The Coaching Papers

The Seven-Ten Boat

San Francisco, March 1975

Lisa had set up her copy stand on the dining table, between the fruit bowl and the radiator, and the radiator was winning. It knocked every few minutes like someone at the wrong door. The camera sat on its arm above a square of black velvet, and two gooseneck lamps leaned in over the velvet like neighbors at a fence.

"Auntie Mei, this one is upside down," Lisa said. "Or the man in it was standing on his head."

"That's your great-great-uncle Wing. He was not standing on his head. He was sitting on a pear crate, and the crate is upside down because he turned it over to sit on it." Mei took the photograph and righted it. A man in a vest and shirtsleeves, squinting, a cigarette held well away from the lens so it wouldn't show, which of course meant it showed more. Behind him, a wooden balcony and a second-story door painted some color the photograph had turned to gravy. "Locke. Main Street. Summer of 1925. Write that down."

Lisa wrote it on a strip of paper and laid the strip under the photograph, and then she took the picture of both together, because that was her system. Every page and every print got its own frame with its own label in the frame, so that the copy could never be separated from the words that said what it was. She had explained the system twice. Mei liked it more than she had admitted.

The flat smelled of the oolong in Mei's cup and the dry, hat-lining smell of the old boxes. Out the window, Sacramento Street went downhill toward the bay, and the foghorns were starting up one after another out by the Gate, low and patient.

"Who's this?" Lisa held up a page, not a photograph. A sheet of thin, yellowed paper with columns of brush characters running top to bottom, and in the margins, small drawings: rows of squares, a circle with a cross in it, a little tower.

Mei put her cup down.

"Where did you find that?"

"Inside that old green book cover. With your teaching certificate." Lisa turned it toward the lamp. "Is it a map?"

"It's a village," Mei said. "Two villages, actually. Put it on the velvet. Don't write anything under it yet."

Lisa looked at her. She was twenty-four, she worked at the public library on Larkin Street, and she had her grandfather's way of waiting, which was annoying, because it worked.

"I'll tell you," Mei said. "Not because you're waiting like that. Because it's time somebody wrote the right words under it."

---

San Francisco, July 1925

The ferry to Angel Island left the pier at the foot of Clay Street at seven-ten, and Mei Chan had never once caught it without running.

This morning she ran the last block with her hat in one hand and her lunch in the other, past the crates of lettuce stacked outside the commission houses, past a man hosing fish scales off the planks into the gutter, past a newsboy who knew her by now and yelled "Run, Miss Interpreter," which did not help. The gangway was halfway up. The deckhand, a Swede named Olsen with arms like stovepipes, sighed and let it back down.

"Every day," he said.

"Not Sundays."

"Every day the boat runs." He took her lunch from her so she could get her hat on. It was wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, and it smelled of the roast pork her mother had sliced at five that morning, sweet and smoky, the fat gone glassy where the honey had lacquered it. Olsen sniffed it frankly and said it smelled like Christmas in a smokehouse.

The ferry pulled out with a long shudder and a smell of hot oil from the engine room. Within five minutes the city was gone behind them, and the boat went nose first into the July fog. Mei stood at the rail on the lee side, where the wind wasn't, and felt the air go cold and then wet on her cheeks. Her wool coat took on a fine silver fuzz of droplets. Somewhere off to the right, the bell on Alcatraz rang, two strokes, a pause, two strokes, and from farther off the deeper horn at Lime Point answered. There were usually a dozen people on the seven-ten: inspectors, stenographers, the cook's helper with sacks of onions, the Public Health doctor on hospital days. And Mr. Louie, who was always already on board when Mei arrived, sitting inside by the window with the paper folded into a long narrow strip so he could read it with one hand.

She went in to him when she was dry enough. The cabin smelled of wet wool and pipe smoke and the coffee the purser sold out of an urn for a nickel.

"You ran," Mr. Louie said, not looking up.

"How can you tell?"

"Your hat is on crooked and you have your mother's lunch in a stranger's hand." He tipped his head. Olsen was coming in behind her with the newspaper parcel held up like a lantern.

Mr. Louie Tak-On was the senior Chinese interpreter at the station, fifty-four years old, born in Sacramento, a widower, very thin, very neat, with a gray mustache he trimmed so evenly that Mei suspected him of using a ruler. He had been interpreting on the island since it opened in 1910, and he had a reputation for catching lies that he did nothing to discourage. On her first day, nine months ago, he had told her three things. Never eat lunch with detainees' relatives. Never accept so much as a cigarette from anyone with a case. Never, ever, change a word.

"Not even to be kind?" she had asked.

"Especially not to be kind. Kind is the inspector's business. Your business is the words."

She had written it in the front of her notebook.

"What do we have today?" she asked him now.

"Board in Room Four. Two cases in the morning. A merchant's wife, which is mine, and a son of a native, which is yours."

"Mine?"

He handed her a slip of paper, the kind the clerk sent down with the day's list. *Fong Yik-Chuen. Alleged son of Fong Bing, native-born, residing at Locke, Sacramento County. Arrived SS President Pierce, 2 July. Board convenes 9:30. Inspector Brandt, Inspector Coyle, Miss Pell.*

"Locke," Mei said.

"You know it?"

"My uncle has a store there."

Mr. Louie folded his paper one fold narrower. "Everyone has an uncle with a store somewhere," he said. "If we disqualified ourselves for uncles, the inspectors would have to learn Toishanese."

She laughed, and he allowed himself the small dry hum through his nose that was the whole of his laughing.

---

Angel Island came out of the fog all at once, the way it always did. One moment the boat was nosing through gray nothing, and the next there was a hillside of dark wet eucalyptus and oak above them, and the white buildings of the station laid out along the shore of China Cove: the long administration building with its covered porch, the hospital up the slope, the power house with its stack, and above them all, set back against the hill, the detention barracks, two stories of wooden siding and wire-covered windows. Smoke went up from the kitchen chimney and lay down flat in the damp.

The wharf smelled of creosote, kelp and black low-tide mud. Room Four was on the second floor, at the end of a corridor painted a green that had been chosen, Mei believed, because nobody could possibly have an opinion about it. A long table, four chairs on one side, one on the other, a window with the fog pressing white against the glass, an ashtray already used. The stenographer's typewriter at the end of the table, under its cloth cover, like a bird put to sleep.

Miss Doris Pell took the cover off with the air of a woman uncovering a cake she was proud of. She was forty, a widow from Oakland, with red hands and a beautiful, fast, slightly loud touch on the keys. She and Mei were the only women on the board floor.

"Coffee's terrible," Doris said, by way of good morning. "Coyle made it. Like he boiled his socks in it and then took out only some of the socks."

Inspector Coyle came in, round and freckled, sleeves already rolled, and then Inspector Harold Brandt, who never rolled his sleeves. Brandt was tall and gray at the temples, a former schoolteacher from Fresno. He had a reputation among the interpreters as fair, slow and nearly impossible to satisfy. He liked a case to be clean.

"Miss Chan." He nodded. "You've read the file?"

"Only the slip, sir."

He passed it across. She opened it.

The applicant was nineteen, by the Chinese count twenty. His alleged father, Fong Bing, born in San Francisco in 1880, had been to China three times, in 1901, 1903 and 1905, and on each return had testified to the birth of a son in his village. Three sons on paper. The first had come over in 1921 and was working in a cannery in Alaska. The second had come in 1923 and been landed. This was the third. There was a photograph of the boy pinned to the inside of the cover: a narrow face, cropped hair, a high-collared jacket buttoned to the throat, and the kind of look a person gets when he has been told not to blink.

There was also a page of the father's earlier testimony from 1906. Mei read it quickly. Village of Sha Kong, Toishan district. Five rows of houses. The family house in the third row, second from the head. A fishpond in front, a bamboo grove behind. A watchtower at the east end of the village, three stories, with a clock.

"With a clock," she said aloud, without meaning to.

"Hm?" Brandt said.

"Nothing, sir. Many of the villages there have towers now. Men send money home and the families build them. For bandits. I didn't know some had clocks."

"Some have everything," Coyle said. "Bring him in, Ed."

The guard brought him in.

He was smaller than the photograph. He had been on the island a little over three weeks, and he had the look the young men got after three weeks, a grayness, as if the fog had seeped into him through the walls. His jacket was the one in the photograph. It had been washed, and the cuffs had been mended with thread a shade too dark. His shoes were new and he was not used to them. He sat where the guard pointed and set his palms on his knees and looked at the table, and then up at Mei, and then quickly at the table again.

She knew that look too. A Chinese face. A girl. What does that mean?

"Tell him," Brandt said, "that he is before a Board of Special Inquiry to determine his right to enter the United States, that he will be asked questions which he must answer truthfully, and that his answers will be taken down and may be compared with the testimony of others."

Mei told him in the village Toishanese of her mother's kitchen. She was careful to say *compared*, the plain word, not anything that would soften it.

He listened tilted a little toward her, like someone afraid of missing a word. When she finished he nodded once.

"Understood," he said.

"Name?"

"Fong Yik-Chuen."

"Any other name?"

"Milk name, Ah Chuen."

"Age?"

"Twenty, by our count. Nineteen by yours."

"Where born?"

"Sha Kong village, Toishan district, Kwangtung."

Doris's keys clattered. The radiator ticked. Outside, the fog bell on Point Blunt rang its single stroke.

It went on like that for an hour and forty minutes, the questions climbing from the plain ones to the strange ones. How many rows of houses in your village? Five. How many houses in your row? Seven. Who lives in the house at the head of the row? Fong Sing, a farmer, with his wife and two daughters. What is in front of your house? A fishpond. How big? Big enough that a man can throw a stone across it but not a boy. Which way does your house face? South, a little east. Is there a clock in your house? No. Is there a clock anywhere in your village? Yes, in the tower. What kind? A round clock with a white face, on the east side of the tower, below the top window.

"Does it keep time?" Coyle asked, idly, ticking something in the margin.

Mei put it into Toishanese.

The boy answered without the smallest pause, as smoothly as if he were reading it off the wall behind her head.

"No. It stopped at twenty past four in the big wind, years ago, and nobody has fixed it. People say it stopped at the hour the tax collector came."

Mei heard herself put it into English. Her voice did not change. Her voice, she had trained over nine months, did not change for anything. But her pencil, which she kept on her own notebook, had stopped moving, and she had to make it move again.

*The hour the tax collector came.*

She had heard that joke before. She had heard it at New Year, at a long table in a back room in Locke, over the clack of mahjong tiles and the smell of roast pork and rice wine, in her uncle Wing's voice, with her uncle Wing's laugh after it. She had been fifteen. He had said it about a different village, his own village, Ngau Tau. Or she had thought he had.

Coyle laughed. "That's good. I like that. Put that in, Doris."

"I put everything in," Doris said.

Brandt did not laugh. His eyes were on the boy, and then at the open file, and then at the 1906 testimony of the father, and he was turning his pen end over end between two fingers, slowly, the way he did when a case was going well, and he did not trust it.

Too Clean

At eleven-forty Brandt called a recess, and the guard took the boy back up the covered stairway to the barracks. He went without looking back. His new shoes squeaked on the boards all the way to the turn.

Coyle stretched until his chair complained. "Well, that's the best one I've had since Easter," he said. "He's got the pond, he's got the bamboo, he's got the lady with the goiter in the fourth house. I'd land him this afternoon if the father matches."

"The father isn't here yet," Brandt said.

"He's coming down Thursday. I wired Sacramento myself." Coyle looked over at Doris. "How many pages?"

"Thirty-one," Doris said, flexing her red fingers. "And not one 'I don't remember.' I'm going to miss them. They give my hands a rest."

Brandt had the 1906 testimony open beside the morning's transcript, and he was running his pen down both at once, the way a man checks a column of figures against a receipt. Mei sat with her notebook closed. Her job in a recess was to be furniture. She had learned that in her first week, when she had offered an opinion about a woman's accent and Brandt had looked at her as if the water pitcher had spoken.

But today he looked up at her.

"Miss Chan. How many months have you been on the island?"

"Nine months, sir."

"And in nine months, how many applicants have answered every question about their own house without a single hesitation?"

She thought. "I don't know, sir. I don't count."

"I count." He closed the file. "None. Not one. People don't know their own houses that well. Ask Mr. Coyle how many windows are in his kitchen."

"Two," said Coyle. "Three. Is the one over the sink a window, or is it a door with glass in it?"

"There," Brandt said. "That's a real son. A real son says three and then says two and then argues with his wife about it." He tapped the transcript. "This one answers like a boy saying his catechism. Like he learned it from a page."

Coyle shrugged. "Or like he's a bright kid with nothing to do for three weeks but lie on a bunk and think about home."

"Possibly." Brandt stood and put on his jacket. "Miss Chan, you'll take him again Thursday, with the father. I want the same interpreter on both, so that nobody can say a question was asked differently."

"Yes, sir."

"And the clock," he said at the door, as though the thought were new, though Mei did not believe anything just occurred to Brandt. "Twenty past four. The tax collector. That's a nice story. Nice stories are generally told more than once. I'd like to know who told it first."

---

The interpreters' room was a narrow space at the back of the second floor that had been a linen closet before anybody thought interpreters needed a room. It had one window, which faced the hill, a table with a burn mark in the shape of Ohio, two chairs, and a hot plate on which Mr. Louie made his own tea because he would not drink what the kitchen called tea. When Mei came in he was pouring. The room smelled of the leaves opening in hot water, a toasted, nutty smell that she always thought of as his.

"Sit," he said. "Mine took nine minutes. The woman says she was married in the third month. The husband says the fourth. Somebody is going to have to go to Fresno." He pushed a cup to her. "Yours?"

"Too clean, Brandt says."

"Brandt always says that when a case is clean." He sipped. "He's usually right. That's the irritating thing about him."

She held her cup and let it warm her hands. Out the window the fog had thinned, and she could see the wet trunks of the eucalyptus going up the hill, the bark hanging off them in long peeled strips like old wallpaper, and a gray squirrel going round and round one trunk as if looking for the way in.

"Mr. Louie. Have you ever heard of a clock that stopped at twenty past four?"

He considered her over the rim of the cup.

"In Sha Kong village," she added.

"I've heard of a great many clocks," he said. "The young men are very fond of clocks. They put them in their testimony the way you put a raisin in a bun. It gives the inspector something to bite on." He set the cup down. "Why?"

"No reason. The joke about the tax collector. I've heard it before, that's all."

"Where?"

There it was. She had walked into it like a door in the dark. Mr. Louie did not move, did not raise his eyebrows, did not do anything but wait, and the waiting was worse than a question.

"At New Year," she said. "Years ago. People tell the same jokes."

"They do," he agreed. "In every village there is a clock, and in every village it stopped at the hour of the tax collector, and in every village the man who tells it thinks he made it up." He picked up his cup again. "Thursday?"

"Thursday."

"Then you have two days to stop thinking about it," he said. "I recommend it. Thinking is very bad for the voice. It makes the voice careful, and the inspectors can hear careful. They are not intelligent men, most of them, but they are not deaf."

---

The afternoon boat was the four-forty, and it was warm by then, as warm as the bay got in July, which meant that Mei could stand on the open deck without her coat. The fog had lifted off the water and gone up to sit on the tops of the hills like a lid left half on a pot. Behind them, the island turned from green to blue to gray. Ahead, the city came up white and crowded on its hills, every window on the slopes of Telegraph flashing in the low sun.

She did not think about it. She thought about the gulls, who followed the boat in hope of the cook's helper, who sometimes threw them bread. She thought about the man at the rail beside her eating a peach so ripe that the juice ran down his wrist into his cuff and he did not care. She thought about the smell of the city coming out to meet them, coal smoke and coffee roasting on the waterfront and, under it, the fish and the tide.

She did not think about her uncle Wing, at the long table in the back room of his store, the tiles clacking under his big square hands, saying, *And the clock in the tower stopped at twenty past four, and do you know why? Because that is the hour the tax collector came, and even the clock knew to stop breathing.*

She had laughed so hard at fifteen that rice wine had come out of her nose, and Uncle Wing had laughed harder at that than at his own joke, and her mother had said she would never take her to Locke again, and had taken her every New Year after that.

---

Chinatown at six o'clock was the loudest place Mei knew. The produce men on Stockton were washing down their sidewalks, and the water ran green with lettuce leaves into the gutters. The fish stalls were shutting up, the men throwing the last ice into the street, where it smoked and slid. From the upstairs windows came the radio of somebody who had a radio, and somebody else's phonograph playing a Cantonese opera, a woman's voice going up and up in a thin bright line over the clang of a gong, and from the lane off Washington the steady crack and rattle of a mahjong game that had probably been going since lunch. A man was selling hot chestnuts from a drum on the corner of Jackson. The bakery on Grant was putting its last trays of egg tarts in the window, and the smell of browned butter and sugar came out into the street and stopped people like a hand on the arm.

Mei and her mother lived above a sewing shop on Waverly Place, two rooms and a kitchen at the back that looked onto a lightwell. The sewing shop was her mother's. Six women worked there in the daytime, at six machines, making shirts and work trousers for a wholesaler on Market Street, and in the evenings her mother stayed down there alone and did the finishing by hand, the buttonholes and the hems, because she said the other women did buttonholes the way a cat does arithmetic.

She was down there now. Mei could hear the treadle going as she came up the stairs.

"Ma."

"You're late."

"The boat's always at four-forty, Ma. I'm always home at six."

