought they were insects.

"The woman with the sewing machine I never saw again. I looked for her in Sham Shui Po for years. I looked at every woman with a sewing machine. There are a lot of women with sewing machines in Sham Shui Po.

"The bottle and the sling, I'll tell you later. They're part of the next part.

"Now tell me about the boy."

[I did not tell her anything about any boy. I want that to be clear. She guessed. She says she can smell it on the paper. She says your handwriting got rounder.]

[She asked me to write the next part, too, so here it is.]

"Your mother told me on the phone that you're working too hard at that bakery and getting up in the dark and coming home smelling of butter. Good. Working is good for you. It's better than sitting in a basement thinking. But your mother says the boss is strict. Is she strict like me or strict like a bad person? Tell me which. If she's strict like me she's fine."

From your grandmother, Leung Siu-fong, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok.

[P.S. I passed physics in the mock. Barely. My teacher wrote "a miracle" on the paper, which I think was a joke but I'm keeping it. I'm also writing to you to say that I heard. I sat on the stairs with the gate closed and I heard all of it through the gate, the gate is just bars. I wasn't going to say. But she knew I did, so you might as well know. I've lived under her for sixteen years. I didn't know any of that. I didn't know about the hand. I thought it was the bread knife too.]

[I've been thinking about it at the stall. When she pours the tea now I look at her hand. She pours with the left one.]

---

**Diary. January 25**

Mrs. Szeto is strict like Por Por. I wrote that back. It's true.

Today the big oven broke at seven-thirty, right when the morning rush was starting, and Uncle Szeto stood in front of it with his arms hanging down like he'd been shot. Mrs. Szeto didn't shout. She went to the phone and called Mr. Medeiros, who fixes furnaces, at home, on a Saturday, and he came in twenty minutes in his coveralls with a toolbox and lay on the floor with his head inside the oven, and swore in Portuguese, and fixed it. She gave him a dozen egg tarts and refused to take his bill and he refused to take the egg tarts and they argued for ten minutes and in the end he took six and his bill went in the drawer with the receipts.

While he was lying under the oven he was talking to me about the Azores. He said when he was ten his family left by ship from São Miguel, a week across the ocean to Halifax, and everyone was sick the whole way except his grandmother, who ate sardines out of a jar and sang. He said she was so tough she bit the head off a fish to show the boys on the ship. He said it from under the oven, so his voice was all echoey and metal.

I asked him if he went back. He said once, in 1985. He said his grandmother's house was a café and he had a coffee in the room where he was born and it was a bad coffee.

He laughed when he said it. The oven clanged.

I wanted to tell him about the woman with the sewing machine. I didn't. It's not mine to tell.

Toogood Pond

**Diary. February 1**

Elliot Huang asked me to go skating.

Not like that. Not a date. He said, in English, at the lockers, with his hands in his sweatshirt pocket, "A bunch of us are going to Toogood Pond on Saturday. You can come. If you want. Deepa's coming." And then, "Do you skate?"

"No," I said.

"That's okay. Nobody does at first."

I said I have work Saturday morning. He said they're going at two. I said okay. He said okay. Then he walked away very fast and hit his shoulder on the door.

Deepa was standing behind me the whole time holding her books against her chest like a shield. "I'm coming?" she said.

"You're coming."

"I didn't know I was coming."

"You're coming, Deepa."

"Fine," she said. "But I'm not skating. I'm forecasting."

---

**Diary. February 2**

I need to write this whole day down because I don't trust myself to remember it in the right order.

Morning at the bakery. Ordinary. Pineapple buns, egg wash, one stroke. Uncle Szeto let me shape the topping for the whole second tray by myself and my hands were cold enough. He said "mm" twice. The Macau lady told me her son is getting married in Richmond Hill to a girl whose family is from Shanghai and she's worried about the banquet, because Shanghai people like everything sweet. Mr. Medeiros came in and said the oven sounded happy.

Mrs. Szeto let me go at one-thirty instead of one because I asked her, and she tipped her reading glasses down her nose to study me and said, "Boy?" and I said, "Pond," and she said, "Boy," and waved me out with a rag.

Baba drove me to Unionville. It's the old part of Markham, Main Street, with small old houses made of wood and red brick with pointed roofs and porches, and shops that sell candles and antique chairs and fudge. It looks like a Christmas card that somebody forgot to put away. There was snow on every roof, thick and smooth like icing, and long icicles hanging from the gutters, some as long as my arm, dripping in the sun. The whole street smelled of wood smoke because people have real fires in their houses here.

Toogood Pond is at the bottom of the street, through a park with tall bare trees. The pond is frozen solid. You can walk on it. Actually walk on it. There were families with little kids on skates holding chairs to push in front of them, and men playing hockey at one end with orange cones for goals, and a dog running in circles, sliding, barking at nothing. The ice was gray-white and scratched all over with lines from the skates, and in some places where it was swept clean you could see down into it, dark, with bubbles frozen inside like glass beads.

The air was so cold and clear it hurt my teeth. The sky was a hard pale blue. The sun was bright but there was no heat in it at all. My breath hung in front of my face like a small cloud that didn't want to leave.

Elliot was sitting on a bench lacing up his skates. There were three other people from school, two boys from his hockey team and a girl called Jen. Deepa was there in a giant red coat and a hat with ear flaps, with a thermos.

"I brought hot chocolate," she said. "For the injured."

Elliot had borrowed skates for me from his cousin. They were white and too big, so I wore two pairs of socks. He showed me how to lace them, very tight, all the way up, pulling each cross hard, and his hands were fast and sure on the laces like Uncle Szeto's hands on the topping. "Tighter than you think," he said. "Or your ankles fold."

I stood up and my ankles folded.

I want to tell Por Por about skating, but I don't know how. It's not like anything we have. It's like standing on two knives on a floor made of glass that somebody greased. The first time I stood up I went straight down on my bottom, hard, and the cold went right through my jeans, and everyone laughed, and I laughed too because it was so stupid.

Elliot held out his hands. Both hands. I took them. His gloves were the thick ones for hockey and they smelled of sweat and rubber.

"Don't look at your feet," he said. "Look at me. Bend your knees. Like you're sitting on a stool."

"I know how to sit on a stool," I said.

"Then sit on it."

Plastic stools by the drain at the stall, doing homework while Por Por shouted at Uncle Fat. I bent my knees. I looked at him. He skated backward, slowly, pulling me, and I went forward. My feet were shaking. The ice made a sound under the blades, a kind of hiss and scrape, like a knife being sharpened very slowly.

We went all the way to the other end of the pond like that. Then he let go of one hand. Then he let go of the other hand.

I went about two meters by myself and then I fell over again. But I went two meters.

Later, on the bench, with Deepa's hot chocolate going lukewarm in the lid of the thermos and our noses running, Elliot said something I'm going to write down exactly.

He said, "My grandmother liked you."

I said, "She said I understand."

"Yeah, I know. I got that part." He was quiet. Then he said, "She tells me stuff all the time. Like, stories. About the laundry and her husband's dad and stuff. And I get, like, a third of it. My dad gets more but he's always at work. My mom's family is from here, she doesn't speak any Chinese at all. So it's just me, sitting there, nodding."

Deepa looked at me, and I looked at Deepa.

"I don't want to just sit there nodding," Elliot said. "That's all. She's gonna stop telling me if I just nod."

I said, "I could come. And help. If you want. If she wants."

He looked at me. He has very dark eyes and his eyelashes had little bits of frost on them.

"Yeah?"

"I don't know all her words. They're different. But I know some."

"That'd be. Yeah. That'd be really good."

Then one of the hockey boys threw snow at him and he chased him across the ice and I watched him skate, fast and easy, like it was the same as walking.

Deepa leaned over and said, "Forecast. Seventy percent chance of you being in big trouble."

---

**Letter. Markham, February 4, 1997**

Dear Por Por,

You asked about the boy. Fine. I'll tell you. His name is Elliot Huang. He's in my English class. He's Chinese but born here, and his grandmother is from Toishan and he can't really understand her. His family has been here since before the war. His great-grandfather had a laundry where the city hall is now. He plays hockey. He taught me to skate.

That's all. That's the boy.

Don't tell Mama.

Actually, I want to ask you something about him, and it's not what you think.

His grandmother tells him stories and he only understands a third. He wants to understand the rest before she stops telling him. I said I would go to her apartment on Sunday and help him. I don't know all of her words. Toishan is so different. But I know more than him.

The thing I want to ask is: should I? Is it my place? It's their story, not mine.

Also, I'm thinking about what you said, that you want to tell Mama yourself. I want to tell you that it's hard. Mama doesn't look happy. She says she is. At the bank, they call her Wendy now because the manager couldn't say Wai-ling, and she said yes, Wendy is fine. She comes home and takes her shoes off at the door and stands in the kitchen for a long time before she does anything. Sometimes she calls you and then she hangs up before it rings because she remembers what time it is there.

I'm not telling you this to make you sad. I'm telling you because you asked me to write what's true.

Love,
Mandy

P.S. The snow here at night is blue. When the moon is out, all the snow on the lawns goes blue, a light pale blue, like the inside of the clam shells at the seafood stall when they're open on the ice. I didn't know snow could be blue.

---

**Diary. February 9**

Sunday afternoon at Elliot's grandmother's apartment.

She lives in a tall building near Warden and Steeles with a lobby that smells of floor polish and someone's ginger soup, and an elevator with a mirror in it that Elliot fixed his hair in, twice. Her apartment is on the eleventh floor and it is hot enough to proof dough in. Hotter than the bakery. The radiators were ticking and there were plants everywhere, jade plants in rows on the windowsill, fat leaves, and a bowl of oranges on the table, and the curtains were plastic lace with a pattern of peacocks. There were photographs all over the walls in frames, crowded together, black and white and color. A cooking show played on the television without its voice, a man silently tossing a wok.

Mrs. Huang made us sit on the sofa, which had a plastic cover that squeaked. She gave us oranges and a plate of sesame cookies and hot water, plain hot water, in glasses. Elliot whispered, "She thinks tea is bad for kids."

She was very happy. She talked straight away. She talked and talked.

Elliot had brought his father's tape recorder, a small silver one. He asked her first if it was okay. I put it into Chinese for him, very politely: "He would like to record you, so he can listen again and learn. Is that all right?" She frowned at the little silver box, then at Elliot, and said, "Of course, why do you need to ask," and then she sat up straighter and patted her hair.

She told us about the laundry. Her husband's father came in 1921, alone, fourteen, on a ship to Vancouver and then on a train across the whole country. He worked for an uncle in the laundry on Elizabeth Street, washing, ironing, ironing, ironing, with irons heated on a stove, all day, every day, the shirts of men who never looked at him. He slept on a shelf above the washtubs. He saved and saved. He couldn't bring a wife because of the law at that time. He waited. He was alone for twenty-six years. He finally brought a wife in 1950, from Toishan, a girl from his village he'd never met, who was Elliot's great-grandmother.

I knew most of the words. When I didn't, I asked her to say it again in another way. She didn't mind. She liked it. She said, "This girl asks questions. My children never ask questions."

Elliot listened. He kept looking at me when I translated, then at her, then at me. When she said "twenty-six years" he said "What?" out loud, in English, and she understood that, and nodded, hard, and held up two fingers and then six.

