moon cakes. The scroll . . . We’ll have to think.”
They put the trays of jewels into the safe and push the file cabinet back in front of it. Then they lock up the bookkeeper’s cage, seal the office, and go downstairs. They pause outside in the Nanjing Road, thronged with people doing business, despite the looming end of the world.
“I bring them back,” Sih Hsuin says, “when my school is done, and everything safe here again.”
His father gazes down the road and shakes his head. In Chinese, as if to himself, he says, “You can’t come back to something that is gone.”
WITH TWO STEAMER TRUNKS and a cardboard suitcase, Ma Sih Hsuin takes the train from Shanghai to Hong Kong. There he learns that his health certificate, acquired at the American consulate in Shanghai, isn’t good enough for the ship’s medical officer, who must be paid another fifty dollars to examine Sih Hsuin again.
The General Meigs has just been decommissioned and transferred to the American President Lines for use as a Pacific passenger liner. It’s a little world fifteen hundred people wide. Sih Hsuin bunks on one of the Asian decks, three stories beneath daylight. The Europeans are above, in the sun, with their deck chairs and liveried waiters serving cold drinks. Sih Hsuin must shower with dozens of other men, under buckets, bare naked. The food is vile and hard to keep down—waterlogged sausages, pasty potato, and salted ground cow. Sih Hsuin doesn’t care. He’s going to America, to the great Carnegie Institute, to get a graduate degree in electrical engineering. Even the squalid Asian quarters are a luxury—no falling bombs, no rape or torture. He sits in his berth for hours, sucking on mango stones, feeling like the king of creation.
They dock in Manila, then Guam, then Hawaii. After twenty-one days, they reach San Francisco, port of entry for the lucky land of Fusang. Sih Hsuin stands in the Immigration line with his two trunks and flimsy suitcase, each stenciled with his English name. He’s Sih Hsuin Ma now—his old self turned inside out, like a jaunty, reversible jacket. Colorful patches cover the suitcase—stickers from the ship, a pink University of Nanking pennant, an orange one from the Carnegie Institute. He feels carefree, American, filled with affection for people of all nations except the Japanese.
The customs official is a woman. She looks over his papers. “Is Ma your Christian or family name?”
“No Christian name. Only Moslem name. Hui.”
“Is that some kind of cult?”
He smiles and nods many times. She narrows her eyes. For a panicked moment, he thinks he’s been caught. He lied about his date of birth, putting down November 7, 1925. In fact, he was born on the seventh day of the eleventh month—the lunar calendar. The conversion is beyond him.
She asks him the length, purpose, and location of stay, all detailed in his paperwork. The whole conversation, Sih Hsuin decides, is a crude test of his ability to remember what he’s written down. She points at his steamer trunks. “Could you open that, please? No—the other one.”
She inspects the contents of the food box: three moon cakes surrounded by thousand-year eggs. She gags as the tomb is opened. “Jesus. Close it.”
She picks through the clothes and engineering texts, stopping to examine the soles of a pair of shoes he has repaired himself. She lights upon the scroll box, which Sih Hsuin and his father decided to leave hidden in the open. “What’s in here?”
“Souvenir. Chinese painting.”
“Open, please.”
Sih Hsuin blanks his mind. He thinks about his homing pigeons, about Planck’s constant, anything except this suspect masterpiece that will, at very least, bring down customs duty far in excess of his stipend for the next four years, or, at worst, get him arrested for smuggling.
The agent’s face wrinkles at the sight of the arhats. “Who are they?”
“Holy people.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Happiness. They see the True Thing.”
“And what is that?”
Sih Hsuin knows nothing about Chinese Buddhism. He has only a rough estimate of English. Now he’s supposed to explain Enlightenment to this American woman official.
“The True Thing mean: human beings, so small. And life, so very big.”
The agent snorts. “They’ve just worked this out?”
Sih Hsuin nods.
“And this makes them happy?” She shakes her head and waves him through. “Lotsa luck in Pittsburgh.”
SIH HSUIN BECOMES WINSTON MA: a simple engineering fix. In myths, people turn into all kinds of things. Birds, animals, trees, flowers, rivers. Why not an American named Winston? And Fusang—his father’s mythic land to the