"Then you're always late." Her mother didn't look up from the machine. Chan Lai-Fong was forty-seven, small, square-shouldered, with her hair pulled back so tight that it seemed to hold her face in place. Her feet worked the treadle in a rhythm so steady it was like a pulse. Bolts of blue denim and gray drill were stacked to the ceiling around her, and the air was heavy with sizing and machine oil and the warm, dusty smell of cloth being pushed through a needle. "There's rice. There's the rest of the pork. There's choy in the pot, it only wants heating."

"Ma, come up and sit."

"After the buttonholes."

Mei went up and heated the choy, and garlic and greens steamed up the kitchen, and the lightwell brought in every voice from every kitchen in the building. Mrs. Jue on the third floor was scolding her son about the price of shoes. Somebody below was frying fish. Somebody above was practicing the two-string fiddle, the same five notes again and again, so badly that it was almost a kind of song.

She brought two bowls down and put one on the cutting table beside her mother's elbow, and her mother sighed and stopped the treadle and ate standing up, because she said that if she sat down after nine o'clock in the morning she would never get up again.

"How was the island?"

"Fine. Foggy."

"Is it ever not foggy?"

"In September."

Her mother ate. Mei ate. The machines stood in their rows with their covers on, like horses asleep in a stable.

"Ma. Sha Kong village. Do you know it?"

Her mother's chopsticks did not stop, but they slowed.

"It's next to your father's village. Across the ponds. Why?"

"I had a boy today who says he's from there."

"Lots of boys say they're from places."

"He said there was a clock in the tower that stopped at twenty past four."

Her mother laughed. It surprised Mei. It was a short, real laugh, almost a snort. "That clock," she said. "That's Wing's clock. He tells that about the tower every New Year since before you were born. The tower's in Sha Kong but you can see it from Ngau Tau, right over the ponds. Your father used to say the Fong people built it and the Chan people looked at it for free." She picked a sliver of garlic off her rice. "Your uncle steals jokes the way a crow steals laundry. Probably everybody in both villages says it."

"Probably," Mei said.

"Why, does it matter?"

"No."

Her mother looked at her, the long flat look of a woman who had been looking at seams for thirty years and could see a crooked one from across a room.

"Write the names for me tonight," she said finally. "In the album. I got the prints back from the photographer's, the ones from your cousin's wedding. I don't know who half those people are in English and your Auntie Kam wants copies. Put the English under the Chinese. Both names. Neat."

"Yes, Ma."

"Neat," her mother said again, and put her bowl down and started the treadle, and the sound filled the shop and went up the stairs ahead of Mei like someone running.

---

She did the album at the kitchen table, under the lamp, while the lightwell went quiet one kitchen at a time. Twenty prints, stiff and glossy and curling at the corners. Her cousin Rose in her wedding coat, red with gold thread, looking terrified. Rose's new husband looking more terrified. Aunties in rows. Uncles in a worse row. A small boy who had clearly just been slapped.

Under each print her mother had already written the Chinese names in her small upright brush hand. Mei wrote the English underneath in pencil, carefully, the way her mother liked, so the letters would sit under the characters like a second floor under the first. *Chan Kam-Ying, Auntie Kam. Chan Wing, Uncle Wing. Lee Rose Chan.*

Uncle Wing was in the last print, standing at the edge of the wedding party with his hat pushed back, looking past the photographer at something to one side, probably food. He had a laugh on his face that he hadn't quite let out yet. She wrote his name under him and then sat a long while over it, the two names stacked one on the other, her mother's brush strokes and her own pencil, while above her the fiddle player went through his five notes one more time and, for once, got all five right.

The Walls Upstairs

On Wednesday the men's barracks complained about the fish.

The complaint came down in the morning as a sheet of red paper folded in four, carried by a guard who carried it at arm's length like a hot dish. It was addressed, in very fine brush, to the Commissioner of Immigration, the Superintendent of the Station, the Steward of the Kitchen, and the Esteemed Interpreters, and it said, at considerable length and with several references to the dignity of persons, that the salt fish served on Monday and Tuesday had been spoiled, that the rice was cooked with too much water and was more like jook than rice, and that the men of the upper floor respectfully wished to know whether the Steward of the Kitchen had ever eaten fish himself, and if so, where.

"I'm not translating the last part," Mr. Louie said, reading it at the hot plate. "I'm going to say it says 'and other concerns.'"

"You said never change a word."

"In the boards. This is the kitchen." He handed it back. "I have the merchant's wife's husband again at ten, from Fresno, who is going to tell us that they were married in the third month and the fourth month both, because there were two ceremonies. Will you go up with Hoyt?"

Mr. Hoyt was the steward, a large pink man from Vallejo who sweated even in the fog. He was waiting for Mei at the foot of the covered stairway with a guard named Petrakis and an expression of deep injury.

"That fish was fresh Tuesday," he said. "Fresh Monday, I'll give you. Tuesday it was absolutely fresh."

"I'll tell them," Mei said.

"Tell them it came from the same place it always comes from."

"I'll tell them that too."

They went up. The covered stairway climbed the slope from the administration building to the barracks, a long wooden passage with a tin roof and wire-mesh windows, and the fog came in through the mesh and beaded on the handrail so that her glove came away wet. At the top Petrakis unlocked a door, and then another door, and then they were in.

She had been in the women's quarters before, many times, to interpret for the matron. She had never been up here.

The first thing was the smell. Two hundred men in a wooden building in a wet climate: tobacco and sweat and damp wool, the camphor of somebody's medicine, hair oil, the sour tang of washing that had never quite dried. Lines were strung from post to post across the long room and hung with shirts and undershirts and long cotton trousers, gray and white and faded blue, so that crossing the room meant ducking under a low cloud of cotton. The bunks went up in tiers of three, iron frames with canvas stretched between, and men lay on them or sat on them or squatted on the floor between them playing cards and dominoes on a folded blanket. The dominoes made a sharp little sound on the boards, a clack and then a scrape as they were pushed together. Somewhere a man was singing under his breath, a song from home, slow and thin, and stopped when he saw her.

The room went quiet in a wave, from the door to the far windows.

A woman. A Chinese woman. In here.

She kept her face as still as she could make it and looked at the walls instead of the men.

She had heard about the walls. Everybody on the station had. The barracks were built of plain redwood boards, painted a dull institutional color, and on every board, from the floor to as high as a man could reach standing on a top bunk, there was writing. Characters cut into the wood with whatever the men could find, nails and penknives and the sharpened handles of spoons, in long straight columns, top to bottom, right to left. Some were cut deep and clean, the strokes square at the ends, the work of someone who had been taught calligraphy and had nothing but time. Some were scratched shallow and crooked. In places the station had painted over them, years ago, and the men had cut new ones through the paint, and the old columns showed underneath like the ribs of a boat under a tarp. There were thousands of characters. There were poems. She could see that from the shape of them, the even lines, five characters or seven. She did not stop to read them. It felt like reading someone's mail while he stood next to you.

But she saw that the wood around the cuts was darker than the rest, rubbed smooth and dark, as if hands had touched them over and over.

"Tell them," Mr. Hoyt said, "that the fish was fresh on Tuesday."

A man came forward from the bunks near the window. He was perhaps sixty, the oldest man in the room, very straight, with a wisp of white beard and a gray scholar's gown so worn at the elbows that the weave showed through like screen. He bowed slightly to Mei and not at all to Hoyt.

"Yee Fook-On," he said. "I wrote the letter. I see they have sent someone who can read it."

"They read it, uncle," she said. "They sent me to answer it."

"And what is the answer?"

"Mr. Hoyt says the fish was fresh on Tuesday."

Mr. Yee looked at Hoyt for a long moment, as a man looks at a dog that has done something on the carpet.

"Tell the steward," he said, "that I have been a fishmonger's son, a schoolteacher, a grocer's clerk in Oakland for nineteen years, and a guest in this house for eleven weeks. In that time I have learned many things. One of them is that a fish does not become fresh by being called fresh. Tell him that if the fish was fresh on Tuesday, then it was fresh in the way that I am young."

Mei translated it exactly, because that was the rule, and because she wanted to.

Hoyt went a deeper pink.

The argument that followed took forty minutes and covered the fish, the rice, the tea, the hours of the wash house, the state of the toilets, and a man on the second tier who snored in a manner Mr. Yee described as unnatural. Mei went back and forth between them like a shuttle on her mother's machines. Hoyt agreed to look at the rice. Mr. Yee agreed that the snoring was not the kitchen's responsibility. Neither of them agreed about the fish. By the end the men in the bunks had stopped staring at her and were listening to the argument instead, and some of them were laughing behind their hands at Hoyt, and once, when Mr. Yee said something particularly cutting about the steward's mother's cooking, which Mei translated as "his family's kitchen," a man on a top bunk laughed out loud and was hushed by three others.

That was when she saw the boy.

He was on a top bunk near the far end, by the window, lying on his side with his face to the wall, and he had not turned to watch with the others. An older man sat on the bunk below, leaning back against the post, with his head tipped up toward the boy and his lips moving. Mei could not hear him. She did not need to. She had watched her own mother drill her on her times tables in exactly that rhythm: a short question, a short answer, a short question. The older man held up fingers as he went, one, two, three, four, five. Five rows.

The boy's lips moved too. He was not holding anything. There was nothing in his hands but a nail.

He was cutting something into the board by his head, small, low down where the bunk frame would hide it from anyone standing on the floor. She could only see it because she was standing at an angle, under the washing, and the light from the window fell across it. Not characters. A drawing. The outline of a broad head with two curved horns.

An ox head.

The older man saw her looking. He stopped speaking and sat forward and lit a cigarette, and the boy's hand went still on the board.

"Miss," said Petrakis. "We done?"

"We're done," Hoyt said. "We're very done."

---

She ate her lunch on the porch of the administration building, in the one corner that was out of the wind, with her back against the post and her feet on the rail. The fog had lifted off the cove. She could see the water, slate green and wrinkled, and a launch coming across from Tiburon with mail. A pair of cormorants sat on the end of the wharf with their wings held out to dry, like old men airing their coats.

Ngau Tau. Ox Head. It was her father's village. Her father's and her uncle Wing's. She had never seen it. She had seen it only in her uncle's stories at New Year: the ponds, the bamboo, the banyan with the split trunk where the children hid, the tower across the water that belonged to the Fongs. You can see it from Ngau Tau, right over the ponds. The Fong people built it and the Chan people looked at it for free.

A boy from Sha Kong could know Ngau Tau. It was next door. Anyone could carve an ox. It meant nothing.

She opened the newspaper around her lunch. Her mother had put in the rest of the pork, a ball of rice, two pieces of salted plum wrapped separately in waxed paper, and, folded small, a slip with three characters on it in her mother's brush: *Eat it all.* Mei ate it all. The pork was cold and still good, the honey crust gone sticky, the meat underneath pink at the edges where the smoke had reached. The salted plum made the inside of her mouth pucker and wake up.

She thought of her uncle cutting pork just like this one on the back counter of his store in Locke, with a cleaver as wide as a book, the slices falling in a fan. Feeding the whole street on the night of the wedding banquet, because he said a man who fed a street could never be lonely in it. Telling her, when she was nine, that she had the best ears in the family and should be a doctor, or a spy.

"Interpreter's nearly the same thing," he'd said when she told him about the job last year, in a letter she had written in her best brush hand. He had written back in his own big, sprawling, generous characters that used half a sheet each. *Our girl on the island,* he had written. *Now the whole delta will want you for a niece. Don't let them bribe you with anything less than a whole roast pig.*

She had kept the letter. She had shown it to Mr. Louie on her first week, laughing, and Mr. Louie had read it twice and handed it back and said, "Your uncle is a funny man," in a voice that had not sounded like he thought it was funny at all.

---

Doris found her on the porch at one o'clock.

"Brandt wants you." She leaned against the rail beside Mei and lit a cigarette and cupped it from the wind. "Your father's down early. The Fong man. Came in on the morning boat from Sacramento, changed at the city, and he's sitting in the hall downstairs in a hat that I would like to discuss with somebody."

"What's wrong with the hat?"

"Nothing. It's beautiful. It's a pearl-gray homburg with a black band and I want to know where a pear farmer gets a hat like that." She blew smoke at the cormorants. "Brandt wants to start tomorrow at nine instead of Thursday afternoon. He says why waste a man who's come all this way. What he means is he doesn't want the man going back to Sacramento tonight and coming back Thursday and talking to anybody in between."

"Talking to who?"

Doris looked at her sidelong through the smoke.

"Anybody, honey," she said. "That's the thing about anybody. You never know who it's going to be."

The Pearl-Gray Hat

Fong Bing took the hat off at the door of Room Four and then had no idea where to put it. He held it against his chest for the oath, and on his knee for the first hour, and finally, when Coyle offered to put it on the radiator, he looked at the radiator with such horror that Doris got up and set it on the empty chair beside her own as gently as if it were a cat.

He was forty-five, born on Jackson Street in San Francisco in 1880, a citizen by birth, and he had his birth affidavit and his return certificates in a brown envelope tied with tape, which he laid down before him and kept one hand on. He was a foreman for a pear grower on Grand Island, across the Sacramento River from Locke, and he looked it: broad, sunburned on the back of the neck and the backs of the hands, with the forearms of a man who spent August on a ladder. His good suit was dark blue serge, too heavy for July, and he sweated in it quietly from the first minute. When he moved his hands, Mei caught the smell of him across the table: tobacco, starch, and under it, faint and green and sweet, the smell of crushed pear leaves, the kind that gets into the skin and won't wash out.

He spoke a slower, rougher Toishanese than the boy, flattened at the edges by thirty years of living among people who spoke something else. When he could not find a word he used an English one, and then looked at Mei apologetically, as if he had tracked mud onto her floor.

"Tell him," Brandt said, "that he may answer in English if he prefers."

Mei told him.

"No, no," Fong Bing said, in English, quickly. "Chinese better. My English is orchard English. Good for ladders. No good for this."

Coyle laughed. Brandt did not.

They began with the father's own life. Where was he born? Who were his parents? When did he first go to China? Why? To marry. Whom? A girl from the Lum village of Tai Tong, over the hill from Sha Kong, Lum Shee, chosen by his mother. When did he return? 1902. Did he have a child from that trip? A son, born that spring. Name? Fong Yik-Wah. Where is he now? Ketchikan, Alaska, in the cannery. Second trip? 1903. Second son? Fong Yik-Man. Where now? Stockton, a cook. Third trip? 1905. Third son?

"Fong Yik-Chuen," Fong Bing said. "He is the one here."

"Describe him."

Fong Bing thought. "Thin," he said. "His mother says he eats like a sparrow and talks like a crow." He stopped, embarrassed. "Not to say that, maybe. He is a good boy."

"Say it exactly," Brandt said to Mei, who had.

Then the village.

By then the room had warmed. The fog had burned off the cove and the sun came in through the one window in a long hard slab that lay across the table and made the varnish smell of itself, a sharp, resinous smell, like a pencil being sharpened. Dust turned over and over in the slab of light. Coyle took off his jacket and hung it on his chair. Doris pushed her sleeves up past the elbow and blew a strand of hair out of her eyes without missing a key. Only Brandt sat as he had sat at nine, jacket buttoned, collar stiff, as if heat were a kind of argument he declined to have. Fong Bing sweated into his serge and did not complain, and once, when he thought no one was looking, he wiped his palm slowly down his trouser leg.

Mei had learned to hear the difference between a man answering and a man reciting. A man answering looked at the inspector, or at nothing, or at the inside of his own head, and his voice went up and down with the effort of seeing a thing that was far away. A man reciting looked at a spot in the air a little above the inspector's head and spoke in a flat, even line, like water coming out of a pipe.

Fong Bing answered. For the first twenty minutes, about his parents and his trips and his ship, he answered. His voice wandered. He corrected himself about the name of a steamer. He said he had been seasick on the second crossing and then laughed and said every crossing.

Then Coyle asked him how many rows of houses there were in Sha Kong, and his eyes went up to the spot in the air above Brandt's head, and Mei felt the back of her neck go cold.

Five rows. Seven houses in his row. Fong Sing at the head of the row, a farmer, wife and two daughters. A fishpond in front, big enough that a man can throw a stone across it, but not a boy. Bamboo behind. The house faces south, a little east. Tamped earth in the kitchen, brick in the main room. A tower at the east end, three stories, with a round white clock below the top window.

"Does it keep time?" Coyle asked.

"No. Stopped at twenty past four in a big wind. People say it was the hour the tax collector came."

It was the same sentence. Not the same facts: the same sentence. The same order of words. A man can throw a stone across it, but not a boy. Mei put it into English for the second time in two days and heard her own voice saying it as if from the far end of a hall.

Doris's keys stopped for half a second, and went on.

Brandt let it go on for another hour. He let the father walk through the house, room by room, and walk through the village, row by row, and every answer laid itself down neatly on top of the boy's answer from Tuesday like a sheet of tissue over a drawing. The fourth house in the second row: a widow with a goiter. The school: in the clan's old meeting house, at the west end, two teachers. The well: stone, with a wooden cover, by the banyan. Mei's pencil had stopped taking notes at all. She was only listening and speaking, listening and speaking.

At half past eleven, Brandt put his pen down.

"What does your son like to eat?"

Mei translated.

Fong Bing looked at her, startled, and then at Brandt, and then at the spot in the air, and found nothing there. His mouth opened and closed.

"Whatever there is," he said finally. "He's a boy. Boys eat."

"What did your wife cook the night before you sailed home in 1906?"

"I don't remember. Rice. Salt fish. It was nineteen years ago."