At one point she said something and laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes with a handkerchief, and I laughed too, and Elliot said "What? What?" and I said, "She said his father was so cheap he ironed his own shirts at home and then charged himself for it," and Elliot laughed, a big real laugh, and his grandmother looked at him laughing and her face went very soft.

When we left she gave me a bag of oranges and said to me, very quietly, at the door, while Elliot was getting his coat: "He's a good boy. He just has no ears."

I said, "He's getting ears."

She laughed and pinched my cheek. It hurt.

In the elevator Elliot didn't fix his hair. He just stood there holding the silver tape recorder in both hands.

"Thanks," he said. "Really."

"She's funny," I said.

"I didn't know she was funny," he said. "I didn't know that." The elevator dinged. He said, "I'm gonna write it all down. The twenty-six years. All of it. Before I forget it."

"Write who said it," I said. "And the date."

He looked at me like I was a bit strange. Then he said, "Okay."

Year of the Ox

**Diary. February 6, the night before New Year**

Mama cleaned the whole house today. She does it every year, but this year she did it like she was angry at the house. She washed the kitchen floor on her knees with a cloth. She washed the windows from the inside even though it was minus fourteen outside and the water froze in a thin film on the glass before she could wipe it, and she stood there scraping it off with her fingernail. She made Kenny vacuum his room twice. She took all the shoes out of the closet by the door and lined them up in pairs on newspaper, and then put them back in a different order.

Baba took me aside in the garage, where he was pretending to look for something in a box. "Is your mother okay?" he asked me. As if I would know better than him. Maybe I do.

"She's cleaning," I said.

"I know she's cleaning. Why is she cleaning like that?"

"New Year," I said.

He looked at me. He was holding a box of Christmas lights he'd found in the box and didn't need. "Mandy. Is there something with your grandmother?"

I didn't answer. That was an answer. He nodded and put the lights back.

Tonight Mama made turnip cake for tomorrow, the way Por Por makes it. She grated the white radish on the big grater until her arm shook. The kitchen filled with that sharp wet smell of radish, like cold earth and pepper, and then she fried the dried shrimp and the sausage and the mushrooms, and the smell turned dark and sweet and salty and went up the stairs and down into the basement and into my pillow. She steamed it in the big round pan on the stove for an hour, and the windows fogged up so thick you couldn't see the snow outside any more, just white on white.

She let me stir the batter. It was gray and gluey and heavy and the spoon made a sucking sound. She said, "Your Por Por does it with chopsticks, not a spoon. I never learned that. I never learned how she does it without it getting lumps."

"You could ask her."

"I could," she said. And didn't.

---

**Letter. Markham, February 8, 1997**

Dear Por Por,

Happy New Year. It's the Year of the Ox. Deepa says that's a hard worker year. Mr. Medeiros at the bakery says in the Azores they have a festival with bulls running in the streets and young men running in front of them, which I think is a strange way to celebrate anything, but he showed me with his hands, very fast, and then he showed me how he ran away.

Your red packets came, three of them, one for Kenny, one for me, and one for Baba, which made him laugh. Kenny spent his on hockey cards. I'm saving mine. I'll tell you why at the end.

Here is New Year in Markham.

Market Village and the plaza on Highway 7 were like Mong Kok. There were lion dancers, a red one and a gold one, with the drum and the cymbals, so loud in the hall that the glass in the shop windows buzzed. They went from shop to shop and the shopkeepers hung lettuce and red packets over their doors on strings, and the lions jumped up and ate the lettuce and spat it out all over the floor. Kenny was in heaven. The old aunties were throwing oranges into shopping carts. There were stalls selling the paper decorations, the fish and the gold coins and the fat babies, and flowers, pussy willow and peach blossom in buckets, the peach blossom flown in from somewhere, very expensive, pink against all the snow outside.

At the bakery we made New Year cake, the sticky brown sweet one with the red date on top, and coconut cake, and the fried sesame balls with the hollow inside. Uncle Szeto let me fry the sesame balls. You have to keep pressing them against the side of the wok with the strainer so they puff up, and when they get big and round and golden they float, and you have to keep them rolling. I burned four. The oil spat on my wrist and left a little red mark. Mrs. Szeto put toothpaste on it, which is what you always did. She gave me a red packet at the end of the day and said, "You're slow, but you're not stupid. That's rare."

I think that is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.

We went to Uncle Hon's for dinner. His whole house smelled of steamed fish and black moss and the narcissus his wife grows every winter in a blue bowl of pebbles by the door. She starts the bulbs in January and watches them like a nurse, turning the bowl a little each day toward the window, and if they open in time for New Year it means a good year, and if they open late she says it means nothing. They opened on the morning of New Year's Eve this year. The smell is so sweet it's almost sour, and it filled the hall where we left our boots in a pile. All the kids got red packets. Uncle Hon made a speech in Cantonese about the year being a good year for business, and Baba made a speech in Cantonese about the year being a good year for snow shovels, and everyone laughed. Mama didn't make a speech. She sat next to Uncle Hon's wife and ate very little. Afterwards the grown-ups played mahjong in the dining room and the tiles went clack and shuffle, clack and shuffle, the long washing sound when they mix them face down with their palms, and Uncle Hon's wife won three times and pretended to be sorry. Mama played one round and lost on purpose, I think, so she could get up and stand at the back window looking at the snow in the yard, which had a crust on top that shone under the porch light like the skin on cooled soy milk.

The turnip cake was good. Not as good as yours. Mama said that first, before anyone could.

I'm going to tell you what I'm saving the money for. I'm going to come in the summer. I'm going to come for July. I know you'll say the fireworks are nothing. I'm not coming for the fireworks. I've been saving the bakery money since November. Baba says if I save half the ticket, he'll pay the other half.

Don't say no. I'm writing it in a letter so you can't hang up on me.

Love,
Mandy

---

**Diary. February 12**

A tape came today. Not for me.

It was in a small padded envelope, the address in Lok's square writing, and the label on the tape was in Chinese only, no English. It said: "For Ho Wai-ling. From her mother. Recorded at her own table, with her own permission, which she does not need to ask herself for. 1 February 1997."

I knew what it was.

Mama picked it up from the mail table when she came home from the bank. She read the label standing up, still in her coat and her boots, with the snow melting off them onto the mat. She turned it over. She looked at me.

I was at the kitchen table doing chemistry. I looked down at my chemistry.

Without a word she took the tape and her car keys and went out into the garage.

We have a tape player in the car. I heard the engine start, and then I heard nothing for a long time. The garage door didn't open. She was just sitting in there with the engine running for the heat and the radio not on.

Baba came home at seven and asked where Mama was. I pointed at the garage.

He opened the door and looked. Then he closed it again very quietly and came back and took off his coat and started cooking dinner. He made egg and tomato, the only thing he knows how to make. He didn't ask me anything. He gave Kenny the biggest piece of egg.

Mama came in at eight-fifteen. Her eyes were red and her nose was red and her face was very calm. She had the tape in her hand. She went straight downstairs to the basement and I heard her go into my room.

I went down after her.

She was standing in front of my desk, where the shoe box of tapes is, the tapes in a row standing up like books, all labeled. She was looking at the last one. "Part one."

"You knew," she said.

"She asked me not to tell you. She said she'd tell you herself."

"She told you first." Mama's voice was very flat. Not loud. Worse than loud. "She told you. Her granddaughter. Before her daughter. In December. You've known since New Year's Day."

"I wanted to tell you."

"But you didn't."

"She asked me not to."

"And you always do what she says?"

"No," I said. "Mostly. Yes. You do too."

Mama sat down on my mattress. The boxes under it creaked. She looked tired, so tired, and older, and for a second I could see what Por Por looks like when she's sitting by the drain with her feet up on Canada.

"I don't remember any of it," Mama said. "Not the hills. Not the rain. Not the sling. I don't remember being hungry. I don't remember being light." She said that word, light, the way Por Por said it on the tape, so I knew Por Por had used the same word. "She carried me over all that and I don't remember any of it. Twenty-four. She was twenty-four."

"I know," I said.

"And she told me it was a train. My whole life. A train." She laughed, a horrible small laugh. "I told you it was a train. I told my teacher in school, when we did family history. A train. I told your father on our second date. A train. I've been telling everyone a nice clean lie about my own life for thirty-five years."

"It wasn't your lie," I said.

"It doesn't matter whose it was." She wiped her nose on her sleeve, which she never lets me do. "Did she tell you the rest?"

"Not yet. She said she'll tell me when she wants."

Mama nodded. "That's what she said to me too. She said, 'Now you know the first part. That's enough for one New Year.'" She did Por Por's voice. She did it perfectly, the way she sniffs at the end. And then she laughed, a real one this time, and then she cried, a real one this time, and I sat beside her on the mattress on top of the boxes and she leaned her head against my head, the way she used to when I was little and I had a fever.

The furnace went whump. The warm air came out of the vent smelling of dust.

"She said something about the bottle," Mama said after a while. "Your Gung Gung's bottle. The water. She said it's in the next part."

"She told me that too."

"She's making us wait."

"She likes making people wait. Look at the mooncake man."

Mama laughed so hard she snorted. Then she stopped. Then she said, "Are you really going in July?"

"Yes."

"With your bakery money."

"Half."

She was quiet. Then she said, "I want to see the corner. Where Auntie Kwan's stall was. I want to stand on it."

"Come," I said.

"I can't. The bank. Your brother. Your father."

"Come," I said again.

She didn't say yes. She didn't say no. She got up, and took the tape that was hers, and looked at the row in my shoe box, and then she put hers in at the very end, standing up, next to "Part one." She took my pencil off the desk and on the masking tape on hers, under Lok's Chinese writing, she wrote in English, very small: "Mama's. Listened to in the garage, February 12. Keep."

Then she went upstairs and ate Baba's egg and tomato, cold, and said it was very good.

Lok Writes Alone

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, March 2, 1997**

Dear Mandy,

This one is from me. Only me. There are no brackets because there is nobody to hide from.

Your grandmother says she's not sending a letter this month. She says she has said enough for one winter and now everybody can sit with it, and that includes you, your mother, and "the Canadian ox," which is what she calls your father now because of the snow machine. She said I can write to you if I want, but I'm not allowed to write anything about her.

I'm going to write about her. She can't read it.

First, your mother called. It was the Sunday after your New Year, at eight in the morning here, which is the worst time, right in the middle of the rush. I know because the stall phone rang, the old one on the hook by the stove that nobody ever calls except the fish ball supplier. Your grandmother answered with her hands full of noodles and said, "What," the way she does, and then she didn't say anything else. She put the noodles down on the counter. Just put them down, on the steel, a whole handful, not in a bowl. Uncle Fat looked at me. I looked at Uncle Fat. Then she turned around with her back to the street and the phone cord stretched all the way across the stall, and she stood like that by the gas cylinder, under your hat, for forty minutes.

Uncle Fat and I did the whole rush. He did the eggs and the noodles and I did the tea, which I have never done, and which I now know is harder than physics. You pour from high so the tea gets air in it, you know that, but you don't know how heavy the kettle is when you hold it up that high for an hour. My arm is still sore. The men from Apliu Street complained that the tea was weak. One of them said it tasted like rain on a bus shelter. I said the regular tea maker is on an international call. He said, "Since when does Siu-fong make international calls," and stood there drinking his rain tea, watching her back, very interested.

