east—turns, over the years after Pittsburgh, into Wheaton, Illinois. Winston Ma and his new wife plant a substantial mulberry in their bare backyard. It’s a single tree with two sexes, older than the separation of yin and yang, the Tree of Renewal, the tree at the universe’s center, the hollow tree housing the sacred Tao. It’s the silk tree on which the Ma family fortune was made, a tree to honor his father, who’ll never be allowed to see it.
He stands near the planting, its black ring of soil like a promise at his feet. He won’t wipe his muddy hands even on his dungarees. His wife Charlotte, scion of a fallen southern planting family that once sent missionaries to China, tells him, “There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.’ ”
The Chinese engineer smiles. “Good one.”
“ ‘When is the next best time? Now.’ ”
“Ah! Okay!” The smile turns real. Until today, he has never planted anything. But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.
COUNTLESS NOWS PASS. In yet one more, three little girls eat corn flakes underneath their breakfast tree. It’s summer. The mulberry puts forth its messy clusters of achenes. Mimi, the firstborn, nine years old, sits among the fruit spatters with her little sisters, her clothes stained red, bemoaning their family’s fate. “It’s all Mao’s fault.” A Sunday morning, midsummer, 1967, with Verdi blasting out of their parents’ locked bedroom, as it has every Sunday of Mimi’s childhood. “That pig Mao. We’d be millionaires if it wasn’t for him.”
Amelia, the youngest, stops stirring her cereal into a paste. “Who’s Mao?”
“World’s biggest crook. He stole everything Grandpa owned.”
“Somebody stole Grandpa’s stuff?”
“Not Grandpa Tarleton. Grandpa Ma.”
“Who’s Grandpa Ma?”
“Chinese Grandpa,” middle Carmen says.
“I’ve never seen him.”
“Nobody’s ever seen him. Not even Mom.”
“Dad never saw him?”
“He’s in a work camp. Where they put rich people.”
Carmen says, “How come he won’t ever talk Chinese? It’s suspicious.” One of the many mysteries their father is so generous with.
“Dad stole my poker chips, when I was beating him.” Amelia pours milk from her bowl to feed the tree.
“Stop talking,” Mimi orders. “Wipe your chin. Don’t do that. You’ll poison the roots.”
“What does Dad even do?”
“Engineer. Dope.”
“I know that. ‘I drive the train. Toot, toot!’ He wants me to laugh, every time.”
Mimi tolerates no stupidity. “You know what he does.” Their father is inventing a phone no bigger than a briefcase that runs off a car battery and can travel anywhere. The whole family helps test it. They must go out to the garage and sit in the Chevy—phone booth, he calls it—every time they make a long-distance call.
“Don’t you think the labs are creepy?” Carmen asks. “How you have to sign in, like it’s a big prison?”
Mimi holds still and listens. Verdi pours out of her parents’ upstairs window. They’re allowed to eat under their breakfast tree, but only on Sunday. On a Sunday morning they could walk to Chicago, and no one would even know.
Carmen follows Mimi’s gaze. “What do you think they do in there, all morning?”
Mimi shudders. “Will you get off my wavelength? I hate when you do that!”
“Do you think they touch each other, naked?”
“Don’t be gross.” Mimi sets down her bowl. She needs clarity and a place to think, and that means getting altitude. She steps up into the low vee of the mulberry, heart pumping. My silk farm, her father always says. Only no silkworm.
Carmen shouts, “No climbing. Nobody in the tree. I’ll tell!”
“I’ll squash you like a bug.”
This makes Amelia laugh. Mimi pauses in the stirrup. The fruits dangle down around her. She eats one. It’s sweet, like a raisin, but she’s sick of them, she’s had so many already in her short life. The branches zigzag. It bothers her, so many different shapes of leaves. Hearts, mittens, crazy Boy Scout hands. Some are furry underneath, which creeps her out. Why would a tree need hair? All the leaves are notched, with three main veins, like the three of them. She reaches up and snaps one off, knowing the horror that will follow. Thick, milky tree blood oozes from the wound. This, she thinks, is what the worms must somehow turn into silk.
Amelia starts to cry. “Stop! You’re hurting it. I can hear it scream!”
Carmen looks up at the window that Mimi is trying to reach. “Is he even Christian? Whenever he goes to church with us, he never says the Jesus stuff.”