"Does your wife have any marks on her face? Scars? Moles?"

"A mole." He touched his own face. "Here. On the left."

The boy had said the right. Mei had translated it on Tuesday. She saw Coyle see it and brighten, and flip back through the transcript, and make a little mark with his pencil and turn the file so Brandt could see.

"There's one," Coyle said happily. "Mole on the left, mole on the right. They're human."

"One," Brandt said. "In two hundred and sixteen questions. On a mole." He picked up his pen again. "Where do you live now, Mr. Fong?"

"Locke. On Main Street."

"Which building?"

"Upstairs, over the Hing Lung store. I rent the room in the back, by the levee. I take the boat across to the island in the morning."

"Who owns the Hing Lung store?"

Mei put it into Toishanese. She said every word of it. She did not let her voice drop on the name of the store, or rise, or do anything at all.

"Chan Wing," said Fong Bing.

"Spell it for the record," Brandt said to her, and she spelled it, C-H-A-N, W-I-N-G, while Doris typed it, and the radiator ticked, and the fog bell on Point Blunt rang one stroke out over the water.

---

They recessed at noon. Brandt gathered his papers and stood and spoke to Coyle by the window in a voice too low to carry, and then turned back to the table.

"We'll continue tomorrow at nine with the father," he said. "And Friday with both. Miss Chan, I'd like you on both days. Mr. Coyle is going to look through the records room this afternoon for any applicant from Sha Kong or the neighboring villages in the last five years. If somebody else has described that tower, I want to know what he said about the clock."

"Yes, sir."

"It's a nice clock," Brandt said. "I'm getting very fond of that clock."

The guard took Fong Bing out. He had his hat back, held in both hands, and his brown envelope under his arm, and he had to pass behind Mei's chair to reach the door. She kept her eyes on her notebook. She heard the floor creak behind her, and the rustle of serge, and smelled pear leaves and starch, and then, very low, almost under the creak of the boards, she heard him say in Toishanese, not to her exactly, but near enough that it could only be meant for her:

"Your uncle says to eat well and not get thin."

Then he was past her and out the door, and the guard after him, and it closed.

Nobody else had heard. Coyle was talking to Brandt about lunch. Doris was pulling the last sheet out of the typewriter with a long ripping zip of paper and roller. Mei sat with her pencil in her hand and looked at the page of her notebook, at the words she had written in the front of it nine months ago in English and in brush. Never change a word.

He had not asked her to change a word. He had not asked her anything. He had told her to eat.

---

"Saturday," she said to Mr. Louie at four o'clock, in the linen closet that was their room. "Can I have Saturday? I'll take your Tuesday."

He was writing up the Fresno man's testimony in his small neat hand. He did not stop.

"You have Sunday and Monday off this week already."

"I want Saturday too. Three days."

"Where are you going?"

"To see my uncle."

The pen stopped.

He looked at her for what felt like a long time, his gray mustache very straight, his hands very still on the paper. Out the window a gull was walking along the gutter of the roof below with the self-importance of a man inspecting a property he did not own.

"In the boards," Mr. Louie said slowly, "we are the only people in the room who understand both sides. The inspector understands one side, and the applicant understands the other side, and we stand in the middle and carry. You know this. If you put anything in your hands that is not what they gave you, you are no longer carrying. You are walking somewhere of your own."

"I'm not putting anything in my hands."

"Then why go to Locke on Saturday, in the middle of a case, to see the uncle who owns the building where the witness lives?"

She had not told him that. Of course she had not needed to. He would have read the morning transcript by now. He read every transcript.

"Because he's my uncle," she said. "Because it's July, and the pears are coming in, and I go every year." The second part was not true. She went every New Year. She had never been in July. "And because if I don't go, I'll sit here on Friday and wonder, and you said thinking is bad for the voice."

Mr. Louie put the cap on his pen.

"I'll take your Saturday," he said. "You'll take my Tuesday and my Wednesday."

"That's two for one."

"Yes," he said. "It is." He took his reading glasses off and tucked them into his breast pocket. "The night boat leaves the Washington Street wharf at six. Take the upper deck, on the left side going up. The right side gets the sun in the morning and you won't sleep." He picked up the pen again and uncapped it. "And Miss Chan. Whatever he gives you to eat, eat it. But don't bring anything back."

Night Boat to Locke

Friday's board was short and sour. Father and son were brought in one at a time and then, at three o'clock, together, and the boy sat at the foot and Fong Bing at the head with the empty chair between them that held, again, the pearl-gray hat. Brandt took them through the village a third time. The mole moved back and forth between the cheeks. Nothing else moved at all.

Coyle had spent Thursday afternoon in the records room and come out with dust on his elbows and nothing else. Sha Kong had sent no one but Fongs for ten years, and every Fong file led back to Fong Bing. There was a Lum from the next village over, landed in 1922, but his file was in the Sacramento office on loan to a deportation hearing and would not be back for a week.

"Then we wait a week," Brandt said. "The boy isn't going anywhere."

The boy, at the foot, kept his eyes down. He had heard *wait* and *week*, and those were words every man in the barracks knew in English.

---

The *Capital Belle* left the Washington Street wharf at six o'clock with her whistle going and her stern wheel beginning to turn, slow and heavy, slapping the green bay water into a white churn that smelled of salt and engine oil. She was an old boat, built for the river, wide and flat and white, with two decks of cabins and a long open promenade around the upper one, and she carried everything that went up and down between San Francisco and Sacramento: crates of machine parts, sacks of mail, barrels of nails, a crated piano, cases of canned milk, a horse in a stall on the lower deck who looked as if he had been on this trip before and had not liked it then either.

Mei had a ticket for a berth in a cabin with two bunks. The other bunk belonged to a large Portuguese lady from Rio Vista who was asleep before the boat cleared the Ferry Building and snored in a way Mr. Yee would have had words for. So Mei took her coat and sat outside on the promenade, on the left side going up, as she had been told, on a bench that was still warm from the afternoon.

She saw Fong Bing almost at once.

He was down on the lower deck, by the freight, sitting on a crate with his serge jacket off and folded on his knee and his hat on the jacket, eating from a paper sack. He looked smaller from above, and tired. He did not look up. She did not think he had seen her board. She moved farther along the bench, behind a post, and pulled her hat down, and felt foolish, and stayed there.

The boat went out through the north bay in the long summer evening. The fog was coming in behind them through the Gate, a gray wall rolling over the hills of the Presidio, but ahead the sky was clear and going yellow, then apricot, then a deep, dusty rose over the low brown hills of Contra Costa. The water changed color under the boat as they went, from green to gray to a muddy, milky brown at the mouth of the Carquinez Strait, where the river came down to meet the sea. The air changed too. It went warmer by the mile. By the time they passed under the bluffs at Crockett, with the sugar refinery's lit windows stacked above the water and a sweet scorched smell of boiling cane coming off it, Mei had taken off her coat and then her gloves, and the wind on her arms was as soft as bathwater.

Suisun Bay at dusk was wide and shallow and flat, the water silver, the shores lost in marsh. Rafts of ducks lifted off ahead of the bow and settled again behind. Somewhere a man on the lower deck was playing a harmonica, an American tune, slow, and somebody else was talking over him in Portuguese, and the stern wheel went round and round under it all with a sound like a giant turning the pages of a wet book.

She thought about not thinking. It was not working.

---

What she knew was this. A boy came from Sha Kong with answers that matched his father's to the word. The father lived over her uncle's store. Both of them told her uncle's joke in her uncle's order of words. The boy carved an ox head, which was her father's village and her uncle's village, beside his bunk. And the father had brought her a message, as if she were not a government interpreter on a case, but a niece who needed reminding to eat.

What she did not know was what any of it meant.

It could mean nothing. People in villages that touched each other told the same jokes. A pear foreman who lived over a store would naturally know the man who owned it. Her uncle knew everyone on the river. He would have heard that Fong Bing was going down to testify and said, *Tell my girl to eat,* the way he would have said it to anybody going to the city.

It could mean the other thing.

Everyone knew about the other thing. You grew up in Chinatown and you knew it the way you knew about the tides. After the earthquake and the fire in 1906, the city's birth records had burned, every one of them, and suddenly a great many Chinese men in San Francisco had been born there, because who could say they hadn't? And a man born there was a citizen, and a citizen's sons were citizens, wherever they were born. So a man went back to China and came home and said, "I have a son," and next time, "another son," and the government wrote down the sons, and the sons were slots on a paper. And if the man had only daughters, or only one son, or no children at all, the empty slots on the paper were worth money. Somebody's real boy in some real village, whose own family had no paper, could become a Fong, or a Lee, or a Chan, for the price of the slot and the price of learning to be that family's son.

And the learning was the hard part. A paper son had to know a village he had never lived in, a house he had never slept in, a father he had met perhaps once, in a hotel room in Hong Kong, the week before the ship. He had to know it so well that he could answer two hundred questions without a stumble. Somebody had to write it all down for him. Rows and houses and wells and widows and moles. Coaching papers, people called them. The boy studied them on the ship and dropped them over the side before landing, or tore them up in the ship's latrine. And somebody, somewhere, in some store in some river town, got paid for writing them.

Every interpreter on the island knew this. Every inspector knew it. Brandt had known it for twenty years. That was why there were two hundred questions. That was why there were moles.

Mei put her hands on the warm rail and looked at the water and did not let herself finish the thought. Not yet. Not until she had seen his face.

---

She slept a few hours after all, on the bench, with her coat over her, and woke at two in the morning to the boat's whistle and a silence that she did not at first understand. They had left the bay. They were in the river now, the true river, between the levees, and the wide noise of open water had gone. Instead there was a nearness to everything. The boat seemed to fill the channel. On both sides, close enough that she could have thrown her shoe onto them, the levees rose, black against the stars, with willows and cottonwoods along the top and their leaves turning silver and dark, silver and dark, in the boat's lamplight. The frogs were going in the sloughs, thousands of them, like a whole county of tiny wooden rattles. The air smelled of mud and tules and warm green water and, once, coming over the levee in a breath of land wind, something sweet and heavy that she could not name until much later: ripe pears, acres of them, waiting in the dark.

At Rio Vista the boat put in and the Portuguese lady got off with three hatboxes. At Isleton a lantern swung on the landing and a man took two crates of chickens aboard, and the chickens complained all the way upriver. Mei went to sleep again and dreamed she was translating for the chickens, and woke with the sun in her face, which meant that despite Mr. Louie the river had turned and she was on the right side after all.

The morning was already warm. The light came flat and pink across the levee tops, and the land beyond them, when she stood up and looked, was below the river. That was the thing she always forgot about the delta, and always saw again with a little lurch: the water was higher than the fields. The boat floated along a raised road of brown river, and on either side, beneath it, lay the land, flat and green and soaking, divided into orchards and fields of asparagus fern gone tall and feathery after the harvest, and pumping stations, and farmhouses with their roofs below her feet. Men were already out in the orchards. She could see the ladders, three-legged and tall, standing among the pear trees like herons.

At Walnut Grove there were Chinese men on the landing and Japanese men on the landing and Filipino men in straw hats, and a white man in a linen suit shouting about a shipment, and the smell of coffee and frying dough from a stand by the gangway. Fong Bing got off there, a stop early, as though he would rather walk the last half mile on the levee road than come down a gangway in front of her. He went up the landing with his jacket over his arm and his hat on and did not look back.

Mei watched him go. Then she stayed on board for the last half mile, alone at the rail, while the boat came round a long slow bend, and there it was.

---

Locke was not a town you saw from the river so much as a town you saw the roofs of. It lay below the levee, tucked into the land side as if hiding from the water, and from the deck you could see only the tops of it: a long line of tin and tarpaper roofs, a few chimneys, a water tank on stilts, a tall pale-green building at the upstream end. Then the boat swung in to the landing, and she was down the gangway with her small bag, and up the wooden steps on the face of the levee, and at the top of the levee she could see down into the whole of it.

Main Street ran parallel to the river, one level lower, narrow as an alley. On both sides stood two-story wooden buildings, built shoulder to shoulder, unpainted or painted long ago, with balconies running along their second stories and propped on posts over the boardwalks. The balconies had laundry on them, and potted plants, and a birdcage, and an old man in an undershirt sitting in a chair reading a newspaper with his feet on the rail. The buildings leaned toward each other a little across the street, as if they were talking. Behind them, she knew, were gardens, long narrow plots running back to the fields, with melons and long beans and bitter gourd climbing on poles. The whole town smelled of river and woodsmoke and frying garlic and, faintly, of somebody's cigar from an upstairs window, sweet and dark as burnt sugar.

And standing in the middle of Main Street, under the balcony of the Hing Lung store, with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a cleaver in one hand because he had come straight from the back counter, with his arms already flung out, and his head already back, and the laugh already coming up out of his chest before she had even reached the bottom of the steps, was her uncle Wing.

"My girl on the island!" he shouted, loud enough for the whole street. "They let you off! Did you escape? Did you swim?"

Two Pigs for the Lum Wedding

The Hing Lung store was eighteen feet wide and ninety feet deep, and Uncle Wing said it held everything a man on the river could need except a wife, and he was working on that.

The front was the store proper. Shelves went up to the ceiling on both walls, so high that he kept a rolling ladder on a rail, and every shelf was crammed. Tins of condensed milk and sardines and peaches. Jars of preserved ginger, black beans, dried scallops like little amber buttons. Bundles of dried bean curd sticks. Paper parcels of tea. Bolts of cotton and spools of thread. Work gloves, rubber boots, straw hats, a stack of enamel washbasins with blue rims. Cigarettes and cigars and tobacco in tins. Along the right-hand wall ran a tall cabinet of small wooden drawers, a hundred of them, each labeled in brush, holding dried herbs and roots and barks that filled that end of the store with a smell like the inside of an old trunk, bitter and woody and sweet. Sacks of rice stood along the floor in a row, fifty pounds each, their tops rolled down to show the grain. Salt fish hung from a beam by their tails. There was a big brass scale on the counter, and an abacus with beads worn pale from fingers, and a pigeonhole rack on the wall behind it, full of letters.

The letters were the part people forgot. Half the men on the river could not read or write, or could do one and not the other, and the Hing Lung was where their mail came, and where Uncle Wing read it to them, and where he wrote their answers, sitting at the end of the counter with a brush and an ink stone and a stack of thin red-lined paper, for ten cents a page. He had been doing it for twenty years. He knew whose mother was sick in which village, whose son had married, whose rice field had flooded. He knew which men sent money home every month and which sent it only at New Year and which had stopped sending it at all. He said he was the only man in Locke who knew the whole of the Toishan district without having been back to it since the old Empress was alive.

Behind the store was the office, and behind the office was the back room with the mahjong table, and behind that, through a screen door that banged, was the yard, where the kitchen was, and the brick oven, and a cook named Yuk Lan who had run Uncle Wing's household for six years and was not, everyone was careful to say, anything else.

"You're thin," Yuk Lan said, when Mei came through the screen door.

"Everyone in this family says that."

"Everyone in this family is right." She pushed a stool at Mei with her foot. "Sit. Eat. Then baste."

---

The Lum boy from the boarding house on Key Street was marrying the second Jue girl that night, and Uncle Wing had promised two whole roast pigs for the banquet, and the pigs were already in the oven.

The oven was a tall brick chamber like a small chimney, built against the back fence, with a fire of oak and pear wood glowing in a pit at the bottom. The pigs hung inside it from iron hooks, split and spread flat on wooden frames, so that from the open door they looked like two pale brown kites. Uncle Wing had rubbed them the night before with salt and five-spice and fermented bean curd and rice wine, and now, every twenty minutes, someone had to open the iron door and paint the skins with a mixture of maltose and soy and vinegar from a crock, with a brush made of a bundle of chicken feathers tied to a stick. The heat came out of the door in a wall. The sweet glaze hissed where it touched. The skin, as the morning went on, went from pale to gold to a deep red-brown and began, in places, to blister and lift into tiny bubbles, crackling faintly, like rain on a tin roof a long way off.

Mei basted. Sammy Jue, who was fifteen and the bride's cousin and Uncle Wing's delivery boy, sat on an upturned bucket and talked.

"I'm going to fly," he told her. "There's a field in Sacramento. Mather Field. The army's got planes. You go up in them, you can see the whole delta at once, every river, every island. Like a map. I'm going to be a pilot."

"For the army?"

"For anybody. For the mail. For the movies." He waved a hand. "Your uncle says I'll have to learn arithmetic first. I said, you don't do arithmetic in the air. He said that's how you end up in the river."

"He's right."

"He's always right. That's what's wrong with him." Sammy squinted at her. "Is it true you work on the island? With the immigration?"

"I interpret."

"Do you get the bad ones? The ones they send back?"

"I get whoever comes."

"My uncle came through there," Sammy said. "In 1912. He was there three months. He says he carved his name on the wall by his bunk with a fork. He says if I ever go there I should look for it." He thought. "I'm not going to go there."

"No," Mei said. "You were born in Walnut Grove. You don't need to."

"That's what I mean." He grinned. "I'll fly over it."

---

Uncle Wing came out at noon with a pot of tea and two cups and a plate of cold sliced pork from yesterday, and settled on the back step under the grapevine that grew over the fence, and patted the step beside him.