I couldn't hear what she said on the phone. The street was too loud and she talked low. I'm telling you the truth. But at the end, she said, quite loud, "I know. I know. I know." Three times. And she hung up and stood there with her hand on the phone for a minute, and then she picked the noodles up off the counter and threw them away, which she never does, and started again.

She was very nice to everybody for the rest of the day. It was frightening.

So that's your grandmother. I'm not allowed to write about her, so I'll stop.

Now me.

My exams start on April 14. I have English first, which is fine, and then Chinese, which is fine, and then math and physics and chemistry, which are not fine. I study at night on the stairs. It's the coolest place in the building and the light is good because they put in new bulbs last year, and if I sit at the top, three steps down from your grandmother's gate, I can hear her radio. She listens to the old Cantonese opera station at night when she's doing her accounts, very quiet, and sometimes she hums along, in a high thin voice that doesn't sound like her at all. I'm not supposed to say that. I'm saying it.

My mother says if I pass, she'll buy me a new pair of glasses. These ones are from Form One. She says I look like an owl that's been in a fight.

About airplanes. I went to my teacher with your list. He was surprised. He said nobody had ever come to him with a list. He said there's a course at the technical institute in Tsing Yi for aircraft maintenance, and you need to pass math and physics, of course you need physics, but they take the hands kind of physics into account. He said there's also a weather course, but that's for university. I told him I know a girl in Canada who wants to do the weather. He said, "On television?" I said yes. He said, "Then she doesn't need university, she needs a nice face." I said she has a nice face and also a pointer. He didn't understand. I didn't explain.

I've applied to the technical institute. I've told no one. You are the first person I've told. My father thinks I'm going to do accounting.

Things you asked about in your old letters that I never answered because your grandmother talks too much and I run out of paper.

The dog that isn't allowed is called Mango. He's not ours. He belongs to nobody. He sleeps on our landing and my mother feeds him the fish skin and denies it.

The mooncake man has a daughter who has gone to Melbourne. He's started selling egg tarts in the off season. They're terrible. Your grandmother buys one every week to support him and gives it to Mango.

The tea cafe on the corner closed. The brother sold the license and the new people sell mobile phone covers. It's a bright shop with a lot of lights and loud music, and it smells like plastic. Your grandmother crosses the street so she doesn't have to walk past it.

Mr. Yip's ribbons are red and gold for the summer. He says there will be a big demand in July. Everyone is saying that. "A big demand in July." Nobody says for what.

The planes are still coming in low over the roofs. I've been counting. I counted eighty-four on Saturday, which is my record. The new airport is going to open next year, out on the island, and after that they will all go out that way, over the sea. My father says the whole of Kowloon will be quiet. He says it like it's a good thing. I don't know.

I've drawn you a map. It's on the other side of this paper. I drew it from the roof, looking down, and then I walked the street with a notebook. It shows our building, and the stall, and Pei Ho Street, and the market, and the ribbon shop, and where the tea cafe was, and the button stalls on Yu Chau Street where my mother is, and the electronics on Apliu Street, and the corner where you said Auntie Kwan's stall was, from the photo. I wasn't sure about that one, so I put a question mark. I didn't want to ask your grandmother because she'd know why I was asking.

I've labeled everything in English and Chinese. I'm sorry about my drawing. I'm better at engines.

From Chung Ka-lok, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok.

P.S. She does still pour with the left hand. I watched her all week. She holds the kettle in her right and the cup in her left and pours down across the scar. I asked her once, very carefully, why left. She said, "Because I'm left-handed, stupid." She's not left-handed. She writes with her right. She chops with her right. Only the tea.

---

**Diary. March 9**

I read Lok's letter at the bakery in my break, sitting on a flour sack in the back room with my coat on because the back door was open for a delivery and the cold was coming in, gray March cold, wet cold, the snow outside turned to slush the color of dishwater and the parking lot full of puddles with a skin of ice on them.

I read it twice. Then I turned it over and looked at the map for a long time.

It's very good. He says he's bad at drawing. He's not. It's all straight lines, like a plan for a building, but he's put small things in that nobody would think of. The drain by the stall where the stools stack. The pole at the bus stop where the old men lean. Mr. Yip's shutter with lines on it, like it's half open. A little square on the landing of our building that says, in English and Chinese, "Mango sleeps here." And on the corner of Pei Ho Street, a small circle with a question mark in it: "Auntie Kwan's stall (1962?) — W. says."

W. says.

Uncle Szeto came into the back room for butter and saw me looking at the map and said, "Where's that?"

"Sham Shui Po."

"Huh," he said, and leaned over and looked. He put one floury finger on the corner of Pei Ho Street, very gently, not touching the paper, just above it. "I used to buy fish balls from a stall there. When I was a boy. Fat old lady with a gold tooth."

My heart went very fast. "Auntie Kwan?"

"I don't know. I never knew her name. She used to give me an extra ball if I said please." He straightened up with the butter. "Long time ago." And he went back to the ovens and turned the radio up.

I sat on the flour sack. A truck backed into the loading bay outside, beeping. Cold air. The smell of yeast. A man I don't know remembered the gold tooth.

When I went back out front, I asked Uncle Szeto what year. He said, "Sixty-three, sixty-four. Before we moved to Tai Po." I wrote the years on the back of my hand with the order pen. Then I wrote it in the margin of Lok's map, under the question mark: "Mr. Szeto (Lucky Moon Bakery, Markham) bought fish balls here as a boy, 1963 or 1964. Gold tooth. Extra one if you said please."

---

**Letter. Markham, March 12, 1997**

Dear Lok,

Thank you for the map. I put it on the wall above my desk, next to the window that looks at the grass. You can see it from my bed.

It's not bad drawing. Don't say that again. It's the best map of anywhere I've ever had.

I've added something to it, look at the margin, I'm sending you a copy so you can add it to yours. A man here, my boss's husband at the bakery, remembers Auntie Kwan. He bought fish balls from her when he was a boy. He remembers her gold tooth. In the photo, she has a gold tooth. You can see it in the copy Uncle Hon made. So I think your question mark is right. I think it's that corner.

I didn't tell Por Por. I'm telling you.

I've been thinking about your list too. The technical institute. I think it's a good idea. I think you should tell your father before you get the letter, not after. My mother didn't know something for thirty-five years and it made everything worse when she found out. I know that's a different thing. But.

Tell me when your exams are, exactly, every day. I'll think about you at the right times. I'll do the time difference. You'll be in the exam hall and it'll be the middle of the night here and I'll be in bed thinking "physics."

Deepa says thank you for the weather course information. She says she doesn't need a nice face, she needs a better pointer.

It's spring here. Supposedly. Everyone says it's spring. There's still snow on the ground in all the shady places, old snow, gray and hard and full of gravel, in piles at the edges of the parking lots like dirty sheep. But the days are longer. When I get home from school it's still light. And yesterday I heard a bird. Not a pigeon. A real bird, singing, in the tree outside, a long whistle going up and down. I stood in the driveway and listened and Mr. Dunphy came out and said, "Robin," and I said, "Thank you," and he said, "That means spring."

I hope Mango is getting enough fish skin.

From Mandy, by the hand of Mandy.

P.S. Is it really true she hums? What songs? I won't tell her.

---

**Diary. March 13**

I just reread my letter to Lok before I sealed it and realized I wrote more to him than I've written to anyone this whole year. More than to Por Por.

That's because he wrote to me first. That's all.

Elliot finished writing down his grandmother's stories. He typed them at school in the computer lab, eleven pages, with the date and "told by Mrs. Huang Mei-kuen, translated with help from W. Lau" at the top, and he printed two copies, one for him and one for her. He showed me today at lunch. His grandmother can't read English. He said she held it on her lap all evening anyway and showed it to the lady next door.

He said, "I'm gonna learn. Like, properly. My dad's gonna find a class."

"Good," I said.

"You wanna help? Like, sometimes?"

"Sometimes," I said.

He smiled. He has a crooked front tooth I hadn't noticed before. I like it.

So I like Elliot. I do. I'm writing it so it's true. I like him and I like that he wants to learn and I like the crooked tooth.

And I also keep reading the P.S. about the left hand.

The Ditch and the Straw

**Diary. April 13**

Lok's exams start tomorrow morning. Nine-thirty in Hong Kong is nine-thirty at night here, the night before. So tonight at nine-thirty I sat on my mattress and looked at the clock on my desk and thought "English," very hard, for a whole minute, like you'd push a car. Then I felt stupid. Then I did it again at ten.

A tape came yesterday. It's labeled in Lok's writing, both languages: "Leung Siu-fong speaking. Recorded with her permission, at the stall after closing, 30 March 1997. For Mandy and for Wai-ling. Together. (She said 'together'. She means it.)"

Mama has it on top of the fridge, next to the rice jar. She says we'll listen to it Saturday night when Kenny's at Ryan's for a sleepover and Baba's at Uncle Hon's for mahjong. She said, "Don't you dare listen to it before me." I said I wouldn't dream of it. She said, "You would dream of it." That's true.

---

**Tape. Leung Siu-fong speaking. Transcribed by Mandy, April 19, with Mama correcting my Chinese and arguing about every third word.**

[Click. Street noise, but far away. A metal shutter coming down, slow, then the bang at the bottom. A pot being scrubbed. The scrubbing stops.]

POR POR: Is it going?

LOK: It's going.

POR POR: Then go and sit on Canada.

LOK: I'm sitting on Canada.

POR POR: Good. Don't talk.

[A stool scraping on the concrete.]

POR POR: Wai-ling. Mandy. This is your mother. This is your grandmother. You know who it is. I'm at the stall. It's after ten. The street's quiet, the men from the electronics shops have all gone home, and Fat has gone home, and the new girl has gone home, she's still slow. There's only me and the boy and the dog that isn't allowed, and a lot of bowls.

Last time I stopped at the lights. At the top of the hill. So now we go down.

We went down the hill that night in the dark. There was no path. People were sliding down the red earth on their bottoms, holding on to bushes. Sang went first with the pot, and your father, Wai-ling, your father went next with the bottle in his shirt, and I went last with you on my back, because I was slowest. You were asleep. I could feel your breath on my neck, warm, small, very fast, like a bird's.

At the bottom there was a stream. Not big. You could step across it. And on the other side, a field, flat and wet, and a long low wall, and beyond that more fields, and a road with a light on it. People were running across the field. I mean running. Everyone had seen the road and everyone was running for it.

Your father said wait. He said the bottle's empty, I'll fill it, we'll need water on the road. He went down to the stream with Sang. I stayed at the bottom of the hill, in the bushes, with you.

[Pause.]

Then there were lights. Flashlights, on the road. A lot of them, moving, and men shouting. Police, I think. Or soldiers. I didn't know the uniforms then, I didn't know anything. Everyone running across the field turned around and ran back. Some kept going. People were screaming. A man ran past me so close his foot hit my leg.

I couldn't see your father. I couldn't see Sang. I could see the stream and the flashlights going back and forth across the field like the beams at the airport, and people being caught, being pulled down, and I couldn't see them.

