plane into the expanses of Spaceland. Truth comes over her like a revelation: The only thing worth believing in is measurement. She must become an engineer, like her daddy before her. It’s not even a choice. She’s an engineer already, and always has been. And as with Abbott’s Square, the minute she comes back to Flatland, her Holyoke friends want to lock her up.
She transfers to Berkeley. Best place for ceramic engineering she can find. The place is a staggering time warp. Future masters of the universe study alongside unrepentant revolutionaries who believe the Golden Age of Human Potential peaked ten years before.
She thrives, reborn Mimi, looking like a diminutive Kazakh carrying a programmable calculator, and, in the estimation of many, the cutest thing ever to mouth the Hall-Petch equation. She savors the eerie Stepford Wives climate. She sits in the eucalyptus grove, the trees that explode in the dry heat, solving problem sets and watching the protesters with their placards full of all-caps slogans. The better the weather, the more irate the demands.
The month before graduation, she dons a killer interview suit—sleek, gray, professional, inexorable as a NoCal earthquake. She interviews with eight campus reps and gets three offers. She takes a job as a casting process supervisor for a molding outfit in Portland, because it offers the most chance to travel. They send her to Korea. She falls in love with the country. In four months, she learns more Korean than she knows Chinese.
Her sisters, too, wander across the map. Carmen winds up at Yale, studying economics. Amelia gets a job nursing wounded wildlife in a discovery center in Colorado. Back in Wheaton, the Ma mulberry is assailed on all fronts. Mealybugs cover it in cottony wisps. Scale insects mass on its branches, invulnerable to all her father’s pesticides. Bacteria blacken the leaves. Her parents are helpless to save the thing. Charlotte, in her thickening fog, murmurs about bringing in a priest to pray over it. Winston pores through horticulture bibles and fills his notebooks with impeccably printed speculations. But each season brings the tree closer to capitulation.
Winston calls Mimi when she’s back in Portland from another Korea trip. He reaches her from the family phone booth, the Ma garage. His invention has shrunken down to the size of a hiking boot, so reliable and power-thrifty that Bell Labs starts licensing it to other outfits. But Winston takes no pleasure in telling his daughter that his life’s work has at last come to fruition. All he can talk about is his failed mulberry.
“That tree. What he do?”
“What’s wrong with it, Dad?”
“Bad color. All his leaves, falling.”
“Have you tested the soil?”
“My silk farm. Finish. It never make one thread.”
“Maybe you should plant another.”
“Best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.”
“Yep. And you always said the next best time was now.”
“Wrong. Next best time, nineteen years ago.”
Mimi has never heard this cheerful, endlessly resourceful man sound so low. “Take a trip, Dad. Take Mom camping.” But they’ve just come back from a ten-thousand-miler up to the salmon streams in Alaska, and the notebooks are filled with meticulous notes that will take years to go over.
“Put Mom on.”
There’s a sound—the car door opening and closing, then the door to the garage. After a while, a voice says, “Salve filia mea.”
“Mom? What the hell?”
“Ego Latinam discunt.”
“Don’t do this to me, Mom.”
“Vita est supplicium.”
“Put Dad back on. Dad? Is everything okay out there?”
“Mimi. My time coming.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“My work all done. My silk farm, finish. Fishing going down, little bit every year. What I do now?”
“What are you talking about? Do what you’ve always done.” Make charts and graphs of next year’s campsites. Fill up the basement with stacks of soap and soup and cereal and any other items that happen to go on sale. Fall asleep every night to the ten o’clock news. Freedom.
“Yes,” he says. But she knows the voice that formed her. Whatever he pretends that yes to mean, it’s a lie. She makes a note to call her sisters and discuss the Wheaton collapse. Parents on the fritz. What to do? But long-distance to the East Coast is two dollars a minute, if you don’t have a magic shoe phone. She decides to write them both that weekend. But that weekend is her ceramic sintering conference in Rotterdam, and the letters slip her mind.
IN THE FALL, with his wife in the basement studying Latin, Winston Ma, once Ma Sih Hsuin to everyone who knew him, sits