He was fifty-one and he looked forty. He had a big square head and a big square body and big square hands that were somehow very delicate with a brush, and he laughed easily and often and with his head thrown back, so that when you thought of him you thought first of the underside of his chin. He had come to America at seventeen, he had told her, and worked on the railroad crews and in the canneries and on the levee gangs and in the asparagus, and he had saved every penny and bought a share in a store in Walnut Grove, and when Walnut Grove's Chinatown burned in 1915 he had come up the levee with everyone else and helped build Locke, board by board, on land a white man would lease them but not sell. He had never gone back to China. He said there was nobody there to go back for. He said it lightly, every time, and changed the subject every time.

"So," he said. "My girl on the island. How do they treat you?"

"Fine. It's foggy."

"Is it ever not foggy?"

"In September." She drank her tea. It was strong and smoky, with a burnt edge to it. "Fong Bing said you told him to tell me to eat."

"Did he? Good. He remembered." Uncle Wing beamed. "He's a good tenant, Fong Bing. Pays on time, snores on time. When he said he was going down to the island to stand for his boy, I said, my niece works there, she's too thin, tell her to eat. I didn't know if he'd see you. Did he see you?"

"He testified in front of me. Three days."

"No!" He slapped his knee. "You did his case? Well. Small river." He shook his head, laughing. "How did he do? He was so nervous before he went. He bought a new hat. Twelve dollars. I said Bing, the inspector isn't going to land your son for a hat."

"He did all right."

"And the boy?"

She looked at him. He was peeling a lychee from a bowl Yuk Lan had set down, working his thumbnail into the bumpy red shell, not looking at her. The shell came off in one piece. The fruit inside was pale and wet and shining, like a peeled grape, like a pearl.

"I'm not allowed to talk about cases, Uncle."

"No, no. Of course not." He ate the lychee and spat the seed neatly over the fence into the neighbor's melons. "Quite right. Good girl. Mr. Louie would have your ears." He knew Mr. Louie's name. She had written it in a letter, months ago. Of course he knew it. "Here. Eat some pork. You're too thin."

---

The banquet was upstairs in the hall of the association on Main Street, a long room with a pressed-tin ceiling and twenty round tables and windows open on both sides to let the river air through, which it did not. By eight o'clock the room was so hot that the candles bent. There were a hundred and sixty people. There were firecrackers in the street at the start, so many that the smoke came up through the open windows and hung under the ceiling in a blue haze that smelled of gunpowder and paper, and the children ran screaming through the bangs with their hands over their ears and the old men stood on the balconies and complained and enjoyed it.

The pigs came in on boards carried by four men each, to a great shout. Uncle Wing carved them at a side table with his wide cleaver, and the skin cracked under the blade with a sound like stepping on thin ice, and the slices fell in a fan, red-brown and gleaming at the edge, white and juicy under it. There was shark fin soup and a whole steamed fish and abalone and roast duck and noodles for long life and sweet red bean soup at the end. The bride, in red, went from table to table pouring tea for her elders with her face set like a girl going into an exam. The groom followed her with the teapot and dropped the lid twice.

Mei sat with Yuk Lan and Sammy's mother and an assortment of aunties who interrogated her more thoroughly than Brandt ever had. Was she married? Was she engaged? Why not? Did the government pay well? Did she have to wear a uniform? Was it true there were white men there who spoke Chinese? Was it true they asked how many steps were on your front stairs? Was it true about the walls?

"Some of it," Mei said.

"Which part?" said Sammy's mother.

"The stairs," said Mei. "They ask about the stairs."

The aunties nodded, satisfied, as if this confirmed something they had always known about the government.

Across the room, she saw Fong Bing at a table by the far window, without his hat, eating steadily, not talking. Once he looked up and saw her. He looked down at once.

---

Afterward, in the back room of the Hing Lung, the mahjong went on until past two. Four tables, sixteen players, the windows open to the yard and the smell of the cooling oven and the grapevine and the river beyond the levee. The tiles were ivory and bamboo, old, the colors on their faces worn soft, and they made the sound she had grown up with at every New Year of her life: the long rattling roar of the shuffle as all four players swept them face down across the table in great circles, like surf on gravel; then the sharp clack, clack, clack as each player built his wall; then the small, separate, decisive knocks of the play, a tile drawn, a tile laid down, a tile slapped face up with a cry of triumph or disgust.

Uncle Wing played at the table nearest the office door, laughing, cigarette in his teeth, winning more than he lost, and Mei sat on a stool behind him and watched his hands. They were quick and sure and they never fumbled a tile.

At a quarter to one a man came in from the street. He was young, sunburned, in work clothes, with mud dried pale on his boots, a stranger she had not seen at the banquet. He stood in the doorway turning his cap in his hands until Uncle Wing saw him.

Uncle Wing laid his tiles face down and got up. "Play my hand, Sammy," he said. "Don't lose it."

He took the young man into the office and pulled the door to behind them. It did not quite close. Nothing in Locke quite closed. Through the gap, from her stool, Mei could see a slice of lamplit room: the corner of a desk, the side of a strongbox standing open, and her uncle's big square hand laying something on the desk, a thick book bound in faded green cloth. He opened it. He ran his finger down a page. He began to read aloud, low, steady, in a voice she had never heard him use before, without any laugh in it at all. The young man had a pencil and a sheet of paper, and he was writing as fast as he could.

The Book of Villages

The upriver boat came through at five, and Uncle Wing always met it, because the freight for the store came on it and because, he said, if you were not on the landing when your rice came off, your rice went somewhere else and became somebody else's rice.

Mei heard him go. She had slept in the little room over the store that had been her mother's when her mother was first married, a room so narrow that she could touch both walls lying down, with a window onto the balcony and the street. She heard his slippers on the stairs, the bang of the screen door, the rattle of the handcart going up the plank ramp to the levee. Then the town was quiet in the way only a river town is quiet at dawn: not silent, but full of small separate sounds, each one distinct. A rooster on Key Street. A pump handle squeaking in a yard. Water lapping on the levee stones. Far off, the boat's whistle coming round the bend, long and hoarse.

She got up and dressed and went down in her stockings, carrying her shoes.

The store was dim and cool and smelled of rice and dried fish and the hundred drawers of herbs. Light came gray through the front windows, under the edges of the blinds. The back room still held the night's cigarette smoke and the tiles lay where they had been left, face up and face down, in the shapes of four unfinished games. Yuk Lan's door at the end of the yard was shut.

The office door was shut too. But nothing in Locke quite closed, and it opened when she pushed it.

The strongbox was locked. The green book was not in it. It was on the desk, under a ledger of accounts and a folded copy of the Chinese paper from San Francisco, where a man who had finished a long night of mahjong and rice wine and roast pork would leave it, meaning to put it away in the morning.

She stood and looked at it for a while before she touched it.

It was bigger than she had thought, the size of a family Bible, and thick, perhaps three hundred pages, bound in green cloth worn through to the boards at the corners. The pages were the thin, strong paper that letters home were written on, sewn in sections. She opened it near the front. The writing was her uncle's, the big, generous brush hand from every New Year's card and every letter he had ever sent her, but smaller here, tighter, crowded to the edges of the page as if he had been trying to save paper.

At the top of the page was the name of a village. Under it was a drawing.

Rows of small squares, laid out in a grid. A circle with a cross in it: a well. A wavy rectangle: a pond. A little upright shape with three stacked boxes: a tower. Arrows marking north. Beside each square, tiny characters: a family name, a given name, an occupation, a number of sons and daughters. Below the drawing, notes ran down the page in columns. *Second row, fourth house, the Lee widow, she keeps ducks. The ducks go into the pond every morning and the boys throw clods. School in the old meeting house, two teachers, the older one has a limp. Market every third, sixth and ninth day at the town of Sam Hap. The road to market crosses one bridge, stone, with a lion on one end only, the other lion fell in the river in the flood of the year the boy emperor came to the throne.*

She turned the page. Another village. Another grid of squares, another well, another pond. *The banyan by the east gate has a split trunk. Children hide in it. A girl fell out of it and broke her arm in the year of the big snow, which was not snow, it was hail.* She turned another. And another.

There were dozens of them. Forty, fifty villages. Toishan, Hoiping, Sunwui, Yanping. Some of the pages were old and faded and the ink had gone brown. Some had been written over, with corrections squeezed between the lines in fresher black. *The Wong school burned, now in the new building by the road. The Lee widow died, house now her nephew's.* In the margins were notes in a different, smaller hand, his hand in a hurry. *From the letters of Lum Hoy, 1918. From what Jue Sing's wife wrote, 1921. Ask Bing about the well.*

The letters. Of course. Twenty years of reading and writing letters for every man on the river. Every mother's complaint about a neighbor, every report of a wedding or a flood or a new school or a broken bridge, he had read them all aloud at the end of his counter, and then, later, at night, he had written them down here.

She found Sha Kong two-thirds of the way through.

Five rows. Seven houses in the third row. Fong Sing at the head, a farmer, wife and two daughters. The pond: A man can throw a stone across it, but not a boy. There it was, the very sentence. Tamped earth in the kitchen, brick in the main room. The widow with the goiter. The school, the well, the banyan. And at the east end, the tower, drawn with care, three boxes stacked, a small circle on the side of the top one.

*Clock, white face. Stopped at twenty past four in the big wind of the dragon year. Say: people say it stopped at the hour the tax collector came.* And beside it, small, in the margin, in his hurried hand: *Say it like this. Inspectors like a story. It sticks.*

Below it, a list of names in a column, each with a few characters after it. *Fong Bing's wife, Lum Shee: small, quick, a mole on the right cheek.*

The right. The boy had said right. Fong Bing, who had been married to her for twenty-four years, had said left.

At the bottom of the page, in fresh ink, newer than anything else on it, three lines. *Fong Bing, first slot: Yik-Wah. Sold 1921. Second slot: Yik-Man. Sold 1923. Third slot: Yik-Chuen.* And after the third, instead of *sold*, a single character she did not expect. *Family.*

She stood with her finger on it. Outside, the boat's whistle blew again, close now, at the landing, and she heard men's voices and the rumble of freight going down a gangplank.

*Family.* Whose?

She turned the pages faster. She did not know what she was looking for until she found it, nearly at the end, a page older than the rest, its edges soft as cloth from handling, the ink gone the brown of tea stains. At the top: *Ngau Tau.*

Ox Head.

The squares. The well. The ponds, three of them, a chain, and across the last one, drawn small at the edge of the page, the Sha Kong tower with its little circle of a clock. The banyan with the split trunk. Beside the second house in the second row, not a stranger's name, but a list, written in a more careful hand than any other on any page, as if he had sat down to do it on purpose, on a day when he had time.

*Toy Kwan, farmer. Wife, of the Lum family. Sons:*

*Toy Hon, first son. Stayed. Farmer. Wife of the Yee family. One son, Toy Gim, born the year of the horse.*

*Toy Ming, second son. Died young, of fever.*

*Toy Wing, third son. To Gold Mountain the year of the rabbit, aged seventeen. Entered as Chan Wing, son of the merchant Chan Yuen of Dupont Street, by paper bought from the Chan Yuen family for three years' wages.*

*Toy Lok, fourth son. To Gold Mountain the year of the dog. Entered as Chan Lok, second son of Chan Yuen, by the same paper. Married Lai-Fong of the Wong family. One daughter, Mei, born in San Francisco.*

And at the bottom, in fresh black ink, the same day's ink, the same new hand as on the Sha Kong page:

*Toy Gim, son of Hon. To Gold Mountain as Fong Yik-Chuen, third son of Fong Bing. Coached from this book. He knows the Sha Kong page and his own. Tell him to say only the Sha Kong page.*

---

She did not know how long she stood there. The light in the window changed from gray to pink. A cat came in through the yard door and sat and looked at her and left.

Her father's name had been Toy. Her uncle's name was Toy. Her own name, the name on her birth certificate and her Civil Service papers and the brass plate on the door of the interpreters' room, the name she signed at the bottom of every transcript to say that she had faithfully rendered every word, was a name her father had bought. And the boy on the top bunk by the window, carving an ox head into the wall where nobody would see it, was her cousin.

She heard the handcart come down the ramp from the levee, the wheels thumping on each plank, and her uncle's voice, loud, cheerful, complaining to someone about the price of peanut oil.

She closed the book. She put the ledger of accounts back on top of it, and the newspaper on top of that, folded the way it had been folded. She went out through the back room and the yard, past Yuk Lan's shut door, past the cold oven still smelling of pear wood and pork fat, out through the gate in the back fence and along the garden paths between the melon vines and the long beans, toward the river, before he could come in through the front and see her face.

---

The man with the skiff at the foot of the levee took her across to Grand Island for a nickel. It was the first time she had ever crossed the river and not been on a boat with a whistle. The water was wide and brown and very fast, faster than it looked, and the skiff went downstream half as much as it went across, the man leaning on his oars with a grunt every stroke. The sun was up now over the levee behind them. Swallows skimmed the water. A muskrat swam past with its nose up, unbothered, like a commuter.

On the other side the levee was lower and the orchards came almost to the top of it. She climbed up through dry grass and foxtails that caught in her stockings, and then she was in among the trees.

She had never been in a pear orchard at harvest. It was cooler than she expected, and greener, and full of a low, steady sound of people working: ladders creaking, branches rustling, the thump of fruit going into canvas picking bags, men calling to each other in Toishanese and Japanese and a Spanish she did not know. The trees were planted in long straight rows, old trees with thick gray trunks and heavy branches propped up on forked poles where the weight of fruit had bent them. The pears were Bartletts, green going to pale yellow, with a blush on the side that had faced the sun, and the smell of them was everywhere, sweet and heavy and slightly winy where windfalls had split in the grass and drawn the wasps.

She found Fong Bing at the end of the fourth row, at the packing shed, an open-sided roof on posts where women sat on boxes in the shade sorting fruit into wooden lugs. He was in shirtsleeves and a straw hat, with a clipboard, counting lugs as they came off the wagon. When he saw her he stopped counting.

He did not look surprised. He looked like someone who had smelled rain coming all morning.

"Miss Chan," he said. "This is a long way from the island."

"I'm not on the island today."

"No." He looked down at the clipboard. "But you'll be on it Monday."

"Tuesday."

"Tuesday." He wrote a number. "Then don't ask me anything, Miss. Because whatever I say, on Tuesday you will have to know it."

A woman at the sorting table laughed at something and threw a bruised pear to a boy, who caught it and bit it and grinned with juice on his chin. The wasps rose and settled. Fong Bing turned the clipboard over and held it against his chest, the way he had held his hat.

"My wife has a mole on the left," he said finally, very low, not looking at her. "She's had it since she was a girl. I'd know that face anywhere. Twenty-four years." He swallowed. "The rest of it, the rows and the widow and the clock, I learned from the same book the boy did. I was born on Jackson Street, Miss. I've slept in that village maybe two years of my whole life, in pieces. But the mole is mine."

On the Levee

San Francisco, March 1975

"Is this him?" Lisa said. "Grandpa?"

She had the soft brown page on the velvet, under the two lamps, and she had found the line by herself, which Mei should have expected, since she had been reading her grandfather's brush hand on birthday envelopes since she was six. Her finger hovered a quarter inch above the paper, not touching. She had been taught at the library never to touch.

"That's him," Mei said. "Toy Gim, son of Hon. Born the year of the horse."

"And this is Lok? Your father?"

"Fourth son. Entered as Chan Lok."

Lisa looked up. The lamps made two small bright squares in her glasses. "Auntie. Did you know? Growing up?"

"No," Mei said. "I found out on a Sunday morning in Locke, in 1925, standing in my stocking feet in your great-great-uncle's office, with a cat watching me." She drank her tea, which had gone cold. "I was twenty-two. I thought I knew my own name."

Lisa did not write a label. She took the photograph of the page without one, a long exposure, the shutter making its slow mechanical sigh. Then she took the strip of paper she had already cut and laid it beside the page, blank, and photographed that too.

"For when you decide what it says," she said.

---

Locke, July 1925

She waited for him on the levee.

She had stayed out on Grand Island all afternoon. She had walked the orchard rows until her stockings were ruined with foxtails, and eaten two pears off the ground, warm from the sun, so ripe that the skin slid off under her thumb, and sat in the shade of the packing shed and watched the women sort, and not asked Fong Bing anything else. At six the skiff man took her back across. The river had gone the brown of milky coffee, and the cottonwoods along the top of the levee were throwing long shadows out over the water, and the swallows had been joined by bats.

From the levee road she could see down into the back of Locke: the long gardens, the outhouses and woodsheds, the yards with their washing and their oil drums and their chicken coops, the brick oven behind the Hing Lung with a thread of smoke still going up from it. Somebody was playing a record of a Cantonese opera on a windup phonograph, the brass gong crashing, the voice of the singer rising in its high bright wavering line. Somebody else was chopping something on a board, fast, a sound like a clock gone mad. The heat was coming up out of the ground now that the sun was off it, and the planks of the boardwalk below gave off a smell of hot wood and spilled beer, and the levee road under her feet smelled of tar and dust.

She sat on the grass at the top of the bank and waited, and he came.

He came up the wooden steps from Main Street slowly, a man of fifty-one climbing a hill at the end of a long day, with a bottle of orange soda in each hand. He sat down next to her without a word and handed her one. It was cold, from the ice chest in the store. The glass was wet and the beads ran down over her fingers.

"Yuk Lan says you went out at six this morning and didn't eat."

"I ate two pears."

"Off the ground?"

"Off the ground."

"That's not eating. That's foraging." He drank half his soda in one go and wiped his mouth on his wrist. "You went to see Bing."

"Yes."

"And before that you went in my office."

She looked at him. His eyes stayed on the river, on a sternwheeler going down toward Rio Vista with its lights just coming on, yellow squares along the upper deck, the smoke from its stack lying back along the water.