So I lay down in the ditch.

It was a drainage ditch along the edge of the field, half full of water. Cold water. Mud. I lay down in it on my side with you on my back, and I laid two fingers across your lips, not hard, just in case, and I lay there. You woke up. I could feel you wake up. You didn't cry. You just looked. I could feel your eyelashes on my neck, blinking.

[A long silence. Then the sound of her pouring water into a glass.]

POR POR: I don't know how long. Long enough that the water stopped feeling cold. Long enough that the flashlights went away and the shouting went away and it was very quiet and there were frogs. And then it was getting light. Gray. The sky was going gray.

And then a woman was standing over me.

She was a farm woman. Hakka. She had the hat, the big flat straw one with the black cloth hanging down all around it like a curtain, so I couldn't see her face, only her chin. She was barefoot. Her trousers were rolled up to the knee and her legs were brown and covered in mud. She had a carrying pole on her shoulder with two bundles of rice straw.

She looked at me lying in her ditch. She didn't say anything. She put down the pole. She took the straw off it, both bundles, and she shook it out, and she laid it over me. All over me. Over my head. Over you. I lay there under the straw and I could hear her walking away, and then coming back, and more straw, and more. It smelled like old rice and wet dog. It was warm. It was the warmest I'd been in three days.

She left me there all day. People walked past. I heard them. Voices, boots, a truck. Nobody looked in the ditch under a pile of straw.

At night she came back. She took the straw off. She gave me a sweet potato, a cooked one, still hot, wrapped in a leaf. She gave you water from a cup. And she gave me money. Coins. Some Hong Kong coins, I didn't even know what they were, she put them in my hand and closed my fingers, and she pointed at the road and said one word. Bus.

[Pause.]

That's all she said. One word. She talked like the people in the New Territories, I could barely understand her, but I understood bus.

I never knew her name. I never saw her face. She walked away in the dark with her pole and her empty ropes and I watched her go and I never saw her again.

[Long pause.]

I'm telling you this so you know. The coins she gave me were enough for the bus to Kowloon, for you and me. There was one coin left over. I kept it. It's in the drawer of the stall, in the small box with the license, with the elastic band. I never spent it. Lok, don't touch the drawer.

LOK: I'm not touching the drawer.

POR POR: You're looking at the drawer.

LOK: I'm looking at Canada.

POR POR: Your father, Wai-ling, and Sang. They were caught at the stream. Both of them. With the bottle. They were put on a truck with a lot of other people and taken back across. I didn't know that. I didn't know that for twenty-two days. I didn't know if he was alive.

That's enough. That's the second part. The third part is Kwan, and the bowls, and when your father came back. I'll tell you that one when I want. Wai-ling, don't cry. Mandy, don't let your mother cry.

[Pause.]

POR POR: She's crying, isn't she.

[Pause.]

POR POR: Lok. The machine.

[Click.]

---

**Diary. April 19, very late**

Mama listened sitting on my bedroom floor with her back against the mattress, with her knees up, and her arms around her knees. I sat on the mattress behind her. Neither of us moved the whole time. When Por Por said "She's crying, isn't she" Mama gave a wet hiccup of a laugh and said "Yes!" out loud to the tape player, as if Por Por could hear.

Afterward she rewound it to the part about the straw and listened again. Then the part about my breath on her neck. Mama's breath, I mean. Mama's breath. Then she sat there.

"Your eyelashes," I said. "On her neck."

"I don't remember it," Mama said. "But I think I do. Isn't that strange? I don't remember it and I can feel it."

She went upstairs and came back down with a cassette, an empty one, still in the plastic, from the drugstore. She sat on the floor and tore the plastic off with her teeth.

"I'm going to send her one back," she said. "Help me."

"What are you going to say?"

"I don't know. I'm going to say the bowls. I remember the bowls." She took the blank tape out of its case and held it. "That's the only thing I remember from back then. A big pile of bowls, white with a blue edge, and the sound of them. Clink, clink, clink. Somebody washing them. Somebody's hands in the water. And I was on a bench, I think, or on the ground, and it was hot, and loud, and I was so tired, and the bowls. I used to dream about the bowls. I thought it was just a dream."

"It's in the photo," I said.

"I know." She looked at me. "I know that now."

We put the tape in Baba's old player and pressed record and the little red light came on and she held the microphone up to her chin with her mouth shut, and the tape went round recording nothing, just the furnace and my breathing. Then she pressed stop and rewound it and started again.

"Ma," she said. "It's Wai-ling."

And then she talked for forty-five minutes. About the bowls. About the stairwell, she remembers a stairwell, she didn't know why. About the bank and being called Wendy. About the snow. About Kenny's hockey. About turnip cake and chopsticks instead of spoons. About how she's angry Por Por never told her and how she understands why. About the train. She said "train" and laughed. She said, "I've told everyone a train for thirty-five years and now I'm going to have to tell everyone again." She said, "Who are you to give me a train, Ma." She said it angry and then she said it soft.

I went upstairs halfway through and made her tea and brought it down and she was still talking, and she didn't stop to drink it.

When she finished she wrote the label herself. Chinese and English. "Ho Wai-ling speaking. Recorded with her own permission, which she does not need to ask herself for. Markham, 19 April 1997. For her mother. And for the boy on the stairs, who can listen, because he will anyway."

She showed me. "Is that right? The way Lok writes it?"

"That's exactly right."

---

**Letter. Markham, April 24, 1997**

Dear Por Por,

Mama's tape is in this parcel. She did it herself. I only held the light.

Spring has really come. I'll tell you about it in one paragraph, because Mama's tape is long enough for both of us.

The snow is gone, all of it, even the dirty sheep at the edge of the parking lot. Everything that was under it is coming out: brown grass, flat and wet, lost mittens, a newspaper from January, the bones of someone's Christmas tree. And the mud. You've never smelled mud like this. It's cold and rich and dark like the soil in the pots on the roof when you water the chilies, but a whole country of it, all at once, steaming in the sun. The river in Rouge Park is so high it's brown and loud and full of branches and comes right up over the path. Little purple flowers are coming out of the lawns, all by themselves, Mr. Dunphy says they're called crocuses and he didn't plant them, they've been there for thirty years, they just come. The trees still have no leaves but if you look at the ends of the branches there are tiny red buds, hard, like grains of rice.

Thank you for the straw. I mean thank you for telling us about the straw. I can't stop thinking about her hat with the cloth around it.

Lok's exams are this week and next. I'm thinking about him at the right times. Tell him.

Love,
Mandy

P.S. Mama wants to know the color of the coin. She thinks it's a ten cents. I say a fifty. We have a bet.

Auntie Kwan's Bowls

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, May 10, 1997**

Dear Mandy, and Dear Auntie Wai-ling,

[This is Lok. Before anything else: my exams are finished. Physics was on Tuesday. There was a question about a pulley and I think I got it, and a question about lenses and I think I didn't. Whatever happens, I'm done. I slept for fourteen hours on Wednesday and Mango slept on my feet.]

[Your grandmother has decided she doesn't want to do the third part on the machine. She says the machine makes her voice sound like a duck in a tin. So she told it to me at the stall yesterday, in the afternoon lull, and I wrote it down on order pads as fast as I could, and then I wrote it out again last night properly in Chinese, and now in English. She has checked the Chinese. She made me change four words. So this is all her, and she has approved it. My comments are in brackets as always. She knows about the brackets now. She said, "Write your little remarks, I don't care," and then she said, "But not too many."]

[She was peeling ginger when she started. She peeled the whole bag.]

"The bus came at dawn. A green and white bus, very old, with the windows open because there was no glass in some of them. I got on with you on my back, Wai-ling, and I held out the coins in my hand and the conductor took what he needed and gave me one back. I didn't know what anything cost. He could have taken everything.

"The bus went for a long time. Through the fields and then through villages and then along the sea, and then the hills, and then suddenly buildings. Buildings everywhere. More buildings than I knew there were in the world, gray and white and dirty, with washing hanging off every one of them on poles, so many colors, like flags. And people. People on every inch of the street. Hawkers. Rickshaws. Trucks. Noise. I thought my head would break.

"The bus stopped at the end of its road and everyone got off. The conductor said 'Sham Shui Po.' I didn't know where that was. I didn't know it was a place. I got off because everyone got off.

"I stood on the corner. You were crying now. Loud. You were awake and hungry and the noise was frightening you. I was wet still, from the ditch, and my trousers were stiff with mud. People walked around me like I was a pole.

"I walked until it got dark. Where to? Anywhere. I was looking for a place to sit. Every place to sit had someone sitting in it already. In the end I went into a building on Pei Ho Street because the door was open and there was a stairwell and the stairwell was dark and empty. I went up to the turn between the third floor and the fourth, and I sat down on the stairs with my back against the wall, and I untied you, and I held you on my lap, and you cried until you fell asleep.

"I slept on those stairs three nights running.

[She stopped peeling. I looked up. She was looking at me.]

[She said, "You know which stairs."]

[I did know. I'm sitting on them right now, writing this. Three steps from the top of the third floor, under her gate. Where I've been doing my homework since I was seven.]

"Yes. Those ones. This building. That's why I bought the flat, when we had the money, in seventy-one. Your grandfather wanted the new estate in Shek Kip Mei, with the elevator. I said no. I said this building. He said why. I didn't tell him why for a long time. I wanted to walk up past those stairs every day and know I didn't sleep on them any more.

"Now. Kwan.

"On the fourth morning I went to wash you at the street tap on the corner. There was a tap at the corner then, for the stalls. I was holding you under the water and you were screaming and a woman came out from behind her stall with a ladle in her hand and said, 'What are you doing to that baby.'

"It was Kwan. She was short and fat and loud and she had one gold tooth at the front and her arms were like a man's arms from lifting the pots. Her stall was the one on the corner, the one in your photo. A cloth roof. A long bench. Congee, noodles, fish balls. Very good fish balls. She made them herself every morning, she slapped the fish paste against the bowl a hundred times until it went springy, you could hear it down the street, slap, slap, slap.

"She looked at me. She looked at you. She looked at my trousers. She knew. Everyone in Sham Shui Po that month knew. There were hundreds of us.

"She said, 'Can you wash bowls?'

"I said yes.

"She said, 'Put the baby on the bench.'

"That's all. That's how it started. I washed bowls for Kwan for food and a corner of her floor at night, in the back where she kept the charcoal. Two big tubs of water, one soapy, one clean, and the bowls coming and coming and coming, white with a blue edge, all day, from five in the morning to ten at night. My hands went white and wrinkled and split. You sat on the bench. You cried every afternoon at three when it got too hot and too loud. The customers gave you bits of fish ball. The man with the camera came one day and took a picture and gave it to Kwan and she put it in her apron and I forgot about it.

"Kwan didn't ask me anything. Not my name for three days. Not where I came from. Not where my husband was. She just fed us and shouted at me if I put a dirty bowl on the clean side.

"I asked everyone who came to the stall about the trucks. About the people who were caught at the border. Nobody knew anything. Some people said they were all sent back. Some people said worse. I didn't believe the worse. I washed bowls.

[She had finished all the ginger. She started on the garlic. Thumbnail, very fast.]

"On the twenty-second day your father came.

