Emperor come and go. Qing, Ming, Yuan. Communism, too. Little insect on a giant dog. But these guy?” He clicked his tongue and held up his thumb, as if these little Buddhas were the ones to put money on, in the run of time.
At that click, a teenage Mimi lifted from her own nine-year-old shoulders to gaze at the arhats from high up and years away. Out of the gazing teen rose another, even older woman. Time was not a line unrolling in front of her. It was a column of concentric circles with herself at the core and the present floating outward along the outermost rim. Future selves stacked up above and behind her, all returning to this room for another look at the handful of men who had solved life.
“Look the color,” Winston said, and all her later selves collapsed around Mimi. “China surely a funny place.” He rolled up the scroll and put it, in its case, back on the closet floor.
In the mulberry, Mimi thinks that if she could ascend another few feet above the Earth, she might look into her parents’ window and see what Verdi is doing to them. But down on Earth, revolution erupts. “No climbing!” Amelia yells. “Get down!”
“Shut your trap,” Mimi suggests.
“Dad! Mimi’s in the silk farm!”
Mimi drops to the ground, a foot from crushing her little sister. She grabs the kid’s mouth and gags her. “Shut up, and I’ll show you something.”
With the perfect hearing of childhood, both sisters know: the something is worth seeing. In another moment, under cover of the swelling Verdi chorus, they creep together, commando-style, into their father’s office. The filing cabinet is locked, but Mimi opens the lacquered box. The scroll unrolls on Winston’s drafting table to the image of a figure seated underneath a gnarled, patient tree.
“Don’t touch! They’re our ancestors. And they’re gods.”
AS MUCH AS HE LOVES ANYTHING in life, the Chinese electrical engineer who brings his family into the garage to make long-distance calls to their Virginia grandparents on a car phone bigger than a yule log loves his national parks. Winston Ma spends half a year planning the annual June ritual, marking up maps, underlining guidebooks, taking neat notes into scores of pocket notebooks, and tying strange trout flies that look like tiny Chinese New Year dragons. By November the dining room table is so full of preparation that the family must eat their Thanksgiving meal—clams and rice—in the breakfast nook. Then vacation comes and they’re off again, the five of them crammed into the sky-blue Chevy Biscayne with roof rack and back seat as wide as a continental shelf, no air-conditioning and a cooler full of juice on ice, logging thousands of miles on trips to Yosemite, Zion, Olympic, and beyond.
This year they return to his beloved Yellowstone. Every campground along the way gets an entry in Winston’s notebooks. He writes down the campsite number and evaluates it according to a dozen different criteria. He’ll use the data over the winter to perfect next year’s route. He makes the girls practice their musical instruments in the back seat. This is easier for Mimi, on trumpet, and Carmen, on clarinet, than for little Amelia and her violin. They forget to pack books. Two thousand miles with nothing to read. The two older girls stare at their little sister for dozens of Nebraska miles until Amelia breaks down and cries. It passes the time.
Charlotte gives up trying to control them. No one suspects yet, but she has already begun to slip into the long private place that each passing year will deepen. She sits in the front seat, navigating maps for her husband and humming Chopin nocturnes under her breath. Dementia starts here, in these days of quiet, automotive sainthood.
They camp near Slough Creek for three days. The younger girls spend hours playing Old Maid. Mimi joins her father in the stream. The shared lassitude of casting, the C of the line as it lengthens in the air, that four-stroke swelling rhythm with the stiff hand stopping at ten and two, the ripple of the dry fly as it alights on the water, her small dread that something might actually strike, the startle of the fish’s mouth when it breaks the surface: these are charmed to her and will stay so forever.
Knee-deep in the cold current, her father is free. He maps the sandbars, measures the speed of the water, reads the bottom, watches for hatch—those simultaneous equations in multiple unknowns that