"I left the book on the desk," he said. "I never leave the book on the desk. Twenty years, I never once. And then last night, rice wine, a wedding, I'm an old man, I leave it. And the paper on top folded the wrong way. I fold it in thirds. You folded it in half." He shook his head slowly. "And the cat was on the desk. The cat never goes in the office unless the door is open."

"I'm sorry."

"No you're not." He finally turned to her, and there was no laugh in his face at all, only a kind of tired, open, careful look, like a man holding out his hand to a dog he isn't sure about. "Ask," he said. "You came all this way. Ask me."

She held the cold bottle against the side of her neck. Below them, on the river, a fish jumped and fell back, and the rings went out.

"Is my name Toy?"

"Yes."

"Did Ma know?"

"Of course she knew. She married him. She married a Toy and wrote Chan on the paper because that's what the paper said. Everybody in Chinatown with a paper does the same thing. You think the Lees are all Lees? Half the Wongs on Waverly Place are Gins. I know a Louie in Sacramento who's actually a Fong." He took another swallow. "Your Mr. Louie, too, maybe. I never asked."

"Why didn't anyone tell me?"

"Because you were born here. With a real certificate, from the real hospital, with the real doctor's name on it. You didn't need to know. You were the first one of us who didn't." He looked down at his soda bottle. "Your father wanted that very much. He said, let her be the one who doesn't have to remember two names. Let her have one."

The sternwheeler blew its whistle at the bend. The sound came back off the far levee a second later, fainter.

"And Gim?"

"Is my brother's boy." His voice didn't change. "Hon's son. My oldest brother. When our father sent me over the water, I was seventeen and Hon was twenty-four, and Hon stayed, because somebody had to stay. Somebody had to farm and take care of Ma and Pa and keep the house. He stayed for all of us. He never came. Thirty-four years I send him money and he sends me letters, and in every letter there's something about Gim. Gim is walking. Gim fell in the pond. Gim is learning his characters, his hand is better than mine. Gim drew a picture of the tower." He set the bottle down on the grass between his feet, carefully, so it would not fall. "Last year there were bandits on the Sam Hap road. They took two boys from the next village for ransom. And the rice failed. And Hon wrote, Wing, I have done my part. Take my son."

"And you couldn't bring him as a Chan."

"The Chan Yuen paper had two sons. I was one. Your father was the other. There's no Chan for Gim." He spread his big square hands. "But I had Bing. Bing came up here after the fire in 1906 with one shirt, and no work, and I gave him a room and I found him the orchard job, and I wrote his letters for him for nineteen years and never took a cent. Bing had a third slot with no boy in it. His own boys are girls. Three daughters." He almost smiled. "I said Bing, I'm not buying. I'm asking. He said, Wing, you can't buy what you already paid for."

*Family.* That was the word in the margin.

"And the others?" she said. "The book. All those villages."

"All those villages." He sighed. "Two hundred boys, maybe. More. I don't keep count. A man comes to me, he's paid for a slot, he's paid a lot, more than he has, his whole village has put in for it. And his boy is going to stand in front of men like your Mr. Brandt, men who know every trick, and if he stumbles once they send him back across the ocean, and the money's gone, and the village is ruined, and maybe the boy jumps over the side on the way home, it happens. So the father comes to me and says, Wing, you know the villages. Help my boy." He picked a foxtail off her sleeve. "So I help. I write him a page. I tell him what the well looks like and who lives in the fourth house. Sometimes I take money. Sometimes I don't. I never once took money from a family that didn't have it."

"It's against the law."

"So is the law," he said, and then, seeing her face, held up a hand. "No. That's not fair. You work for them. I won't say that to you. I'm sorry."

The bats went over. The phonograph down in town ran down and someone wound it up again and the opera started from the beginning.

"He's too perfect," Mei said.

Her uncle went very still.

"Brandt says so. He says no real son knows his own house that well. He says real sons argue with their fathers. The boy hasn't made one mistake in three days, Uncle. Not one. Except the mole."

"The mole."

"You wrote right. Bing said left. Bing's right, isn't he?"

"I got it from a letter," he said slowly. "From Bing's wife, years ago, about a photograph. I must have turned it around in my head." He rubbed his face. "And the boy said right."

"The boy said exactly what was on the page."

"Of course he did. I told him, don't change a word."

She laughed then, she could not help it, a short ugly laugh that hurt her throat. *Don't change a word.* He looked at her, startled.

"What else is Brandt going to ask?" he said quietly. "What does he want? If I knew what he was going to—"

"Don't."

It came out of her louder than she meant, loud enough that a man walking a dog along the levee road turned his head. She put the soda bottle down.

"Don't ask me that, Uncle. Don't ever ask me that. Not about this boy or any boy. I'm the one who sits in the room. I'm the one who carries the words across. If you ask me what they're going to ask and I tell you, then I'm not carrying anymore. I'm—" She stopped. Mr. Louie's words. *Walking somewhere of your own.* "I signed my name to it. My bought name. I still signed it."

For a long moment he said nothing. Then he nodded, once, slowly, the way the boy had nodded in Room Four when she told him his answers would be compared.

"All right," he said. "I won't ask."

"Promise."

"I promise." He reached for his bottle, remembered it was empty, and left it. "You know what's funny? When I wrote you that letter, when you got the job, I was so proud I told the whole river. My girl on the island. I was proud the way you're proud when your kid gets into a good school. I didn't think." He shook his head. "I really didn't think. I thought, now there's one of us on the inside, in the room, and she's honest. I thought that would be good for everybody."

"It is good for everybody."

"Is it good for you?"

She didn't answer. Down in the town, someone had started the mahjong again, and the long roar of the shuffle came up over the roofs, and then the clack of the walls being built, tile on tile on tile.

---

She took the night boat down. He walked her to the landing and carried her bag and said nothing about the book, and nothing about the boy, and at the gangway he put a paper parcel into her hands. She could feel the warmth through the paper. She could smell it, honey and soy and smoke.

"For your mother," he said. "Not for you. You're not allowed to bring anything back. I know the rules." He tried to smile. "It's pork. It's not evidence."

She took it. She stood at the rail on the left side going down, which was the side that would get the sun in the morning, and watched him on the landing under the one electric light until the boat came round the bend and the levee hid him, a big square man hands in pockets, head not thrown back at all.

The Lum File

The Lum file came back from Sacramento on Tuesday morning, four days early, on the same seven-ten boat as Mei, in a canvas mail sack at Olsen's feet.

She did not know it was the Lum file. She knew only that there was a mail sack, and that Brandt was on the wharf waiting for it, in his buttoned jacket, in the fog, which he never did. He took the sack from Olsen himself and signed for it and walked up the boardwalk ahead of everyone with it over his shoulder like a sailor going home.

"Well," said Mr. Louie, beside her at the rail. "Somebody in Sacramento has done their job. That's very unusual. We should send flowers."

Mei did not answer. She had slept perhaps three hours on Sunday night on the boat and perhaps two on Monday night in her own bed, lying on her back and listening to the lightwell: Mrs. Jue's son coming in late, the fiddle player failing at his five notes, her mother's treadle downstairs going until past midnight, steady as a heart. Her mother had taken the pork from her at the door on Monday morning and smelled it and looked at her daughter's face and said only, "You'll tell me when you're ready," and gone down to the shop.

She was not ready. She did not know what ready would look like.

---

Room Four at nine o'clock was colder than she had ever known it. The radiator had died over the weekend and the engineer had not yet come, and the fog stood against the window so thick and white that the room seemed to be wrapped in wet cotton. Doris had her coat on over her cardigan and a pair of gray wool gloves with the fingertips cut off, which she said she had kept since the Armistice for exactly this kind of occasion. Coyle came in rubbing his hands and blowing on them. Brandt came in last with a file under his arm, and it was not the Fong file. It was thinner, older, the folder gone soft.

He sat. He laid the thin file beside the thick one and opened both, and put a finger on a page in the thin one, and looked at Mei.

"Lum Hoy," he said. "Landed in 1922, the son of a merchant in Stockton. From the village of Tai Tong, over the hill from Sha Kong. A good, honest, muddled boy. Couldn't remember how many brothers his grandfather had. Argued with his own father about the color of their front door, green or blue, for twenty minutes. Landed him on the third day." He tapped the page. "Mr. Coyle, do you remember what he said about the Sha Kong tower?"

"Can't say I do," said Coyle.

"He was asked if he could see any towers from his village. He said yes, the Fong tower, on the next hill. He was asked to describe it. He said it was three stories, gray brick, with a clock." Brandt turned the page toward Mei so she could see the typing. "And he was asked whether the clock kept time, and he said, and I quote: 'Yes, now it does. It was broken for some years after a typhoon, but in the spring before I left, a man came from Kongmoon with new hands and new springs, and now the boys of three villages set their watches by it, those that have watches.'"

Doris's typing stopped. She looked up over her cut-off gloves.

"Spring of 1921," Brandt said. "Four years ago. The clock has been working for four years." He closed the thin file. "Bring the boy in, Ed."

---

He had been on the island five weeks now. Mei could see it in him. He was thinner, and his color was worse, and the mended cuffs of his jacket were dirty again. He sat where he was told to sit, palms on his knees, and his eyes came to her, and she saw his eyes go to her face and search it, quickly, as if for weather.

He knew, she thought. Somehow the barracks knew she had gone to Locke. The barracks knew everything. The cooks talked to the guards and the guards talked to the laundrymen and the laundrymen talked to the men. He knew she had been to the Hing Lung. Maybe he even knew she had been in the office.

She kept her face still. She let her eyes rest on him for exactly as long as they rested on anyone, and then she looked at Brandt.

"Tell him we will continue where we left off," Brandt said. "Tell him I have a few more questions about his village."

She told him.

Brandt went slowly. He always went slowly, but today he went more slowly still, like a man walking out onto river ice and listening to it. He asked about the pond again. He asked about the widow with the goiter. He asked about the school. The boy answered as he had answered before, smoothly, in the same words, his eyes on the spot above Brandt's head. Mei carried every word across. Her own voice sounded to her like a stranger's, someone reading aloud from a book she had not chosen.

Then Brandt said, "Tell me again about the tower."

The boy told him. Three stories. Gray brick. At the east end of the village. A round clock with a white face, on the east side, below the top window.

"Does it keep time?"

Mei put it into Toishanese.

And there it was, for the first time in four sessions: a hesitation. Not long. If she had blinked she would have missed it. His mouth opened and he drew a breath, the breath of a boy about to say something, and then closed again, and his eyes left the spot above Brandt's head and dropped, just for an instant, to the table, and then went back up.

"No," he said. "It stopped at twenty past four in a big wind. People say it was the hour the tax collector came."

Mei carried it across. She carried every word. Her pencil was flat on the page and her hand was cold.

"Who repaired it?" Brandt said.

She translated.

"Nobody has repaired it," the boy said. "It is stopped."

"A witness from Tai Tong says it was repaired in the spring of 1921 by a man from Kongmoon. He says the boys of three villages set their watches by it."

She translated that too. *Three villages.* She watched the words reach him. Tai Tong, Sha Kong, and the third one, across the ponds. Ngau Tau.

The boy kept his eyes on Brandt a long while. Then they moved to Mei.

It was not a pleading look. That was what she would remember afterward, in the ferry, and at home, and for years. It was not a look that asked her for anything. It was the look of somebody standing on one side of a river and seeing a person he knows standing on the other side, and realizing that she cannot come across, and that he cannot either, and that they are both going to stand there.

"I don't know about any man from Kongmoon," he said. "I only know what I know."

She carried it across.

Brandt wrote something. He wrote for a long time. The fog bell on Point Blunt rang one stroke, and then, a long while after, another.

"What can you see," Brandt said, "from the top of the tower?"

"I have never been to the top of the tower."

"From the bottom, then. From the east side, where the clock is."

The boy thought. "The ponds," he said. "Three ponds. And across the ponds, Ngau Tau village."

"What is Ngau Tau?"

"A village of the Toy family."

"Do you know anyone in Ngau Tau?"

The boy was quiet. Mei translated the question again, exactly the same, because sometimes they asked her to repeat and she had learned to do it before they had to ask.

"Everyone in our villages knows everyone," he said finally. "We go to the same market. We fish in the same ponds. The children fight across the bunds."

"That's not what I asked. Do you know any family there by name?"

He looked down at his hands on his knees. His thumb was moving against his trouser leg, back and forth, a small, rubbing motion, the motion of a boy smoothing a carving with his thumb to see if the edges are clean.

"No," he said. "Not by name."

Mei carried it across, and signed her name at the bottom of the page at the end of the session, M. Chan, Interpreter, in the same neat hand as always.

---

At the recess Coyle took the transcript to the window and read through it with his lips moving, which he did when he was unhappy, and said, "Well, all right, the clock," and then, "Look, he's a kid, he's been stuck on this rock for five weeks, maybe he just got it wrong," and then, "Damn it, Harold, I liked this one."

"So did I," said Brandt. "I liked him very much. He has a very good memory." He gathered the files. "The trouble is it isn't his."

"You're going to deny."

"I'm going to recommend denial. You can dissent. Then it goes to the Commissioner." Brandt put on his hat. "But I'll give him one more session. Friday. With the father recalled. I've wired Sacramento already. If the father can tell me who fixed that clock, I'll eat this file." He looked at Mei. "Miss Chan, you look unwell. Is it the cold?"

"Yes, sir."

"Get the engineer to look at the radiator on your way down. Tell him I said it's a disgrace. Tell him I used that word." He paused at the door. "You've done good work on this case. Very exact. I appreciate exact."

Then he was gone, and Coyle after him, grumbling, and Doris pulled the cover over her typewriter and came round the table and stood beside Mei's chair.

"Honey," she said. "Go outside. Get some air. You're the color of the wall."

---

She did not go outside. She went down to the basement first, because Brandt had told her to, and found the engineer, a Scot named Ross, eating a sardine sandwich beside the boiler in a heat so thick it smelled of hot iron and coal dust and the oil on his overalls. She told him the radiator in Room Four was a disgrace and that Inspector Brandt had used that word. Ross looked at her over his sandwich with deep pleasure. "Did he now," he said. "Did he really. I'll come up when I'm done with this, then, and not one minute before." The heat of the boiler room stayed on her face all the way back up the stairs, and then the cold of the corridor took it off again like a hand.

Then she went to the linen closet, which was empty, because Mr. Louie was still downstairs with a Sacramento merchant who had come about his nephew, and she sat at the table with the burn mark shaped like Ohio and opened her notebook to the back page.

At the front was the rule, in English and in brush. Never change a word.

At the back there was nothing. She uncapped her pen.

She drew a small box near the top edge and wrote in it, in brush strokes made with a fountain pen, which never looked right: *Toy Kwan, farmer.* Under it, four lines going down, and at the end of each line, another square. *Hon. Ming. Wing. Lok.* Under Hon, a line, and a square. *Gim.* Under Lok, a line, and a square, and she stopped with the pen over it for a long time before she wrote, in English, in pencil, below the brush, so that the two names sat one above the other like the floors of a house: *Mei.*

Then, at the side of the page, she wrote small, in English: *Chan Wing. Chan Lok. Fong Yik-Chuen.* And drew a line from each paper name to the real one, so that when she was done the page looked like a net, or a map of a river with all its sloughs.

She was still looking at it when the door opened and Mr. Louie came in and saw it, and saw her face, and closed the door very carefully behind him.

One Name

Mr. Louie did not sit down. He went to the hot plate and filled the kettle from the jug and set it on the coil, and stood with his back to her while the coil ticked and reddened, and only when the kettle began to make its first small sounds did he speak.

"Close the book, please, Miss Chan."

She closed it.

"Thank you." He took the tea tin from the shelf, opened it, measured leaves into the pot with the little bamboo scoop he kept in the tin, two scoops and a half, the way he always did. "I'm going to ask you some questions now. You will notice that I am asking them as if I were on a board. That is because I would like to be able to say, later, if anybody asks me, that I asked them."

"All right."

"Have you told anyone outside Room Four anything that was said inside Room Four?"

"No."

"Not your mother? Not your uncle?"

"No."

"Has anyone asked you to?"

She thought of the levee, the cold soda bottle, her uncle beginning, If I knew what he was going to—

"Someone began to," she said. "I told him not to. He promised."

Mr. Louie nodded slowly at the kettle. "Have you carried anything into Room Four that was not given to you there? A paper. A word. A look."

"No."

"Have you changed a word?"

"Not one."

"Then you have done nothing wrong," he said. "Yet."

The kettle began to sing. He took it off the coil before it could reach the high note and poured, and the smell came up, toasted and green and clean, and filled the little room. He set a cup in front of her and sat down at last across the table, and put his own cup between his hands, and looked at her over it.

"*Yet* is the important word," he said. "In this work it is always the important word. You understand what happens on Friday."

"Brandt recalls the father. One more session."

"And you sit in the chair. And the inspector asks a question, and you carry it to a boy who is—" He stopped, and lifted one finger off the cup, toward the closed notebook. "I won't say what he is. I haven't read it. I only saw a drawing of a family upside down from across a room, which anybody might do. But you know what he is. And from the moment you knew it, every word you carry across that table is a word carried by his family. Exact or not exact. It doesn't matter. Brandt would say so. The Commissioner would say so. I would say so."

"I know."