"I was at the tubs. It was evening. The stall was full. And I looked up and he was standing on the other side of the street, by the tap, looking at all the stalls, one after another. He was so thin. He was dirty. His shirt was torn at the shoulder. He had the bottle. The glass bottle. He still had the bottle, in his hand.

"He didn't see me. He went to the stall next door and asked something. Then the next stall. I found out later he had walked down every street in Sham Shui Po for two days asking at every stall, every one, if anyone had seen a woman from the north with a baby in a red sling with lotus flowers on it. Two days. Every stall. Because he thought, if she's alive, she's working, and if she's working, she's at a stall, because she can cook. And she wasn't cooking, she was washing bowls, but he was nearly right.

"He came to Kwan's stall. He asked Kwan. Kwan chewed on her gold tooth and studied him and then she pointed with her ladle, behind her, at the tubs.

"I had a bowl in my hand. I dropped it. It broke. Kwan made me pay for it out of my food for a week. She said it was a good bowl.

[She laughed when she said that. She laughed a lot. Then she had to stop and blow her nose on the cloth she uses for the counter, and then she shouted at me for watching her blow her nose.]

"He and Sang had walked back. They got off the truck on the other side and the next night they walked again. Different hills. They swam a part. Sang lost his shoes. He still had the pot. Your father still had the bottle, filled with water from the stream, the same stream. He said he wasn't going to come all that way and not bring me water.

"So now you know.

"The sling is in my wardrobe in the flat, in the bottom drawer, wrapped in newspaper. It's faded almost pink. The stitches held. I told you they would.

"The bottle we kept for years. In the eighties Fat broke it, cleaning. He cried more than I did. We kept the bottom half. It's on the shelf at the back of the stall. It holds the chopsticks for the staff. Lok, show me. That one. Yes. You've used it every day for eleven years.

[I have. It's the thick green glass jar with the uneven top. I always thought it was a jar. I just held it. It's smooth at the top edge, where it broke. Smooth from forty thousand hands taking chopsticks out of it.]

"And the coin. The one left over from the bus. Tell your mother she's wrong, and you're wrong too. It's a five cents. A small brass one, very thin. You both lose.

"That's all. That's all you're getting. Kwan gave us her stall's corner to start our own, in sixty-eight, when she got tired. She found a way to get us the license. Don't ask me how. She died in seventy-four, in her bed, very old, very rude to the doctor.

"Now. You're coming in July. Both of you. I know. Wai-ling told me on the phone. I said don't come for the fireworks. Come for the stall. If you come, you work. Both of you. You can wash bowls."

From your grandmother and your mother, Leung Siu-fong, by the hand of Chung Ka-lok.

[P.S. from me. Mandy: I told my father about the technical institute. You were right. Before the letter. He shouted for about ten minutes. Then he didn't speak to me for two days. Then on the third day, at dinner, he said, without looking at me, "Airplane mechanics wear uniforms with their names on them, yes?" and I said yes, and he grunted, "Fine," and passed me the fish. That's how my father apologizes. With fish.]

---

**Diary. May 18**

Mama bought her plane ticket. The bank gave her two weeks without pay. She told the manager she was going home for her mother and he said "Of course, Wendy," and she said, "Wai-ling. It's Wai-ling," and he said "Wai-ling," almost right.

I bought mine too. Half of it is pineapple buns.

We leave June 27. Baba and Kenny are staying. Kenny has hockey camp and Baba has the printing shop, and Baba says somebody has to water the bamboo, by which he means the tomato plants he planted in the backyard last week, very seriously, in a row, with sticks.

---

**Diary. May 25**

Today Mama and I made a timeline.

It was Mama's idea, which surprised me. We bought a roll of brown paper from the art store and rolled it out along the whole kitchen floor, from the fridge to the back door, and held the ends down with the rice jar and Baba's boots. Kenny walked on it once and got shouted at by both of us at the same time.

We drew one long line all the way along it in black marker. And then we put on it every move.

Sha Lan village, the house with the door left open. Spring 1962.

The hills. Two nights.

The stream and the ditch. The farm woman with the hat.

The green and white bus.

The stairs between the third floor and the fourth, Pei Ho Street, Sham Shui Po. Three nights.

Auntie Kwan's stall, the corner. Twenty-two days of bowls.

Gung Gung and Sang on the truck back, and the walk again, and the swim.

Por Por and Gung Gung's own stall, 1968.

The flat on the fourth floor, 1971, above the same stairs.

Uncle Sang to San Francisco, 1979, without his pot.

Mama born, 1960, which goes before everything, so we had to write it squeezed in at the very start, sideways.

Me born, 1981, on the stall counter, practically.

Kenny born, 1987.

Gung Gung, 1989. We drew a small star, because that's what Mama wanted. She didn't want to write anything else.

And then a long gap, and then: Kai Tak, window seat, August 17, 1996. The crescent in Markham. The basement.

And Mama got the marker and drew one more line, past the basement, and wrote at the end of it, "Kai Tak again, June 1997."

We stood on the chairs and looked down at it.

"It's so short," Mama said. "When you draw it. It's so short."

It's not short. It's the whole floor.

Mama took a picture of it with Baba's camera, standing on the chair, and then another from the other end. Then she said we have to roll it up before Baba comes home and steps on it, and we rolled it up, very carefully, from the back door end, so it starts with us and ends with Sha Lan in the middle of the roll.

I'm taking it with me in July. I want Por Por to check it. I want her to fix what we got wrong.

Spring Formal

**Diary. June 2**

Elliot asked me to the formal.

He did it in the computer lab, at the printer, while we were both waiting for our history essays to come out. The printer was making its screaming noise, the one where it pulls the paper through in jerks, and he said something and I said "What?" and he said it again louder just as the printer stopped, so the whole lab heard him say "DO YOU WANNA GO TO THE FORMAL WITH ME."

Twelve people turned around.

I said yes. Very quietly. Then louder, because the printer started again.

A boy at the back clapped once. Just once. Mr. Kowalczyk, who was walking past the door, put his head in and said, "Congratulations to everyone involved," and walked on.

It's June 20 at a banquet hall on Woodbine Avenue. We fly on the 27th. It's fine. It's a week before. I checked three times.

---

**Diary. June 8**

Problem: I have no dress.

Deepa has a dress. Deepa has had her dress since March. It is dark green with a gold border and her aunt in Scarborough made it and she looks like a queen in it and she refuses to let me see it again until the night because "it's a reveal."

I went to the mall with Mama and everything was either shiny and pink with straps like spaghetti or black and short and cost more than three weekends at the bakery. Mama made faces at all of them in the fitting room mirror behind my back. I could see her.

Then on the way home she was quiet in the car, and when we got home she went straight upstairs without taking off her shoes, which she never does, and I heard the closet door and some boxes, and then she came down holding something folded in tissue paper.

It was her cheongsam.

I knew it existed. I've seen it in a photo: Mama at her graduation from secretarial college, 1979, standing on the steps with a diploma, very thin, with a big perm, in a cheongsam the color of the inside of a lychee. Pale, pearly, a white that is almost pink. With small dark red flowers along the collar and down the side, embroidered, and frog buttons in red silk cord, and a slit up the side to the knee.

"Your Por Por chose the cloth," Mama said. "At the fabric market on Ki Lung Street. We went every Sunday for a month. She felt every roll. She made the man take down everything and she rubbed it between her fingers like she was buying fish. And then she found this and she said 'That one,' and he said it was the most expensive one, and she said 'That one.'"

"Who made it?"

"Mr. Ng. A tailor on Fuk Wing Street. He measured me in his shop, it was so tiny, two of us couldn't stand in it at the same time, I stood in the doorway and he measured me from inside. He had pins in his mouth the whole time and talked through them. He's dead now. His son runs a shop that fixes zippers."

I touched the cloth. It was cool and smooth and heavy, with a sheen on it like milk.

"It won't fit," I said. "You were tiny."

"I was tiny," Mama said. "You're tiny. Try it."

It fit.

Almost. It's a little tight across the shoulders, because of carrying the bakery trays, Mama says, and a little long. But it fit. I stood at the long mirror by the front door and Mama stood behind me and did up the frog buttons one by one at the side, slowly, from the collar down, and when she got to the last one she put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me in the mirror, and her mouth went small and tight the way it does at the bank when a customer is rude.

Then she said, "Stand up straight. You look like a question mark."

Later she wrote it in the little notebook where she's been keeping a list of the family's things, the ones that matter, since the timeline. It has the sling in it, which she's never seen except in Por Por's words, and the bottle, and the coin, and the photo. Under it, in her neat bank handwriting:

"Cheongsam, pale lychee silk, red flowers at collar and side, red frog buttons. Cloth chosen by Leung Siu-fong, Ki Lung Street, 1979. Made by Mr. Ng, Fuk Wing Street. Worn by Ho Wai-ling, graduation 1979. Worn by Mandy Lau, Spring Formal, Markham, 1997."

"You haven't worn it yet," I said.

"I'm a bank teller," she said. "I'm very good at things that are going to happen."

---

**Diary. June 14**

Saturday at the bakery, the last full one before the trip. It's hot now, real heat, and with the ovens going the shop is like the inside of a rice cooker. Uncle Szeto propped the back door open with a sack of sugar and a fat bee kept coming in and going straight for the coconut, every time, like it had an appointment.

He let me do the whole first batch of pineapple buns. Topping, egg wash, oven, out. I didn't ask. He just went to the back and started on the egg tarts and left me there with the trays. I rolled the balls between my palms, cold hands, I'd held them on the steel counter first, and pressed them flat and laid them on, and brushed, one stroke. When they came out, cracked and gold, he walked past and looked at the tray for a second and kept walking.

No "mm." I waited all morning. Nothing.

At one o'clock, when I was taking off my apron, he called me to the back. He had a piece of paper. On it, in pencil, in very small careful Chinese, was the recipe for the topping. Flour, sugar, egg yolk, the lard, the milk powder, everything. Weights. The part about cold hands written at the bottom and underlined twice.

"For your grandmother," he said. "She'll fix it."

Then he said "mm," and went back to the egg tarts.

---

**Letter. Markham, June 15, 1997**

Dear Lok,

This is the last letter before I come. Probably it will arrive the same day I do. That's okay. Read it anyway.

I'm going to a dance on Friday in my mother's cheongsam. The one Por Por chose the cloth for at Ki Lung Street. Ask her if she remembers. She'll say no. She remembers.

Mama says we land at about six in the evening on the 28th. She says don't come to the airport, it's too far and too busy and the taxis will be fine. I'm telling you that so you know where it is, Kai Tak, the arrivals hall. I'm not saying come. I'm just saying that's where it is.

How were the results? You don't get them until August, I know. But how do you feel?

Mrs. Szeto is giving me two weeks off. She was very cross about it. She said if I'm not back by the eleventh of July she'll give my job to the slow girl from the noodle place. There is no slow girl from the noodle place. She made her up. Uncle Szeto gave me a bag of something to give to Por Por. It's dried scallops, the expensive kind, from the shop that smells like Pei Ho Street. He said "For the gold tooth's corner." I asked him what that means. He said, "She'll know. Everybody who ate there knows."

I don't think Por Por will know. But I'm taking it.

