his father, but there’s nothing left to help. He stands and takes the stairs, two at a time. But by now everything is as clear as Christmas, everything anyone needs to know. Upstairs, the two women curl up in their bedrooms and can’t be wakened—a late-morning sleep-in on Christmas Eve.
Blur rises up his legs and torso. He’s drowning in pitch. He runs back downstairs, where the old propane heater still cranks away, venting gas that rises and pools invisibly underneath the ceiling that Nick’s father has so recently snugged up with extra insulation. Nick blunders through the front door, trips down the porch steps, and falls into the snow. He rolls over in the freezing white, gasping and reviving. When he looks up, it’s into the branches of the sentinel tree, lone, huge, fractal, and bare against the drifts, lifting its lower limbs and shrugging its ample globe. All its profligate twigs click in the breeze as if this moment, too, so insignificant, so transitory, will be written into its rings and prayed over by branches that wave their semaphores against the bluest of midwestern winter skies.
MIMI MA
THE DAY IN 1948 when Ma Sih Hsuin gets his third-class ticket for a crossing to San Francisco, his father starts addressing him in English. Forced practice, for his own good. His father’s magisterial British colonial speech runs rings around Sih Hsuin’s own electrical engineer’s functional approximations. “My son. Listen to me. We’re doomed.”
They sit in the upstairs office of the Shanghai complex, half company trading house, half family compound. The enterprise of Nanjing Road percolates up to the window, and doom is nowhere to be seen. But then, Ma Sih Hsuin is not political, and his eyesight is that of a man who has worked too many math problems by candlelight. His father—scholar of art, master calligrapher, patriarch with one major and two minor wives—can’t help lapsing into metaphor. Metaphor embarrasses Sih Hsuin.
“This family has come so far. From Persia to the Athens of China, you might say.”
Sih Hsuin nods, although he would never say any such thing.
“We Hui Moslems have taken everything this country threw at us, and packaged it for resale. This building, our mansion in Hangzhou . . . Think of what we have outlasted. Ma resilience!”
Ma Shouying gazes out into the August sky, staring at all the calamities the Ma Trading Company has survived. Colonial exploitation. The Taiping uprising. The destruction of the family’s silk plantations by typhoon. The 1911 revolution and the ’27 massacre. His face turns toward the room’s dark corner. Ghosts are everywhere, victims of violations that not even the philosopher magnate who hired a pilgrim to go to Mecca for him dares to name out loud. He spreads one palm on the paper-stacked desk. “Even the Japanese couldn’t break us.”
HISTORY GIVES SIH HSUIN a rash, the random ebb and flow. He’ll travel to the States in four days, one of a handful of Chinese students in all of 1948 to be granted visas. For weeks he has studied the maps, gone over the letters of acceptance, practiced all the inscrutable names: USS General Meigs. Greyhound Supercoach. Carnegie Institute of Technology. For a year and a half, he’s attended matinees of movies with Gable Clark and Astaire Fred, practicing his new tongue.
He plows on in English, out of pride. “If you want, I stay here.”
“Want you to stay? You have no idea what I’m saying.”
His father’s stare is like a poem:
Why do you linger
at this fork in the road
rubbing your eyes?
You don’t get me,
do you, boy?
Shouying pushes up from the chair and crosses to the window. He looks down the Nanjing Road, a place as eager as ever to profit from that bedlam, the future. “You’re this family’s salvation. The Communists will be here in six months. Then all of us . . . Son, face facts. You’re not cut out for business. You should go to engineer’s school forever. But your sisters and brothers? Your cousins and aunts and uncles? Hui traders with lots of money. We won’t last three weeks, once the end comes.”
“But the Americans. They promise.”
Ma Shouying crosses back to the desk and takes his boy’s chin in his fingers. “My son. My naïve son with his pet crickets and homing pigeons and shortwave radio. The Gold Mountain is going to eat you alive.”
He releases his son’s face and leads the way down the hall into the bookkeeper’s cage, where he unlocks the grate and shoves aside a filing cabinet to