"In 1917," Mr. Louie said, "there were two interpreters on this island named Tom and Wong. Good men. Better at the work than I was then. They were dismissed and indicted for taking money from families to soften the questions. Tom went to McNeil Island for two years. Wong was acquitted and could never work again. The inspectors who sat with them for seven years were never quite sure afterward of any case they had heard. Hundreds of cases." He drank. "They didn't only lose their own jobs. They made every Chinese face in that chair into a question. Mine. Yours, before you were hired. You were hired anyway, which surprised me."

She held the cup. It burned her palms and she let it.

"What do I do?"

"I'm not going to tell you that."

"Mr. Louie—"

"If I tell you what to do, then I have carried something to you that you will carry into that room, and then it is two of us." He set the cup down. "I'll tell you only what the regulations say, which you could read for yourself on the board downstairs. An interpreter who has a personal relationship with an applicant or a witness must disclose it to the inspector in charge and ask to be relieved. Must. Failure to disclose is grounds for dismissal." He paused. "What you disclose, and in what words, is your own business. A relationship can be described in many ways. All of them true."

She looked at him. He looked back, his gray mustache perfectly level.

"And if the case came to you," she said slowly, "on Friday. If I were relieved."

"Then I would take it," he said. "And I would carry every word, exactly. As I always do." He picked up his cup again. "And I would know nothing about the boy except what he said in the room. It is the one way I have ever found to be of use to anybody."

---

The engineer had fixed the radiator by two o'clock, banging on the pipes until the whole second floor rang like a fire station, which made Coyle wince and Doris laugh. Mei did the afternoon cases, a merchant's son and a laundryman's wife, and carried every word, and heard nothing.

On the four-forty boat she stood at the rail and watched the city come up out of the haze, and the fog came in behind the boat over the Marin hills in a long slow wave, like milk poured into a bowl, and covered the island before they were halfway across.

On the lower deck a crew of carpenters going home from a job at the fort were passing a bag of roasted peanuts from hand to hand and dropping the shells over the side, where the gulls fought for them and lost interest, and fought again. The air smelled of salt and the carpenters' sawdust and the burnt-sugar smoke from the coffee roaster on the Embarcadero, which reached a long way out over the water on an east wind. Mr. Louie stood beside her the whole way and did not say a word, and when they reached the pier he lifted his hat to her, as he always did, and said, "Good night, Miss Chan," as he always did, and walked off up Clay Street with his newspaper folded into its long thin strip under his arm. She watched him go. She had worked beside him for nine months and she had never once asked him where he lived.

---

Her mother was not at the machine.

The shop was dark, the six machines under their covers, and the light was on upstairs. When Mei came into the kitchen her mother was sitting at the table, which she never did before nine o'clock, with a pot of tea and two cups, and a bundle wrapped in a clean white flour sack on the chair beside her.

"Sit," her mother said.

Mei sat.

"I've been waiting since Monday," Chan Lai-Fong said. "You came home with Wing's pork and Wing's face. I know that face. Your father had it when he had something to say and didn't want to say it. I'm too old to wait any more. Ask."

So Mei asked.

And her mother told her, sitting very straight at the kitchen table with her hands folded on the oilcloth, in a low, level voice with no tremble in it at all, as if she were giving the measurements for a pair of trousers. How she had been married at nineteen in Hong Kong, to a man from Ngau Tau she had never met, who had come over the water four years before as the second son of a Dupont Street merchant named Chan Yuen. How she had come to San Francisco in 1902 on a merchant's wife's certificate that was half true, because she was the wife, but he was not the merchant's son. How she had stood in the old detention shed on the Pacific Mail dock, before there was any island, for three weeks, answering questions about a house she had never seen in a village she had never been to, because the Chan Yuen family's village was not her husband's village, and somebody had written her a page too.

"Who?"

Her mother almost smiled. "Who do you think? He was writing them even then. On the back of rice-sack labels. He was twenty-eight and he thought he was very clever." She poured the tea. "He was very clever. I passed."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because your father asked me not to." She pushed a cup across. "He said, she's born here. Her papers are real. When they look at her, let them see a girl with one name. Let her not have to stand in a shed in her head every time somebody asks her where she's from. Let her be the one in the family who doesn't need to remember." She looked down at her own hands. "I thought he was right. For years and years I agreed with him. Then they gave you that job. On the island. And I thought, now she'll hear it, in that room, from some boy's mouth, before she ever hears it from mine."

"I heard it from Uncle's book."

"That's worse," her mother said. "I'm sorry."

She reached over and untied the flour sack on the chair.

Inside was a quilt, folded small. Mei had seen it all her life. It had lived at the bottom of the trunk at the foot of her mother's bed, under the winter blankets, and came out only when someone was sick or at New Year, when it went over the back of the good chair. It was made of cotton, blue and white and the red of dried chilies, in small squares and triangles, hand-pieced, the stitches so fine they looked like a seam of salt along each edge. The cotton had gone soft as skin. It smelled of camphor and cedar and, faintly, of the trunk.

"Your Auntie Hon made this," her mother said. "Hon's wife. Of the Yee family. In Ngau Tau. She made it for my wedding and sent it over the water with a letter that Wing read to me, because I couldn't read hers, her characters were village characters, very bad. She said she had put one square in it for each person in the Toy house, so I would always have them with me." She laid her palm flat on it. "Count."

Mei counted. Thirty-one squares in the center panel, in a block, set apart from the triangles around them by a narrow band of red.

"Grandfather. Grandmother. Hon. Ming. Wing. Lok. Hon's wife. And the rest are cousins and aunties and a great-uncle who was blind and lived in the back room." Her mother touched one square near the corner, plainer than the others, a blue so faded it was nearly gray. "That one she added later. She sent it in 1906, in a letter, just the one square, with the edges turned under, and asked me to stitch it on. For her new son."

Gim.

Mei touched the square. It was rougher than the others, a coarser cotton, as if it had been cut from something that had been worn. A shirt, maybe. A baby's jacket.

"I said Chan people," her mother said quietly. "Last week. About the tower. 'The Fong people built it and the Chan people looked at it for free.' I heard myself say it. Thirty years, the other word doesn't come out of my mouth anymore. Even in my own kitchen." She shook her head. "Your father would have laughed at me. He always said Toy. In this kitchen, at night, with the door shut. He said it so I wouldn't forget."

Downstairs, faintly, through the floor, Mei heard the street: someone's phonograph, a vendor calling, a streetcar bell on Washington. Above, the fiddle player began his five notes. Her mother did not look up.

"What are you going to do?" her mother asked.

"I don't know."

"Wing will have told you what he wants."

"He promised not to ask me anything."

"Then he's grown up a little. Good." Her mother folded the quilt again, slowly, corner to corner, the way she folded finished shirts for the wholesaler, sharp, exact. "I won't tell you either. You're the one in the chair." She tied the flour sack around it and held it out. "But whatever you do, don't do it halfway. Halfway is how people get hurt. Do the whole thing, whatever it is, and then stand there."

Mei took the quilt. It weighed almost nothing.

"Keep it in your room for now," her mother said. "And Mei. The album. When you have time. Under everybody who has two names, write both." She got up by degrees, one palm pressed to the oilcloth, the way she stood at the end of a long day at the machine. "Pencil. In case we change our minds."

The Hospital Window

On Wednesday the fog lifted early, which it had not done since the Fourth of July, and the island looked like a different place.

Mei saw it from the boat. The water in Raccoon Strait was blue, actually blue, a hard bright cobalt with white chop on it, and the hills of Marin across the strait were gold with dry grass and dark green in the folds where the oaks grew. The eucalyptus on the island's slopes stood up silver-gray and shining, every leaf turning in the wind. The white buildings of the station looked freshly washed. Even the barracks, behind their wire, looked almost cheerful, like a boarding school on a postcard. Olsen, at the gangway, had taken off his coat and was in his undershirt, showing arms tattooed with an anchor and a woman's name that had been partly covered by a different woman's name.

"Summer," he said, with disgust. "It'll last an hour."

It lasted until ten-fifteen, when the hospital sent down for an interpreter.

Mr. Louie was in a board with the Sacramento merchant's nephew. The other Toishanese interpreter, a young man named Jue who came only three days a week, was not there. That left Mei. The orderly who brought the message was a tall, sad boy from Petaluma who had been at the station a month and was still frightened of the detainees. He held the slip out to her at arm's length.

"Chinese male," he said. "Hand infection. Doc says he won't hold still."

She read the slip. *Fong Yik-Chuen. Barracks, upper floor.*

She stood up. She thought of Mr. Louie's rules, and of the regulation on the board downstairs, *must disclose*, and of the fact that she had not yet disclosed anything to anyone. She thought that if she said now that she could not go, the orderly would ask why, and she would have to say something, and whatever she said would be the beginning of Friday, here, today, on a Wednesday morning in the sunshine, to a frightened boy from Petaluma.

And she thought that the boy upstairs had an infected hand and would not hold still because nobody in the room could tell him what they were about to do to it.

"Show me," she said.

---

The hospital stood on the hill above the administration building, a two-story frame building with deep porches and tall windows, painted white, with green shutters. Inside it smelled of carbolic and iodine and floor wax, a sharp, clean, frightening smell that went straight to the back of the throat. The floors were pale linoleum. The walls were the same green as the board floor. Through the windows the sun came in in long bright bars and lay across the iron beds, and the sheets in the sun were so white they hurt to look at.

The boy was in a small room at the end of the corridor, sitting on the edge of an examining table with his left hand held against his chest. The doctor was a short, bald, impatient man named Ames, with a gray mustache stained yellow from cigarettes and a white coat with a burn hole in the pocket. A nurse in a starched cap stood at the side counter laying out instruments on a white enamel tray, one by one: a scalpel, a probe, forceps, a roll of gauze, a brown bottle. Each made a small hard click on the enamel.

"Finally," said Ames. "Tell him I need to see the hand. Tell him I'm not going to cut it off. I've told him that four times in English and he looks at me like I'm going to cut it off."

Mei told him.

The boy looked at her. His face had gone gray-yellow, and there was sweat along his hairline, and his eyes were too bright. He held the hand out slowly, palm up.

It was swollen to twice its size from the wrist to the knuckles, the skin stretched shiny and red and hot-looking, and in the center of the palm, at the base of the thumb, there was a dark puncture with a yellow head on it, the size of a split pea. A red line ran from it up the inside of his wrist.

"Hell," said Ames, quietly. "Ask him how this happened."

Mei asked.

"A nail," the boy said.

"What was he doing with a nail?"

She asked.

The boy hesitated, and then said, "Carving." He moved his good hand a little, a small gesture, a nail moving against wood. "On the wall. By my bed. I hold the nail like this, and push with the palm. Five weeks. The palm wore through."

She carried it across.

Ames grunted. "They all do it. Every one of them. I've told the Commissioner, give them pencils and paper, let them write it down, and he says pencils and paper are contraband because they'll use them for coaching. So they use nails instead, and get lockjaw, and I get to deal with it." He rinsed his hands at the basin, hard, with a brush. "Tell him I'm going to clean it and open it and let the poison out. Tell him it's going to hurt like the devil for about a minute and then it's going to feel a whole lot better. Tell him he has to keep absolutely still or I'll cut something I don't want to cut."

She told him, word for word, the devil and all. She found she had no trouble with the words at all. The boy listened, and nodded, and put his hand flat on the white towel the nurse laid on the table, and turned his face away toward the window.

"Tell him to look at something," Ames said. "Out the window. Tell him to count the boats."

She told him. "Count the boats in the strait."

"There's one," he said, after a moment. "A sailing boat. Two sails, one white and one brown."

Ames picked up the scalpel.

It took less than a minute. Mei watched the boy's face and not his hand. She saw him clench his jaw and go white around the mouth and keep his eyes on the window, and she heard him counting, under his breath, in Toishanese, one, two, three, and then, when Ames pressed, four, in a voice that broke on it, and five, six, in a whisper. There was a smell, sudden and bad, and the nurse's hands moving quickly with the gauze, and the click of the scalpel going back onto the enamel tray.

"There," said Ames. "Done. Good boy. Tell him he's a good boy."

She told him.

"Six boats," the boy said, very faintly. "One is a ferry."

Ames laughed, a short bark, and stripped off his gloves. "Tell him to keep it clean and dry and to stop carving the damned walls. Tell him if that red line goes past his elbow, he's to tell a guard right away. Tell him I'm keeping him here till tonight to watch it." He threw the gloves in the bucket. "Nurse, dress it, I've got a measles in eight. Miss, wait for the nurse, he'll need you to tell him about the dressing."

And then he was gone, and the nurse, who had wrapped the hand in a thick white mitten of gauze and taped it, said, "I'll get a sling from the store," and went out after him, leaving the door half open, and her footsteps squeaked away down the waxed linoleum.

They were alone.

---

She stood by the counter with the enamel tray, with its scalpel and its stained gauze, and the brown bottle, and she looked at the window and not at him. Out in the strait the ferry was coming across from Tiburon, white, with a feather of smoke. The sailing boat with one white sail and one brown had gone behind the point.

"You're Lok's daughter," the boy said.

She did not answer.

"I won't say anything about the case," he said, quickly, low. "Uncle Wing said not to look at you, not to talk to you, not to know you. He said if I looked at you, it would make trouble for you. I looked anyway. On the first day. I'm sorry."

"I can't talk with you," she said. Her voice came out very steady, steadier than she felt. "Not about anything."

"I know." He was quiet. Then: "Only one thing. Not the case. It's from my mother. She said if I ever saw Auntie Lai-Fong, or anyone from Auntie Lai-Fong's house, I should ask if the blue held. In the quilt. She was always worried. It was my baby jacket, she cut it up, it wasn't good cotton. She wants to know if the blue held."

Mei looked at him then.

He was sitting on the edge of the examining table with his bandaged hand in his lap like something he had been given to hold, and his face was gray and wet and nineteen years old, and he had his father's square jaw, which was also, she saw now, her own father's square jaw in the one photograph she had of him. She did not know how she had not seen it on the first day. She had been looking at the words.

"It's gray now," she said. "Nearly gray. But it held. The stitching's all there."

He shut his eyes. He nodded. "Good," he said. "She'll be happy. Gray is all right."

That was all. That was the whole of it. The footsteps were coming back down the corridor, squeak, squeak, and the nurse came in with a sling made from a folded triangle of muslin and said, "Here we are, then," and Mei told him, word for word, how to keep the dressing dry, and that the nurse would change it at six, and that he was to sleep here tonight and not in the barracks, and he nodded at each sentence, and did not look at her again.

---

She went down the hill afterward into the sunshine, which was still there, and sat on the end of the wharf in her good skirt with her feet over the water, which the guards did not allow and nobody stopped her doing. The tide was out. The rocks at the foot of the pilings were furred with green weed and crusted with barnacles and black mussels, and small crabs moved among them sideways, unhurried. The water was so clear she could see the bottom, pale sand with long ribbons of eelgrass waving in it. A school of small silver fish turned all at once under her shoes, flashed, and turned again, as if one mind were steering them. The planks under her were warm and gave off a smell of tar and salt and old rope. Somewhere up the hill, in the station's garden, a guard's wife was beating a rug over a fence, and the slow soft thuds came down to the water a little after each swing of her arm.

She had broken Mr. Louie's rule. Not the one about words. The other one. She had spoken to a detainee, in a room alone, about his family, which was her family.

She had not told him anything about the case. He had not asked. She had not carried anything into Room Four and she had not carried anything out of it. But she had carried something across, all the same, from her mother's kitchen to an examining table on a hill, and she did not know what to call it, or whether any regulation had a word for it.

Gray is all right, he had said.

Olsen came out onto the wharf with a coil of rope over his shoulder, saw her, and stopped.

"You're not supposed to sit there," he said.

"I know."

He considered her. Then he set down the coil of rope and sat on it, a few feet away, and took out his pipe and filled it and lit it, and the smell of cheap sweet tobacco drifted over her on the wind.

"Fog's coming back," he said, nodding at the Gate. A long gray bank was lying on the sea outside the Gate, low and thick, waiting.

"I know," she said.

"Told you," said Olsen. "An hour."

A Crate of Bartletts

He came up the stairs on Thursday evening with a crate of pears on his shoulder, the way he had come up the levee steps with soda, slowly, breathing through his nose like a pump engine, and he set the crate down on the kitchen floor with a grunt, and straightened, and put his hands on the small of his back.

"Sixty pounds," he said. "Bartletts. Best on Grand Island. Bing picked them himself. The commission house on Washington Street took four hundred lugs off the boat this morning and I said, not this one, this one's for my sister-in-law."

"I'm not your sister-in-law," said Chan Lai-Fong, without turning from the stove. "I'm your brother's widow. It's different. A sister-in-law has to be polite to you."

"You've never been polite to me."

"So you see, it's working."

The crate filled the kitchen with its smell before he had even taken his hat off. Mei had never smelled so many ripe pears in a small room. It was sweet and heavy and a little like flowers and a little like wine, and it came up out of the wood and the straw packing and got into everything, the curtains, the dish towel, her hair. Her mother's steamed fish on the stove, with its ginger and scallion and hot oil, could barely hold its own.

He had come on the morning boat, he said. He had seen to the shipment, and had lunch at a cousin's restaurant on Jackson, and walked around Portsmouth Square for two hours looking at the pigeons, and then sat in the barbershop on Grant until the barber threw him out, and only then come here, because he knew Mei would not be home until six.

"You could have come to the shop," her mother said. "I was here."

"You'd have put me to work on buttonholes."

"You'd have done them badly."

"That's why I didn't come."