Deepa says the weather in Hong Kong on July 1 will be rain. Heavy rain. She's been studying the maps at the library. She says it's monsoon season and there's a big trough coming. She's so pleased with herself. She told me to bring an umbrella "and not one of your stupid little folding ones." I'm bringing a big one.

Mango. Fish skin. Tell him I'm coming.

From Mandy, by the hand of Mandy.

---

**Diary. June 20, or June 21, it's after midnight**

I want to get everything down.

Baba drove me to Deepa's at six to take pictures. Deepa's whole family was in the living room, her parents and her aunt from Scarborough and Aachi in her cardigan and two little cousins, and they made us stand in front of the fireplace for about two hundred pictures. Deepa's dress is green and gold and her hair was up with jasmine flowers in it and the whole room smelled of jasmine, so sweet, like the white flowers on the bushes in Kowloon Park in summer. Aachi held my hand and looked at the cheongsam and said something in Tamil to Deepa, and Deepa said, "She says your mother has good taste," and I said, "My grandmother," and Deepa told her, and Aachi nodded and said something else, and Deepa laughed and wouldn't tell me what.

Elliot came at seven in his uncle's car with his uncle driving. He was wearing a suit, dark blue, a little big in the sleeves, and a tie he kept touching. When he saw me he stopped at the bottom of Deepa's steps.

"Whoa," he said.

That was it. That was the whole sentence. Deepa's mother laughed out loud.

The banquet hall was enormous and cold from the air conditioning, with chandeliers and a dance floor and round tables with white cloths, and a DJ who played everything too loud. It was the same kind of hall Chinese people get married in. Some of the kids were running around in the hallway taking off their shoes. Some of the boys were pretending not to want to dance and then dancing anyway, badly, in a circle, all at the same time.

I danced. I danced with Deepa and the girls first, in a group, kicking our shoes off under a table. Then a slow song came on and Elliot came over across the floor with his fists jammed in his jacket, then pulled one free and held it out, and I took it.

He was nervous. His hand was a bit sweaty. He didn't know where to put his other hand and put it on my back, by the frog buttons, very lightly, like the cloth was hot.

We didn't really dance. We sort of turned in a circle very slowly. I put my head on his shoulder because my neck was tired from looking up. He smelled of soap and his uncle's car.

"I'm gonna miss you," he said into my hair. "In July."

"It's only two weeks."

"I know. I'm still gonna."

Later we went outside to the parking lot because the hall was too loud. It was still light, almost nine o'clock, the long June light that goes on forever here, the sky turning a pale peach color at the bottom and a deep clean blue at the top. The air was warm and smelled of cut grass and car exhaust and someone's cigarette by the door. There were fireflies over the grass at the edge of the lot. I'd never seen fireflies. Tiny green lights going on and off, on and off, slow, floating, like someone was signaling.

We sat on the curb. My cheongsam was too tight to sit in properly so I sat sideways. He took off his tie.

"Will you write?" he said. "From there?"

"Yes."

"Real letters?"

"I only do real letters," I said.

He laughed. Then he kissed me.

It was very quick. It was a bit crooked. His nose bumped my cheek. Then he pulled back and looked at me like he was waiting to get told off.

"Okay?" he said.

"Okay," I said.

He kissed me again, less crooked.

Then Deepa came out the door with her shoes in her hand and said, "Oh my God, finally," and went back inside.

Now I'm home. Everyone's asleep. The cheongsam is on a hanger on the back of my door and it's glowing a little in the dark from the streetlight through the high window. I hung it carefully. Mama will check.

I'm writing it all down because I'm happy.

And because there's something else I need to put here, so it's somewhere true: when he asked if I would write real letters, the first thing I thought of, for half a second, before I answered, was square handwriting. Chinese characters down one page, English down the next. Brackets.

I don't know what that means. I'm not going to think about it now. I'm going to sleep. In a week I'll be in the air.

Aisle Seat

**Letter. On the plane, June 28, 1997**

Dear Baba and Kenny,

Mama has the window seat this time. She asked for it at the check-in and then she pretended she hadn't, she said, "Oh, they gave me the window," very surprised. So I'm on the aisle, with my knees in the way of the cart every time it comes past, and a lady across from me who has been eating dried squid out of a bag for six hours. The whole row smells of it.

Mama has had her forehead against the little window since Alaska. There's nothing out there but cloud.

Kenny, I didn't forget. Here is the plane report you asked for. The food: chicken or fish. I had chicken, it tasted like the box. There's a television screen on the wall at the front showing a map with a tiny plane on it, crawling across the ocean, so slow you can't see it move unless you look away and back. We passed over a place in Russia that had no towns on it at all, just a name. Mama slept for three hours with her mouth open. I didn't take a picture, because I'm nice.

Kenny, I didn't forget the other thing either. Baba's recorder is in my bag with four new cassettes, still in the plastic. I'm going to ask her for the whole thing, start to finish, all on one tape, so nobody has to put three tapes and a pile of Lok's notes together ever again. You can listen to it when you're old enough to sit still for two hours. So, never.

Baba, I put the tomato instructions on the fridge under the magnet of the moose. Water in the morning, not at night. Mr. Dunphy says if you water them at night they'll get a fungus. Don't let Kenny practice his slap shot near them.

I'll post this when we land.

Love,
Mandy

---

**Diary. June 28, night, the flat**

Everything at once. I'll try.

The landing. Lok told me about it in his letters, the planes coming in low over the roofs, but I'd never been inside one doing it, not that I remember. You come down over the sea and then the plane turns, hard, very low, right over the city, toward a hill with a big checkerboard painted on it, red and white, and then you're over the rooftops. Right over them. So close I could see the laundry. Shirts on bamboo poles. A woman on a roof in a blue nightdress hanging out sheets. Water tanks. A man sitting on a plastic chair on a roof, smoking, looking up at us. And air conditioners, thousands of them, stuck to the sides of the buildings like barnacles, dripping. Then the wheels hit and everyone clapped, and the lady with the squid said "Ha!" loudly to no one.

Mama held my hand during the turn. She held it so tight her ring hurt.

Then the door opened and the air came in.

I'd forgotten. I really had. I'd been in Canada for ten months and I had forgotten what this air is. It's not air. It's soup. Hot, wet, heavy, like walking into the bathroom after someone's had a hot shower with the door shut. It smells of kerosene from the planes, low tide, and something rotten-sweet, like fruit that's gone over, and it lies on your skin straight away so you're wet before you've walked ten steps. My hair went big. My clothes stuck to me. My glasses would have fogged, if I wore glasses. Mama peeled off her cardigan in the jet bridge, said "Oh," very quietly, and then, "Oh, I'd forgotten."

The arrivals hall was a crowd, a wall of people pressed against the barrier holding up signs with names on them, and people shouting, and drivers, and a man selling something on a tray, and the noise of it, a roar, like being inside a shell.

And Lok was there.

I didn't see him at first. I saw a sign. A piece of cardboard, the side of a box from a fish ball supplier, and on it in black marker in square handwriting, in English: "W. LAU and W. HO (H. W. L.)." And under it, in Chinese: "Leung Siu-fong's family." And holding it, a boy in a white school shirt that was too hot for him, sweating, with his hair sticking up, and new glasses. Thin black frames. Not an owl at all.

"I said not to come," Mama said.

"Mandy said that's where it is," Lok said to Mama, very politely. "So I thought I'd check."

Mama looked at me. I looked at the sign.

He's tall now. Taller than me by a whole head. When I left he was the boy on the stairs with his knees up. His voice was the same as on the tapes but it sounded strange coming out of an actual face, deeper, a little hoarse, and his English is very careful and a bit old-fashioned, like it's from a book, which it is. He shook Mama's hand. Then he shook mine. We shook hands. Like businessmen.

"Hello," he said.

"Hello," I said.

"You're shorter," he said.

"You're taller."

"That's how it works," he said, and took my suitcase, and wouldn't give it back.

The taxi was red with a silver top and the driver had the radio on a horse race and the air conditioning so cold the windows fogged on the outside. Kowloon went by. Neon coming on. Red and gold banners hanging down the sides of buildings, everywhere, for the first of July. Mr. Yip's big demand. Flags along the roads. Lanterns. Huge signs saying things I didn't read. Crowds. Steam coming off the stalls. Buses so full the people were pressed against the windows. I'd forgotten how many people. I'd forgotten that people live on top of each other here, in layers, forty floors, all with the lights on.

Lok sat in the front with the driver and talked about the horses. Mama and I sat in the back and didn't talk at all. Mama had the window again. She had her hand flat on the glass.

The taxi stopped at the corner of Pei Ho Street and I got out and the smell hit me. Dried shrimp. Hot oil. Durian from somewhere. Diesel. Wet cardboard. The drains. A fruit seller's jackfruit split open on a crate, yellow and sticky, with flies. I stood on the pavement with my eyes closed like I did the first time at Market Village, only the other way round.

And then there was the stall.

The tarpaulin was down over it on one side because of the heat, and the lights were on, the bare bulbs hanging on wires, and there were men on the stools eating noodles with their shirts unbuttoned, and steam, and the big kettle, and Uncle Fat cutting bread with the long knife, very fast, like he was angry at it. Exactly the same. And behind the stove, in her blue apron, with her back to us, frying something with the big ladle, Por Por.

I thought she wouldn't come out. I thought she'd do the eggs. I said that to myself on the plane. She won't come out. She'll do the eggs.

She came out.

She came round the side of the stove wiping her hands on her apron and she walked straight past Uncle Fat and straight past the men on the stools and stopped in front of us on the pavement. She looked at Mama. She looked at me. She looked up and down. Her face didn't do anything.

"You're fat," she said to me.

"I'm not fat."

"You're fat. Good. Canada feeds you." She looked at Mama. "You're thin. Canada doesn't feed you."

Mama started laughing. She laughed until she had to bend over with her hands on her knees, and somewhere in the laughing it turned into crying without stopping to change, and Por Por stood there and let her, and then Por Por took Mama's face in both hands, both hands, one of them with the scar, and held it, and said, "Stupid girl. Stupid girl. You came."

Then she let go and turned around and said, "Fat. Two milk teas," and went back behind the stove and started on the eggs.

---

**Diary. June 29, 4:50 a.m.**

I can't sleep. Jet lag. It's afternoon in Markham.

I'm sitting on the stairs between the third floor and the fourth. The light in the stairwell is on, the new bulb Lok said they put in, flickering a little. It smells of concrete and somebody's mothballs and the dog. Mango is asleep two steps down from me. He's brown and white and fat and has one ear that stands up. He didn't bark at me. He sniffed my hand for a long time and then lay down against my foot like I'd always been here.

Three steps from the top. This is where Lok sits. This is where Por Por slept three nights with Mama on her lap.

The wall is painted green halfway up and white above that, and the green is scuffed and chipped and someone has written a phone number on it in pencil. The steps are concrete with a strip of metal along each edge, worn smooth and shiny in the middle where everyone's feet go. It's hot even now. The walls are warm.

I'm sitting here with my back against the wall and my knees up. I'm trying to imagine it. Twenty-four. Wet trousers. A baby. No one.

I can't imagine it. I can only sit here.

Below me I can hear the street waking up. A shutter. A truck. Someone hosing down the pavement, the water slapping. And the stall: the gas going on with that hollow whoomp, and the kettle starting to tick as it heats, and a radio.

She's already down there.

---

**Diary. June 29, night**

I worked the stall today.

Por Por woke Mama at five by standing in the doorway and coughing on purpose, same as always. Mama put on her oldest T-shirt and went down without a word and Por Por handed her a pair of rubber gloves and pointed at the tubs. Two of them, plastic, red, on the ground by the drain. One soapy. One clean. And a stack of bowls. White with a blue edge.

Mama looked at the bowls. Then she looked at Por Por. Then she put the gloves on and sat down on a stool and started washing.

She washed bowls for nine hours. She didn't complain once. Her hair was wet with sweat and her T-shirt was soaked through and she didn't stop. Every time Por Por walked past she'd glance at the clean tub and say "Faster," or "That one's not clean," and Mama would say "It's clean," and Por Por would say "Do it again," and she'd do it again.

I did the tea.

Por Por put me behind the stove with the big kettle and the stocking and the cups and showed me once. Pour through the stocking into the pot. Pour from the pot back through the stocking, from high up, so it froths. Again, higher. Five times, six. Your arm burns. The tea goes dark brown, almost red, and smells bitter and smoky and sweet at the same time, like burnt sugar. The steam comes up in your face. Then evaporated milk from the can, a lot, and it goes the color of the hills at the top of Lok's map.

Lok was right. It's harder than physics.

The men from Apliu Street complained. One of them said, "Siu-fong, this tastes like a bus shelter in the rain," and Por Por said, "It's my granddaughter's, from Canada, drink it," and he drank it, and said, "Oh, from Canada," and drank it slower, and gave me a thumbs up.

At two o'clock, in the lull, I gave Por Por Uncle Szeto's bag of scallops and his paper.

She opened the paper and read the recipe. She held it far from her face, then close. She said, "Too much sugar." She said, "Lard, good." She said, "Who is this?"

I told her. The bakery. Uncle Szeto. The fish balls. "For the gold tooth's corner."

Por Por stopped. She held the paper very still.

"Kwan used to give an extra ball," she said slowly, "to the polite ones."

"He said that. He said if he said please."

She folded the recipe in four and slid it into her apron. She didn't say anything else about it. But all afternoon I saw her touch the pocket, like you touch your purse in a crowd.

At closing, while Uncle Fat chained the stools, I asked her. I had the recorder out on the counter already, between the sugar and the chili oil, with one of the new cassettes beside it. I'd written the label on the plane, on a strip of masking tape: "Leung Siu-fong speaking. The whole thing, from the beginning. Recorded with her permission."

Por Por picked up the cassette and held it far from her face, and then close, the way she'd held the recipe.

"After the first," she said.

"After the first of what?"

"July. Everybody is busy until the first of July. The whole city. Even me." She put the cassette down on the recorder, square, like a lid on a pot. "Put that away before it gets chili oil on it."

The First of July

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, June 30, 1997**

Dear Deepa,

You were right. I want that on paper so you can frame it.

It started raining at about ten this morning and it hasn't stopped. It's not Canadian rain. It's not even the rain I remember. It comes down like someone is emptying a bath over the city, straight down, so heavy you can't see across the street, and warm, warm as tea, and it bounces off the pavement knee-high. The gutters on Pei Ho Street are rivers. There's a man wading down the middle of the road with his trousers rolled up to his thighs, carrying a television on his head. Plastic bags float past. A sandal floated past. Mango stood at the edge of the pavement looking at the water with his one ear up, very offended, like it was personal.

Your umbrella advice: useless. Nothing helps. You're wet in two seconds no matter what. I gave up and walked to the market in my flip-flops with the rain hitting my head like small stones, and the aunties at the vegetable stalls laughed at me and called me "the Canadian," and one of them gave me a bag of lychees for free because she said I looked like a drowned cat and she felt sorry for me.

The weather's on every radio. Signal this and that. A trough, like you said. Tell Mr. K that you predicted a Hong Kong trough from a library in Markham. Tell him he owes you a pointer.

Love,
Mandy

---

**Diary. June 30, very late**

Por Por kept the stall open all night.

Everyone said she was crazy. Uncle Fat said she was crazy. The men from the electronics shops said she was crazy and then sat down on the stools and ordered noodles. The rain was coming down so hard on the tarpaulin it sounded like gravel being poured on a drum, a roar, so we had to shout to hear each other. Every half hour the tarpaulin filled with water in the middle and sagged down like a belly, lower and lower, and Lok had to stand on a stool and push it up from underneath with the handle of the broom so the water poured off the edge in one big sheet, whoosh, onto the pavement, and everybody cheered.

People kept coming in from the rain. Not just customers. Mr. Yip from the ribbon shop, with his whole family, his wife and his grandchildren and his old mother in a wheelchair, because their shutter was leaking. Lok's mother from Yu Chau Street, with a big plastic bag of buttons on her lap that she'd rescued from her stall, sorting them by color on the table while she ate. Mrs. Tse from next door to Por Por, who brought her own stool. The mooncake man, with a box of his terrible egg tarts, which he handed round, and which everybody ate, because it was that kind of night. People I didn't know. People with wet hair and wet shirts and plastic bags on their heads. The stools ran out. People sat on upturned crates and on the gas cylinder. The steam from the noodle pots went up into the light from the bare bulbs and hung there under the tarpaulin like a low ceiling, and everything smelled of wet clothes and hot soup and chili oil and rain.

Uncle Fat had the radio on, the little one on the shelf, turned up as loud as it would go, and you could just about hear it under the rain. At some point near midnight the radio voices got very formal and serious and everyone at the stall kind of stopped. Not all at once. Bit by bit. Spoons stopped. Mr. Yip's grandchildren stopped kicking each other. Lok's mother stopped sorting buttons, with a red one in her fingers.

The radio counted. The rain roared.

And then it was midnight, and it was the first of July, and it was still raining.

Uncle Fat looked at the radio. He said, "Well, that's that, then." Then he picked up his knife and started cutting bread for the morning.

Por Por said, "We open at five." She said it to nobody in particular. Then she said it to me. "Five. You're doing the tea."

Mr. Yip's old mother, in the wheelchair, who is ninety-one and almost never speaks, said very clearly, "I'd like more soup." And everybody laughed, and Por Por gave her more soup.

That's all. That's what happened at our stall. I'm writing it down exactly because I think people will ask me later, what was it like, the night of the handover, and I want to tell them the truth, which is that it was raining, and the tarpaulin kept filling up, and an old lady wanted more soup.

---

**Diary. July 1**

At nine this morning, after the rush, Mama said she wanted to go to the corner.

The rain had stopped for a bit. Everything was steaming. The streets were shining wet and the sky was low and white and the heat was coming back up off the pavement in waves, so the air smelled like a hot iron on a damp shirt. Puddles everywhere, with oil in them, rainbows.

Auntie Kwan's corner is a fruit stall now. A man with a big belly and a towel round his neck selling mangoes and lychees and dragon fruit and durian under a striped umbrella. There's no tap. There's a lamppost where Mama thinks the tap was, from the photo, and a drain grate in the pavement.

Mama stood on it. Right on the drain grate. She just stood there with her hands at her sides, looking at the fruit.

The fruit man said, "You want something?"

Mama said, "I'm just standing here. Is that all right?"

He shrugged. "Stand. It's free."

And then Por Por was there, next to her. I didn't hear her come. She'd taken her apron off. She was in her flowered blouse with the short sleeves, and her arms were brown and strong and wet from the tubs. At first she only stood there, next to Mama on the drain grate, both of them, shoulder to shoulder, the same height, the same way of standing with the weight on one hip.

I had my bag on my shoulder with the recorder in it. I put my hand in, very quietly, and found the buttons by feel. I don't know how she knew. She didn't turn around.

"Put that away," she said.

I took my hand out. She waited until she heard the zip. Then she pointed. "The tubs were there. Where the durian is. The bench was there, along the wall. You sat on the end, there, by the lamppost. The tap was here." She tapped the lamppost with one knuckle. "I washed you under it. You screamed. Kwan came out with a ladle."

Mama laughed, and wiped her face.

Por Por bought a bag of lychees from the fruit man. She paid him and then she gave him an extra coin and said, "For the corner." He looked at the coin. He looked at her. He said, "Okay, Auntie," and gave her two more lychees.

I stood a bit back, by the bus stop pole, so they could have it.

Lok was next to me. He'd come down from the stairs. He kept quiet too, standing there with his hands in his school trousers, his new glasses fogged from the heat.

"You should write it down," he said, eventually. Very quietly. "Who stood where."

"She wouldn't let me record it."

"She let you hear it," Lok said. "That's a different thing. Write that."

"I'm going to."

"I'll put it on the map," he said. "Tubs. Bench. Tap. Lamppost."

"And the drain," I said.

"And the drain," he said.

---

**Diary. July 1, night**

Por Por closed the stall.

At five in the afternoon. On a Tuesday. She pulled the tarpaulin down all the way and tied it, and put the hat on the gas cylinder, and wiped down the counter, and said, "Fat, go home." Uncle Fat stood there with the bread knife in his hand, horrified, like she'd told him she was going to the moon.

"You're closing?" he said.

"I'm closing."

"You haven't closed since your husband died."

"Then it's time," Por Por said. "Go home. See your wife. She's forgotten what you look like."

Lok said it's the first time in eight years. He said he can't remember the stall being closed at night ever, not once. Without it the corner looked wrong, like a face with its glasses off. The bare bulbs were dark on their wires. The stools were stacked and chained by the drain. Mango came and lay down in front of the tied tarpaulin and looked at us as if we'd done something unforgivable, and Mrs. Tse leaned out of her window above and asked if somebody had died, and Por Por shouted up, "Nobody died, I'm going out," and Mrs. Tse said, "Out where?" and Por Por didn't answer.

We went to Tsim Sha Tsui to see the fireworks. Mama, Por Por, me, Lok. Lok's mother wouldn't come, she said she'd seen fireworks. We took the train from Sham Shui Po, so crowded we couldn't move our arms. Por Por was pressed against a teenage boy with blue hair and she told him his hair was a disgrace and he said "Thank you, Auntie," and she said, "That's not a compliment," and he said, "I know, Auntie," and everyone in the carriage laughed.

The waterfront was more people than I've ever seen in one place in my life. More than New Year at Market Village times a thousand. Everyone with umbrellas, because it was raining again, not hard now, a soft warm drizzle, so the whole promenade was a field of umbrellas, all colors, touching edges, dripping on each other. It smelled of wet umbrellas and sweat and the sea and popcorn from somewhere and cigarettes.

Across the water, the island. All the buildings lit up. Every one. Red and gold and white, signs and lights running down the sides of the towers like water. The harbor was black and choppy and the lights lay on it in long shaking lines.

Then the fireworks.

They came up off barges in the harbor, with a thud you felt in your chest before you heard it, and then burst open over the water, huge, gold and red and green and white, and the reflection burst open under them in the water at the same time, so it was two sets of fireworks, one up, one down, and the rain made the light fuzzy, like looking through a wet window. Every time one burst the whole crowd went "Ooh," together, a hundred thousand people at the same time. The smoke drifted over us, smelling like Kenny's cap guns.