He sat at the kitchen table and Mei sat across from him, and her mother put down the fish, whole, on its long plate, with the scallions laid over it in green threads and the oil still crackling, and a bowl of rice in front of each of them, and a dish of choy, and a dish of salted egg steamed with pork, and sat down herself, which she never did at six o'clock. Nobody spoke of anything. They ate. Uncle Wing praised the fish and complained about the rice and told a long story about the barber that was not funny until the end, and then was very funny, and her mother laughed in spite of herself and covered it with her napkin, and through the lightwell came the voices of the building's other kitchens, Mrs. Jue's son asking for money, the fiddle player starting and stopping.

"He's terrible," Uncle Wing said, cocking his head toward the ceiling.

"He's been terrible for two years," Mei said.

"He's getting better," her mother said. "In two years he's learned five notes. In twenty years he'll know a whole song."

"In twenty years we'll all be deaf."

"Then it won't matter."

---

When the bowls were empty, he took a flour sack out from under his chair, where it had been the whole time, and put it on the table between the fish bones and the teapot.

Mei knew what it was before he untied it. She could see the shape of it through the cotton. The size of a family Bible. The green cloth at the corners.

"I'm not asking you anything," he said, before she could speak. "I promised. I keep promises. Ask your mother."

"He keeps promises," her mother said. "Unfortunately he makes very stupid ones."

"I'm going to tell you what I know," he said. "Not what I want. What I know. Then I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do. Then you can throw me down the stairs." He laid his big square hand flat on the flour sack. "Bing got a wire on Tuesday night. He's to come down to the island Friday morning, nine o'clock, to testify again. Everybody in Locke knows. Bing told me. He said the boy's sick, his hand is bad, they cut it open at the hospital. He heard that from the cook. The cook heard it from the laundryman." He shrugged. "And he heard they asked the boy about the clock."

Mei said nothing.

"So I know they know about the clock," her uncle said. "And I know the clock was fixed four years ago, because I've just spent two nights going through every letter from Sha Kong and Tai Tong and Ngau Tau I have ever read aloud at my counter, and in a letter from the Lum boy's mother in 1921 there it is. The man from Kongmoon. New hands. I read it out loud to Lum Hoy's father myself and I never wrote it down." He pressed his knuckles hard into his eyebrows. "Twenty years, and I miss the one line."

"Wing," her mother said.

"I know." He took his hands away. "So here's what I thought I'd do. On Tuesday night I thought, I'll write Bing a new page. A short one. The clock was fixed in 1921, a man from Kongmoon, it keeps time now. Bing goes in on Friday, he says it, everybody's happy." He looked at Mei. "And then I thought, if Bing goes in there with a new page, my niece is sitting in the chair. And she knows. She's read the book. She'll hear Bing say, a man from Kongmoon, and she'll know where he got it, and she'll have to carry it across, and she'll know she's carrying my page. And I promised her I wouldn't put anything in her hands."

He picked up a pear from the top of the crate and turned it over. It was a perfect one, pale gold, with the red blush on one side, a little brown freckling around the stem.

"So I didn't write it," he said.

"Thank you," Mei said, and it came out small.

"Don't thank me. I thought of something worse." He put the pear down. "On Wednesday I thought, I'll go to the island myself. I'll walk into the Commissioner's office and say, I am Toy Wing, called Chan Wing, of the Hing Lung store, and for twenty years I've written coaching papers for boys from the Sze Yup, and I wrote this one, and the boy is my brother's son and none of it is his fault. Take me. Let him go."

"They'd take you," her mother said flatly, "and they'd send the boy back on the next ship, and they'd go through every Fong file and every Lum file and every Chan file on that island for twenty years, and every boy you ever wrote a page for would be on a boat to Hong Kong by Christmas." She pointed her chopsticks at him. "And they'd come and look at Mei's papers. And mine. That's what would happen. That's the stupidest thing you've ever thought, and you once tried to dye your own hair with walnut shells."

"It was a good color."

"It was green."

"It was very dark green." He turned to Mei. "She's right. I know she's right. So I didn't do that either." He untied the flour sack and folded the cotton back. The green book lay on the oilcloth among the rice bowls. The smell of it came up, old paper and ink and the faint smoke of his office. "So this is what I'm going to do. Nothing. I'm going to do nothing, and Bing is going to go in tomorrow and say whatever he knows, which is that he doesn't know who fixed any clock. And the boy will say what he says. And you'll do what you do. And this—" he pushed the book across the table toward her, slowly, through the fish bones— "this is yours."

"I can't take that."

"You already read it."

"Uncle, that's—" She looked at it as if it might go up in flames. "That's evidence. Of everything. Every boy in it."

"Yes." He nodded. "It's evidence of two hundred boys in Stockton and Fresno and Ketchikan and Walnut Grove. Some of them have kids now. Some of them have stores. Sammy Jue's uncle is in there. Half the town of Locke is in there. Your father's in there. Your mother's in there, on the back of a rice label I glued in on page nine." He sat back. "It's been in my office for twenty years and I've always thought, it's mine, I'll decide. And then my niece walks in in her stockings and reads it while my cat watches, and I think, no. I'm not the one who sits in the room. She is. Let her decide."

"Decide what?"

"What it is." He spread his hands. "Whether it's a crime or a family history. Whether it goes in the stove or in a drawer or to the Commissioner. Whether anybody ever reads it again. I don't know. I've been the only one who knew what was in it for so long that I can't tell anymore."

Her mother had gone very quiet. She was looking at the book, at the soft frayed corner of it, with an expression Mei had never seen on her face, as if she were looking at a photograph of herself as a girl.

"Page nine," her mother said.

"Page nine," said Uncle Wing. "The rice label. You can see the printing through the paper. Golden Grain Mills, Canton. I wrote your whole house for you on the back of it the night before your ship. You were so angry. You said I'd made the stairs too steep."

"You had made the stairs too steep."

"And you passed," he said. "You walked up those stairs in your head for three weeks and you passed."

---

He left at nine, to sleep at the cousin's on Jackson Street and take the morning boat back up the river before Bing came down. At the door he put on his hat and stood for a moment looking at Mei, and his face went the way it had gone on the landing in Locke, where the laugh started to come up and could not find its way out.

"I'm proud of you," he said. "I want you to know I still say that. Whatever you do tomorrow. My girl on the island."

Then he went down the stairs, and she heard the street door, and his footsteps going away along Waverly Place under the lanterns, unhurried, and a man calling good night to him from a doorway, because of course he knew somebody on every block of every street in the world.

---

Mei sat at the kitchen table until midnight with the book closed in front of her.

She did not open it. She did not need to. She knew what was in it now: the squares and wells and ponds, the widows and the moles, the clock that had stopped and the clock that had started again. Her father on one page as a fourth son. Her mother on a rice label on page nine, walking up stairs that were too steep. A boy on the last page, in fresh ink, with a hand bandaged in white gauze, counting boats.

Her mother washed the dishes and dried them and put them away and did not say anything. When she was done she took a pear out of the crate and cut it into eight pieces on a saucer with the little paring knife, the slices falling over one another in a fan, wet and pale, the juice running onto the saucer, and set it down beside the book, and went to bed.

At midnight Mei got up and went into her room and took the quilt out of its flour sack and spread it on her bed, and put the green book under her pillow, and lay down on top of both in her clothes with the light off. Through the window she could see the top of the lightwell, a small square of sky, gray-orange with the city's lights reflected in the fog. The pears in the kitchen filled the dark with their smell.

She knew what she was going to say in the morning. She had known since Tuesday. She had only been waiting to be sure that she could stand there afterward.

She said it once in the dark, to the ceiling, to hear what it sounded like. In English first, the way she would say it in the morning to the Inspector in Charge. Then, because no one was listening but her mother through the wall, in Toishanese, the way her father had said the family name at this table, at night, with the door shut, so nobody would forget.

Relieved

She caught the seven-ten without running.

It was the first time in nine months. She was at the foot of Clay Street at ten to seven, with her hat on straight and her lunch in her bag and the notebook in her coat pocket, and she stood on the pier in the fog and watched Olsen roll the gangway out and hook it on, and he looked at her and then at his watch and then at her again.

"Are you sick?" he said.

"No."

"Somebody die?"

"No."

"Then what are you doing here on time?"

"I'm going to work," she said, and went up the gangway, and the planks were slick under her shoes with the wet.

Fong Bing was on board. She had known he would be. He sat inside the cabin at the far end, by the coffee urn, in his serge suit and his pearl-gray homburg, with the brown envelope on his knee and his hand on it. He saw her come in. He lifted his hat an inch off his head and set it down again, and looked out the window at the fog, and she sat down beside Mr. Louie, who had the newspaper folded in its long narrow strip and did not look up.

"You're early," Mr. Louie said.

"I have to see Mr. Whitcomb before nine."

The newspaper did not move. Then, slowly, Mr. Louie folded it one fold narrower.

"I'll be in the closet," he said. "Making tea. If anybody needs an interpreter."

---

The Inspector in Charge had an office on the ground floor at the end of the long porch, with a window onto the cove and a brass plate on the door and a carpet, the only carpet in the building, worn to the threads along the track that led to the desk. Mr. Edgar Whitcomb was a heavy, slow, quiet man of sixty who had been at the station since 1913 and was said to have read every file that had ever passed through it, which could not be true, but which nobody had ever proved false. He was at his desk when she knocked, eating a soft-boiled egg out of a cup with a small spoon. He finished the spoonful before he looked up.

"Miss Chan."

"Sir. I need to ask to be relieved of a case."

He put the spoon down in the saucer and wiped his mouth with his napkin and folded it and set it beside the egg.

"Sit down," he said.

She sat. The chair was hard and too low, so that she had to look up at him across the desk. She had rehearsed this in her room, in the dark, in two languages. She had rehearsed it on the boat. She found now that she did not need to rehearse it, that the words were there already, lined up, the way the answers were lined up behind the boy's eyes when he looked at the spot above Brandt's head. Except that these were hers. Nobody had written them for her.

"The case is Fong Yik-Chuen, sir. Inspector Brandt's board. The alleged father, Fong Bing, lodges in a building in Locke owned by my uncle, Chan Wing, and my uncle knows the family well. On the first day of testimony the witness gave me a personal message from my uncle as he left the room. I did not report it. On Saturday and Sunday I visited my uncle in Locke, off duty, and spoke to the witness there, briefly, about the case. I did not tell him anything that had been said in the room, and he did not tell me anything I have carried back into it. On Wednesday I was sent to the hospital to interpret for the applicant, and when the doctor and nurse had left the room I spoke with him for perhaps two minutes about a family matter that was not his case." She took a breath. "I should have come to you on Tuesday morning. I didn't. I'm sorry, sir. I'd like to be relieved. And if you think it right, I'd like to resign."

Whitcomb did not say anything for some time.

He picked up the spoon again and looked at it and put it down. Out the window, a gull landed on the porch rail, looked in at them both with one yellow eye, and left.

"Have you altered any testimony?" he said.

"No, sir."

"Have you softened any question? Hardened any answer? Left anything out?"

"No, sir."

"Will you swear to that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you conveyed any question in advance, or any information about the proceedings, to the applicant, the witness, your uncle, or any other person?"

"No, sir."

"Has anyone offered you money? Or anything else?"

She thought of the pork. *It's not evidence.*

"My uncle sent my mother a roast pork, sir. And sixty pounds of pears."

Whitcomb studied her. One corner of his mouth moved, a very small distance, as far as it probably ever went.

"I think we can leave the pears out of it," he said. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and uncapped his pen. "You understand that I'll have to have Mr. Brandt and Mr. Coyle review every transcript you've interpreted on this case. And possibly others."

"Yes, sir."

"And that if you'd waited until Inspector Brandt found this out by himself, which he would have, because he always does, I would not be offering you the choice of resigning."

"Yes, sir."

"And that you can't come back. Not to this station. Probably not to the Service."

She had known that. She had known it in the dark, on the quilt. It was different to hear it said in a carpeted room by a man with egg on his saucer.

"Yes, sir," she said.

He wrote. His pen scratched. The clock on his wall, a plain round clock with a white face, said eight twenty-six, and its second hand went round and round, keeping perfect time.

---

Brandt was waiting in the corridor outside Room Four. He had heard. Of course he had heard. Whitcomb's clerk had gone up the stairs two at a time ahead of her with a slip of paper, and the whole floor knew by now.

He stood with his back to the green wall, his jacket buttoned, his hat in his hand, and he looked at her as she came down the corridor in the same way he looked at a transcript: slowly, all the way to the end.

"Miss Chan."

"Sir."

"Mr. Louie will take the board this afternoon," he said. "I've put it back to one o'clock. Mr. Fong will wait." He turned his hat once in his fingers. "I've told Mr. Whitcomb that your transcripts are the most exact on this floor and that I've never had cause to question a word of them. I want you to know I said that."

"Thank you, sir."

"It isn't a kindness. It's a fact." He was quiet. Down the corridor Doris's typewriter started up in another room, a fast loud rattle, and stopped. "May I ask you something that's none of my business?"

"Yes, sir."

"What did you talk about with the boy? In the hospital. Two minutes, you said."

She thought about what to say. She thought about Mr. Louie's rule. She thought there was no rule now, that she had resigned it along with everything else at eight twenty-six, and that the only thing left was whether she wanted to tell the truth to this man, in this corridor, about this.

"A quilt, sir," she said. "His mother wanted to know whether a color had held."

Brandt looked at her.

"Had it?" he said.

"Mostly. It's gone gray."

He nodded slowly, as if that were a very reasonable answer to a question he had asked a great many people and never quite got before. Then he put on his hat.

"Good luck, Miss Chan," he said, and went into Room Four, and closed the door.

---

There was not much to clear out of the linen closet. Her notebook, which she had in her pocket. A spare pair of stockings in the drawer. A cup her mother had given her, blue and white, with a chip in the rim. A photograph of the ferry that Doris had cut out of a newspaper and pinned to the wall beside the window, under which someone, probably Coyle, had penciled the words Miss Chan's Carriage.

Mr. Louie was at the hot plate. He had made tea. He poured her a cup and set it on the table with the burn mark shaped like Ohio, and sat down across from her, and they drank it without speaking. It was the same tea it always was, toasted and green and clean.

"I'll take him at one," Mr. Louie said finally. "And the father."

"I know."

"I will carry every word."

"I know."

"I'll know nothing about him except what he says in the room." He set his cup down. "That's all I can do. It's what I do."

"It's enough."

"It's never enough," he said. "But it's exact." He reached into his breast pocket and took out his reading glasses and put them on, and then took them off again, which she had never seen him do. "My name is real, Miss Chan. Did you know that? Louie. My father's name and his father's. Born in Sacramento in 1871, to a man who came over in '52 when there were no papers to buy, because nobody had thought yet of keeping us out." He folded the glasses. "I've sat in a great many rooms as the only man with one name. People think that is a virtue. It isn't. It's luck. I used to think it made me better at this work." He looked out the window at the hill, at the eucalyptus, at the fog lying in the branches. "I think now perhaps it only made me lonelier at it."

Nothing of her own came to her, so she borrowed from her mother.

"You should eat more, Mr. Louie. You're too thin."

He laughed. A real laugh, out loud, not the hum through the nose. It startled them both.

---

Doris came down to the wharf to see her off on the noon boat. She had her cut-off gloves on, though it wasn't cold any more, and at the gangway she pulled them off and pushed them into Mei's hand.

"Armistice gloves," she said. "For the next disgraceful radiator. Wherever it is."

"Doris—"

"Don't. I'll cry, and then I'll get mascara on the Fong transcript, and Brandt will have me shot." She hugged Mei hard, briefly, smelling of typewriter ribbon and violets. "Write to me. In English. Your brush stuff all looks like birds walking to me."

The boat pulled out. The engine shook the deck under her feet and the wake opened behind them, white and then green and then gone, and the smell of hot oil came up from below, the same smell as every morning of nine months. A cook's boy was sitting on the sacks by the rail peeling an orange, and the sharp sweet spray of the peel reached her on the wind, and for a second she could not think where she was, and then she could. Olsen came past with a coil of line and did not say anything about her being on time, or about the noon boat, or about the bag in her hand. He only touched the brim of his cap to her, the way he did for the inspectors, which he had never done before.

Mei stood at the stern rail on the open deck in the fog and watched the island go: the wharf, the long white administration building with its porch, the hospital on the slope, and above them all the barracks, two stories of wooden siding and wire-mesh windows, gray in the gray. She could not see any faces in the windows. She had not expected to. She looked anyway, at the upper floor, at the far end, by the window, where a boy had carved an ox head down low on a board where nobody would see it.

The fog closed over the island before they were a quarter of the way across, and she turned around and faced the city, and did not turn back.

The Clock Keeps Time

Mr. Louie came to Waverly Place nine days later, on a Sunday afternoon, in a straw boater and a pale linen suit that made him look like someone else entirely, a retired druggist perhaps, or a man who sold insurance to other quiet men. He stood in the doorway of the sewing shop with his hat in his hand, and Mei's mother looked up from the cutting table and took him in from his shoes to his mustache with one long flat seamstress's look.

"You're the interpreter," she said.

"I am, Mrs. Chan."

"You're too thin."

"So I've been told," said Mr. Louie, and Mei, coming down the stairs with a basket of finished shirts, nearly dropped them.