I looked at Por Por.

She wasn't watching the fireworks. She was looking at the lights on the island. The buildings. Just looking.

Mama saw too. Mama took her hand. Her left hand, with the scar.

"Like from the hill," Mama said.

Por Por shook her head. "No. More. Much more." Then she said, "And these move." She meant the lights on the boats on the water, going back and forth, and the cars on the island roads, and the fireworks. She said, "These move. The ones from the hill didn't move."

She held on to Mama's hand. She didn't let go for the rest of the fireworks. I'd never seen her hold anyone's hand that long. Not even mine, crossing Cheung Sha Wan Road.

Lok and I were standing behind them, under the same umbrella, his, because mine was broken from yesterday. It's a small umbrella. Our shoulders were wet.

"I have to tell you something," I said, while a big gold one went off.

"About the boy in Canada," he said.

I turned so fast the umbrella tipped and dumped water down my back. "Who told you there was a boy in Canada?"

"Your handwriting got rounder," he said. "She told me. In February. She said to watch for it."

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

"It's okay," he said. He was looking at the harbor, not at me. "You have a boy in Canada. That's okay."

"That's not what I was going to tell you."

"No?"

"I was going to tell you that I read the brackets first," I said. "Every letter. Before her part. I always read the brackets first. I just wanted you to know that."

He watched the water. A green one went off and lit up his glasses, and then a red one. Then he said, "Okay." And then, "I'll keep doing them."

"Good."

"Even after," he said. "Even if she stops."

"She won't stop."

"No," he agreed. "She won't."

The Sling

**Diary. July 4, the flat**

Today Por Por opened the bottom drawer.

It was after the lunch rush, the hottest part of the afternoon, when the whole flat shimmers and the fan just stirs the heat around like soup in a pot. Mama and I were lying on the bamboo mat because the floor is the coolest place, with wet towels on our necks, and Por Por came up the stairs, which she never does in the day, and walked past us into her bedroom. We heard the wardrobe. The sticky drawer at the bottom that you have to pull with both hands and jiggle.

She came out with a parcel of newspaper, tied with red plastic string, and sat down on Gung Gung's chair by the window and untied it. The newspaper was yellow and soft as cloth. I could read the date on the corner. August 1971. The month they moved into this flat.

Inside was the sling.

It's not red any more. It's a pale dusty pink, like the inside of a shell, darker in the folds where the light didn't reach. If you hold it to the window you can see the lotus flowers, a ghost of them. And the stitches. Small and tight and doubled along every edge, so close you couldn't put a pin between them. Thirty-five years and not one has broken.

"You can touch it," Por Por said to Mama. "It's not a museum."

Mama touched it with her fingertips. Then she held it against her face and breathed in.

"It smells of newspaper," she said.

"Of course it smells of newspaper. What did you think it would smell of? You?"

Mama laughed and cried at once, which she's been doing all week. Por Por says it's the heat.

Then Por Por disappeared into the kitchen and returned hugging a five-kilo bag of rice from the shop downstairs. "Stand up," she said to me. "Turn around."

She put the rice in the sling against my back and crossed the straps over my chest and tied them at the front in a flat double knot, very fast, without looking. The rice was heavy and warm from the shop.

"Walk," she said.

I walked to the window and back.

"Your mother was lighter than that," Por Por said. "That's all I wanted to show you."

She untied me, the knot just fell apart in her hand, and folded the sling and gave it to Mama. "It goes to Canada," she said. "The sling goes. The stall stays. I stay."

Mama didn't ask the question she's been asking on the phone since 1995. She said, "I know, Ma."

---

**Diary. July 6**

Tonight we unrolled the timeline in the flat. It doesn't fit, so we did it in halves, from the window to the door. Lok sat in the doorway because the gate was open for the breeze. Mango lay on Markham.

Por Por got down on her knees and read all of it with her finger under each line, the Chinese Mama wrote under the English. She didn't say a word until the end.

I had the red pen ready. I'd brought it from Markham specially, a good one, so she could fix what we got wrong. I held it out.

She didn't take it.

"Who is this for?" she said.

"For us," Mama said. "For the wall in the basement. For Kenny, when he asks. For his children."

"For the wall."

"So people can see it."

"Which people?"

Mama didn't have an answer for that. Por Por got up with her hand on her knee and fetched the big scissors from the kitchen, the ones she uses on the string around the dried fish. She knelt at Sha Lan.

"Ma," Mama said.

Por Por cut. Straight across, just after "the house with the door left open." Then she shuffled along on her knees, past the hills and the ditch and the farm woman and the bus, past the stairs and Kwan's corner and the truck and the swim, and cut again, just before "Por Por and Gung Gung's own stall, 1968." The paper was thick. The scissors crunched through it like someone stepping on a dry leaf, twice.

She rolled the piece up, marker side in, and tied it with the red plastic string.

"This part stays here," she said.

"You told us," Mama said. Her voice went high and cracked down the middle. "Three tapes. You told Mandy, you told me. It's ours now too."

"I told you. I told her. I didn't tell a wall in Markham."

"It's my life. I was on your back."

"You were on my back," Por Por agreed. "You were asleep."

Mama went out through the gate and down the stairs, and we heard her flip-flops slap all the way to the street. Por Por took the roll into the bedroom. The drawer jiggled and shut. Then she went down too, to start the rice.

So it was me and Lok and Mango, and two pieces of timeline on the floor with a gap between them as long as my arm.

"I could draw it again," I said. "I remember every line."

"You could," Lok said.

"I'm not going to."

"No," he said.

He ran down to the dried-goods shop and brought up a length of the thin brown paper they wrap shrimp in, and the tape from the stall drawer, the drawer he isn't allowed to touch. He said it was an emergency. We joined the two ends to the new piece. It smells of shrimp. It always will.

Mama came back up at ten with her face washed. She stood over the blank part with her arms folded. Then she uncapped the marker and wrote "1962" at the top of it, small, and nothing else.

"Just one word?" I said. "Just 'walked'?"

"She wants it empty," Mama said. "So it's empty." She capped the marker. "I'm still angry." And she went to bed in her clothes.

---

**Diary. July 9, after closing**

I asked again. It's the ninth. After the first, she said.

The street was nearly empty. Shutters down all along Pei Ho Street, the last hawker pushing his cart home with one wheel squeaking, a smell of hot drains and burnt sugar coming up off the pavement where the day's heat was still trying to get out. The bulbs were off except the one over the stove. Moths were going round it in a fat gray cloud. I'd brought the fan down from the flat, because she likes the clicking, and it clicked on the left turn and blew the moths sideways.

The recorder was on the counter, the labeled cassette on top of it. Lok was on his stool. Mama was at the tubs with her gloves off, and Mango was under the bench where he isn't allowed.

Por Por looked at the label for a long time.

"No," she said.

"You said after the first."

"I said after the first I'd tell you. I'm telling you."

I argued. I'm not proud of all of it. I said Kenny. I said his children. I said three tapes and a pile of order pads get lost, things get lost, look at Sang's pot.

"The pot was sold," she said. "Not lost. Sang knows exactly where it went."

Then she put her elbows on the counter.

"I told it three times," she said. "Each time it came out different. The first time I said two nights. The second time I said three days. Which is true?"

"Both?"

"Both. Now you want a fourth one, from the beginning, tidy, on one tape. That one wins. Everybody plays that one. And then the other three are wrong. And I'm wrong, the one who was there." She tapped the cassette. "I gave your mother a train. A clean, tidy thing, so she could carry it. I'm not giving you another tidy thing."

"It wouldn't be a train. It would be true."

"It would be a tape," Por Por said.

Mama, at the tubs, didn't say anything. She was drying a bowl that was already dry.

"There are parts you left out," I said. "I can tell. The door. The sewing machine woman. What you did at night, the twenty-two days."

"Yes."

"Will you ever..."

"No." She wiped the counter in one long stroke, the whole length. "Some of it I don't remember. Some I do. You won't know which. That's mine." Then: "The tapes I sent are for you and your mother. Not the boy in Canada. Not a school. Tell the boy we walked. That's enough for a boy."

She unplugged the fan.

When I put the recorder away I peeled the masking tape off the cassette and put on a fresh strip. I didn't write anything on it.

---

**Diary. July 10, the stairs, late**

The light in the stairwell is flickering again. The concrete is still warm from the day, and somebody on the fourth floor is frying garlic at midnight, which in this building nobody would ever complain about. I borrowed a pencil from Lok. It's a short yellow one, chewed at the end. I'm not asking whose teeth.

These are guesses. Mine. Pencil, so they can be wrong.

The door. I think she went back and shut it in her head every night for a year.

The sewing machine woman. I think Por Por saw her at the stream. I think that's why she looked at every sewing machine in Sham Shui Po, not to find her, to find out she'd been wrong.

The twenty-two days. I think on Kwan's floor, by the charcoal, she decided what she would do if he didn't come. I think she'd decided by the tenth night.

The license. Kwan knew somebody. I'm not guessing who.

The stairs. She said she bought the flat so she could walk past them every day. I believe her. I also think she wanted to live on top of the place where she'd been nobody, and be somebody there.

Lok is two steps down, doing nothing, which is all he does since exams. I told him what I was writing.

"Pencil," he said.

"I know."

---

**Letter. On the plane, July 11, 1997, window seat**

Dear Por Por,

You came to the airport. You stood at the barrier with your arms crossed and told Mama the sling must not go in the washing machine, and told me to keep writing what things smell like, and then you turned around and walked away fast through the crowd. You didn't say anything about the tape. Neither did I.

Here's what the plane smells like: dried squid, the same lady, I swear. Coffee. The plastic of the window. And my hands, which still smell of the morning tea, the bitter smoky part. I washed them four times at the airport and it hasn't come out. I hope it doesn't.

We went up over the harbor and turned, and I looked for our building. I think I found it. I'll never know.

In my bag: the sling in its newspaper, on Mama's lap, she won't let it go overhead. The three old tapes, which nobody else will hear. Four new cassettes, still in the plastic, and one with a blank label. The timeline, with the shrimp paper in the middle. Lok's map. Uncle Szeto's recipe, with your "less sugar." And my pencil page, which I'm putting in with this letter. Lok, read it to her if she lets you. If she doesn't, don't.

Mama held the sling through the turn over the harbor. She said, "She gave me the sling and kept the walk." Then she said, "That's probably fair. I'll decide in Markham."

Love,
Mandy

---

**Letter. Sham Shui Po, August 14, 1997**

Dear Mandy,

[Results came. Physics: passed. Not well. The technical institute says yes. I start in September. I'm going to learn engines.]

[I read her your pencil page. All of it. She listened while she did the garlic, thumbnail, very fast. When I finished she didn't look up. Here is what she said.]

"Some are right. Some are wrong. I'm not telling you which. Don't send me any more. And don't rub them out.

"The bamboo is alive. The stall is fine. Fat thinks he runs it now.

"Tell your mother the sling is not for hanging on the wall. I know she's hung it. Fine. Put a name on it.

"Write about the snow again when it comes."

[That's all. Then she asked me how you spell Markham. I wrote it on an order pad. She copied it four times, pressing hard, until it was straight.]

[Look at the front of this envelope, under your street. That's her.]