She took him up to the kitchen because there was nowhere else, and her mother followed with a pot of tea because she was not going to miss this, and took the far chair with a shirt across her lap and a needle going, pretending to finish a buttonhole. Mr. Louie looked around the small hot kitchen, at the lightwell window, at the crate in the corner that still held a dozen Bartletts gone golden and freckled and soft, at the pencil marks in the album open on the shelf. He did not ask about any of it.

"I've walked past this building for twenty years," he said. "I live on Stockton, above the herbalist's. Four blocks. I had no idea."

"You never asked," said Mei.

"No. You never did either." He accepted a cup. "I came to tell you something that is not a secret. I want to be clear that it is not a secret. If it were, I wouldn't be here."

"All right."

"The applicant Fong Yik-Chuen was landed on Wednesday, when the Commissioner signed the board's decision," Mr. Louie said. "It was unanimous. He'll come over on the Thursday boat, at four-forty, with the others released that day. Somebody from his family will want to meet him at the Clay Street pier." He sipped. "That much is in the public notice. Anybody could read it. Your uncle probably already has."

Her mother's needle had stopped. Mei's hands were flat on the oilcloth, and she found that she could not feel them.

"And the other part," Mr. Louie went on, "is not a secret only because Mr. Coyle has now told it to the entire station at lunch four times, and to the cook, and to Olsen, and I believe to a visiting dentist, so it can no longer be considered confidential by any reasonable standard." He set his cup down. "At the one o'clock session, on the day you left, Inspector Brandt asked the boy one more time about the clock. Whether it keeps time."

"And?"

"And the boy said, I'll give it to you exactly, because Doris typed it and I carried it: 'Yes. It keeps time. It was fixed when I was fifteen, by a man from Kongmoon. I said it was stopped because my father remembers it stopped, from the last time he was home, and I didn't want to make my father wrong in front of you. I'm sorry. I should have said it is fixed. The boys set their watches by it. I didn't have a watch. I used to count the hours by it from the ponds.'"

Mei closed her eyes.

"Then Brandt called the father," Mr. Louie said. "And asked him who repaired the clock. And Mr. Fong said, 'I don't know who fixed any clock. I haven't been there since 1906. If my son says it's fixed, then it's fixed. He's been looking at it. I haven't.' And then Brandt asked him about the mole again, and Mr. Fong said left, and Brandt said, your son says right, and Mr. Fong turned to the boy across the table, in the middle of the board, which you know is not permitted, and said, 'Left, you fool, your mother's mole is on the left, how many times,' and the boy said, 'Right, Ba, it's on the right when you're looking at her,' and they argued about it for nearly a minute, which Doris typed, every word, until Mr. Coyle laughed so hard he had to leave the room."

Her mother made a sound at the end of the table. It might have been a laugh. She bent her head over the buttonhole and it came again.

"Mr. Brandt did not laugh," Mr. Louie said. "He waited until Coyle came back. And then he closed the file, and said, I believe the exact words were, 'That will do. That is a father and son.' And they voted." He picked his cup up again and looked into it. "I carried that too. Every word."

---

The Thursday boat came in at five-twenty, late, because there was a heavy fog on the bay that afternoon and the pilot had come across slow, sounding his horn every minute. The pier at the foot of Clay Street was crowded. Families stood along the rail with umbrellas against the drip, and children ran between the pilings, and two men from a Chinatown benevolent association stood by the gate with a list on a clipboard. There was a smell of wet wood and fish and coal smoke from the boat as it nosed in out of the gray, and then the long shudder and grind of the hull against the pilings, and Olsen at the bow throwing a line.

Uncle Wing had come down on the morning boat from Locke. He stood beside Mei at the rail in his good suit with his hat pushed back, not laughing, holding a paper parcel of roast pork against his chest like Fong Bing with his envelope. Her mother stood on her other side in her one good coat, very straight.

They came down the gangway one at a time, a guard at the top reading names. Eleven young men and two women, each with a bundle. Some were met by shouting crowds of relatives. Some were met by one man who shook their hand. One was met by no one and stood at the foot of the gangway looking at the city as if it might bite him, until one of the association men went over to him with the clipboard.

Gim was ninth.

He came down slowly, carefully, in his mended jacket, with a bundle in his good hand and the other hand still in its muslin sling, the bandage smaller now. His shoes didn't squeak anymore. He reached the bottom of the gangway and stopped and looked along the rail, the way the boy had looked along the rail in Room Four, quickly, searching faces for weather.

Uncle Wing did not shout. Mei had never once in her life seen him not shout. He walked forward through the crowd, slowly, with the parcel of pork held out before him as carefully as a bowl filled to the brim, and stopped in front of the boy, and they looked at each other.

"You look like your father," Uncle Wing said finally, in Toishanese.

"Everybody says I look like you," said Gim.

"Who says that?"

"My mother. She says it's not a compliment."

And then Uncle Wing laughed, the whole laugh, his head going back, the underside of his chin, and put the pork into the boy's good hand and the arm with the sling around his own shoulder, carefully, and they stood there with their foreheads nearly touching, and people moved around them on the wet planks like water around a rock.

Her mother went forward next. She did not hug him. She laid her palm against his cheek, the way she laid her palm flat on a seam to see if it would lie down, and held it there.

"Hon's boy," she said. "Of course you are."

Then he looked past her at Mei.

She had thought about what she would say. She had thought about it for six days. She found, standing on the pier in the fog in Doris's gloves, that she did not have to say anything, because he spoke first.

"The blue held," he said. "I told my mother. I sent a letter on Tuesday. Uncle Yee wrote it for me in the barracks. The old one who complained about the fish."

"I remember him."

"He said if I saw you, I should tell you the fish never got better." Gim considered. "He said to say it exactly."

Mei laughed. She had not expected to. It came out of her the way it had come out of her at fifteen at the long table in Locke, too loud, with rice wine nearly coming out of her nose, and her mother looked at her sharply, and Uncle Wing looked at her and laughed harder.

---

Labor Day weekend she went up the river one last time that summer. It was hotter than July. The river was low and slow and brown, and the levees were dry and gold, and the orchards on Grand Island were picked clean, the ladders stacked against the packing sheds, the windfalls rotting sweetly in the grass under a haze of wasps.

They did it on the Sunday night, after the mahjong, after everyone had gone home. Uncle Wing lit a fire of pear wood in the pit at the bottom of the brick oven in the yard, and when it had burned down to a bed of coals that breathed red and black in the dark, he brought the green book out from the office in both hands and set it on the back step, under the grapevine, in the light from the kitchen door.

Gim was there, home from his first week on the orchard crew with Bing, his hand healed to a pink seam across the palm, sunburned across the back of his neck in a stripe exactly like Bing's. Yuk Lan was there, because she said nobody was burning anything in her yard without her. Sammy Jue was not there, because nobody had told him, and he would be furious for a year.

Uncle Wing opened the book to the first page.

"Sam Hap," he said, reading the name of the village at the top. He looked at the drawing for a moment, the squares, the well, the bridge with one lion. "The other lion fell in the river in the flood." Then he tore the page out along the stitching, carefully, and laid it on the coals.

It caught at the corner. The thin strong paper went brown, then black, then curled up on itself, and the brush characters stood out on it for a second in pale gray against the black, like frost on a window, and then they were gone, and the page was a soft gray flake that the heat lifted and turned over and carried up out of the oven mouth into the dark.

"Lung Mei," he said, and turned the page. "Five rows. The school burned, now in the new building by the road." He tore it out. The coals took it.

It took a long time. There were nearly three hundred pages. He read the name of every village, and one thing about it, only one, and then he tore the page out and laid it on the fire, and the yard filled with the smell of burning paper and old ink and pear wood smoke and the pork fat soaked into the bricks. The frogs went on in the sloughs. A boat went down the river with its lights on, beyond the levee, and its wake came slapping in against the landing a minute later.

When he came to Sha Kong he stopped, and handed the page to Gim without a word.

Gim looked at it for a long time by the kitchen light. The five rows. The pond a man could throw a stone across, but not a boy. The tower with its little round circle. The mole on the right. He touched the circle of the clock with his healed finger.

"It keeps time," he said, to nobody, and laid it on the coals himself.

At page nine Uncle Wing stopped again. He did not read anything. He took out of the book a soft folded rice label glued to a sheet, the printing showing through brown from the back, and handed it to Mei, and she put it in her pocket for her mother, still folded, without looking at it.

And at the end, the last page, the oldest one, soft as cloth at the edges, with the chain of three ponds and the banyan with the split trunk and, at the far edge, the Fong tower with its clock across the water, and in the middle, the names, careful, in a hand that had sat down to do it on purpose: Uncle Wing did not read it at all. He did not tear it out. He held the book open at it on his knees in the red light of the coals for a long time, and then he closed the green cloth cover over it, with nothing else left inside, and gave it to her.

"Not this one," he said. "This one you keep."

Both Names

In October of 1925 the evening school on Stockton Street needed someone to teach English to men who had come off the island in the last year, three nights a week, in a classroom on the second floor above a cigar maker's, for twenty dollars a month and the use of the blackboard.

Mei took it. She had no better offer. The Service had sent her a letter accepting her resignation, very correct, two paragraphs, signed by someone she had never met, and the Chinese school and the newspapers and the bank on Grant Avenue had all, politely, found that they did not need anybody just now. Twenty dollars a month did not go far. Her mother said that it went exactly as far as a person walked it and put her on buttonholes in the afternoons, and Mei discovered that she did buttonholes the way a cat does arithmetic, and was moved to hems.

The classroom smelled of chalk and the cigar maker's leaf coming up through the floorboards, a brown, sweetish, dusty smell that got into her coat. There were fourteen men in the first class, aged nineteen to fifty, in work clothes, with their hands still smelling of the laundries and the kitchens and the fish market they had come from. They sat in rows on benches built for children, their knees up near their chins, and copied the alphabet off the board in careful, square, beautiful letters, as if they were brushing characters, and pronounced them in ways that made her laugh, and then laughed at her laughing.

On the first night she wrote on the board, in English, a sentence for them to copy. *My name is.* And then she stopped, chalk in her hand, with fourteen men waiting.

"Write your name," she said in Toishanese. "Whichever one you want."

Some of them wrote one. Some of them, after a while, slowly, looking sideways at each other, wrote two.

---

Gim came down from Locke at New Year with Uncle Wing and a whole roast pig in the hold, and sat in the third row of the evening class for one week of his visit, out of what he said was curiosity and what was in fact, she knew, his uncle's instructions. He was the worst student in the room. He spent most of the hour drawing in the margins of his copybook: the ponds, the bamboo, the banyan with the split trunk, the tower across the water, all in a fine, quick, certain line that made the man beside him lean over to look.

"You're supposed to be writing the alphabet," she said.

"I am," said Gim. "Look." And he had, down the side of the page, every letter, each one sitting in a square of its own like a house in a row.

Uncle Wing never wrote another page. He told her so at New Year, at the long table in the back room in Locke, between hands of mahjong, without being asked. He said he had retired from the coaching business and taken up the far more honest business of selling rubber boots at a twenty percent markup. He said Fong Bing had a new tenant in the third slot of his heart, which was a gramophone, and played the same record every night until Yuk Lan threatened to drop it in the river. He said the boy was the best ladder man on the island by the end of his first harvest and would be a foreman before he was thirty, and then he would buy the orchard, and then the island, and then the river, and Uncle Wing would sit on the levee and charge him rent for the view.

Gim did buy an orchard, in the end, though a small one, and not until 1948.

Mr. Louie came to tea on Waverly Place on the first Sunday of every month after that, in his straw boater in summer and a gray felt hat in winter, and sat at the end of the kitchen table and let her mother tell him he was too thin. He never once spoke about a case. He told them instead about the herbalist below his flat, who had been feuding with the herbalist across the street since 1909 over the price of dried tangerine peel, and about the pigeons in Portsmouth Square, which he had begun, in his retirement, to name. Doris wrote every Christmas from Oakland, in a big round hand on cards with robins on them, and the news was always the same: the coffee was still terrible, Coyle had made it, and Brandt had asked after Miss Chan again, in passing, as though the thought were new.

---

San Francisco, March 1975

"Three stories," said Mei.

"Four," said Gim.

"Three. Uncle Wing drew three. Look. Three boxes."

"Uncle Wing never saw it. He left before they built it. He drew it from letters." Gim leaned over the velvet, his reading glasses shoved up into his gray hair, his big square sunburned hands, the hands of a man who had spent fifty summers on a ladder, held carefully behind his back so as not to touch anything, because his granddaughter had told him twice. He was sixty-nine, gray, thick through the shoulders, and he had driven down from Courtland that morning in his pickup truck with a lug of last autumn's pears from cold storage in the back for Mei, because he said she had never once in her life eaten enough. "Four stories. The top one is small. That's where the clock was. Below the top window, on the east side."

"You told the board three."

"I told the board what the page said." He straightened up. "I was nineteen. I'd have told them it had wings if the page said wings."

He had already told it once that afternoon, while Lisa changed the film. How the clock had looked from the bund between the second and third ponds, small and white, like a coin somebody had pressed into the side of the tower. How on still mornings you could hear it strike across the water if the wind was right, and the ducks would lift off the pond at the first stroke, every morning, as if they had never heard it before. How he had learned to tell the hour by it before he could read, and how the boys from all three villages had argued over whether it ran a minute fast, and how the man from Kongmoon had come with a box of springs and brass wheels on a carrying pole and stayed four days, and every child in Ngau Tau had sat on the wall of the bund and watched him through the window, and he had let them hold the screws.

Lisa was laughing behind the camera. She had been laughing for ten minutes, ever since her grandfather came up the stairs and saw the page on the velvet under the two lamps and stopped short on the threshold, cap still on, and said, very quietly, "Oh," and then, after a moment, in a completely different voice, "That's wrong, that tower."

She had a small cassette recorder on the table beside the fruit bowl, a black box the size of a book, with a microphone on a cord. She had asked him before she switched it on. She had asked him in English and then, when he made a face, in her careful library-class Toishanese, which was so bad that he had agreed at once, out of pity. The little reels turned behind their plastic window. On the label on the cassette she had written in her round, square-lettered hand: *Toy Gim (Fong Yik-Chuen), Courtland. With his permission. About the Ngau Tau page.*

"So what do I write?" she said. "For the label. Three or four?"

Mei and Gim looked at each other.

The radiator knocked. Outside, while they argued, the fog had rolled down off Twin Peaks, and the foghorns had started up out by the Gate, one after another, low and patient, the same horns, she thought, though they must have replaced them a dozen times by now. On Sacramento Street a car went by with its radio on, too loud, some song with a lot of drums, and faded downhill toward the water. The flat smelled of tea and the dust of old boxes and, from the lug on the kitchen floor, the heavy, flowery, winy sweetness of Bartletts, so strong in the warm room that it was like having the orchard in the next room.

"Write both," Mei said.

Lisa cut a fresh strip of paper and wrote, slowly, saying it aloud as she went, so the recorder would catch it.

"Ngau Tau village and the Sha Kong tower, Toishan. Drawn from letters by Toy Wing, called Chan Wing, of the Hing Lung store, Locke, between 1905 and 1925." She paused. "Tower: three stories, according to the drawing and Auntie Mei. Four stories, according to Grandpa, who could see it from the ponds."

"Put that he's right," said Gim.

"I'm not putting that you're right."

"Put that I counted the hours by it."

Lisa looked at Mei. Mei shrugged.

"Put it," she said. "He did."

Lisa wrote it. She laid the strip on the velvet below the soft brown page, and adjusted it a quarter inch with the end of her pencil, not touching the paper, and looked through the camera, and adjusted it again.

Then she said, "And the names. Down here. Under the family."

Mei came round the table and stood at her niece's shoulder and looked down at the page in the lamplight. *Toy Kwan, farmer. Sons: Hon. Ming. Wing. Lok.* Her uncle's careful hand, the one he had sat down on purpose to use. *Entered as Chan Wing. Entered as Chan Lok. One daughter, Mei, born in San Francisco.* And at the bottom, in ink that had been fresh in July of 1925 and was the same brown as the rest now, fifty years on: *Toy Gim, son of Hon. To Gold Mountain as Fong Yik-Chuen.*

Gim had confessed in 1962, when the government had offered paper sons a way to come forward and have their true names put back on the record, and had stood in an office on Sansome Street for three hours with Mei beside him, not interpreting, only sitting, while a young man with sideburns typed it all up. He had been a Toy on paper for thirteen years. His son was a Toy. Lisa was a Toy. On her library badge it said *L. Toy*, and she had told Mei once, at a family dinner, that she had been eleven when it changed and could hardly remember being anything else, and had never once thought about it, and Mei had told her that was exactly what Mei's own father had wanted for his daughter, and Lisa had not understood, and now she did.

Mei was still a Chan. Her certificate said Chan. Her teaching license said Chan. Fifty years of evening classes on Stockton Street, and the men who had sat in her rows and their sons and their grandsons, said Miss Chan, and she had not had the heart to make them learn another word for her. But in her mother's album, on the shelf by the window, under every print of every person in the family who had two names, there were two names, in pencil, one above the other, like two floors of the same house. Her mother had made her go back and do every one. Neat.

"Write it the way he wrote it," Mei said. "And then under it, write ours. In English. In pencil."

"Why pencil?"

"In case we change our minds."

Lisa looked at her for a second. Then she took a pencil from the jar and bent over a new strip of paper and began to write, in her round square library hand, the names, both of them, each one, while the recorder turned on the table and the radiator knocked and her grandfather stood behind her with his hands clasped at his back, reading over her shoulder, and correcting her spelling of Ngau Tau, twice, and being wrong the second time, and arguing about it.