forbade us ever to speak of the gem again. And with tears in his eyes he said Lao-li and I were his treasures. A treasure—that was what I wanted to be! Not a thief! Not a cursed killer!
“I thought many times to bury the Shanghai Moon in the garden. To throw it in the river. As though that would remove the curse! Always I was stopped by the thought of Aunt Rosalie. How she had loved it. I hid it among my things.
“In the weeks that followed, I found my young cousin shared my understanding that the loss of the gem had caused Rosalie’s death. Hadn’t Uncle Paul and Uncle Kairong said exactly that? At first we returned to that day over and over, trying to comprehend, but finally, terrified of its power, we made a pact never to speak about it. We kept to our word until my cousin stunned me, weeks later, with an idea spoken casually, as simple truth: Finding the gem would bring his mother back.
“I was a child, at the limit of my understanding, but I knew this was wrong. He went on to confess his greatest fear: that he was not up to the task, and that she could not come back until he accomplished it.
“What I would have given for adult counsel! But I could ask for none. But I also could not bear for my cousin to shoulder this impossible task and the guilt that would accompany his inevitable failure. I was racked with enough guilt for two already! I determined to take the only course I saw. I would show him the Shanghai Moon. I had no doubt this would bring down on my head the punishments the gem’s thief and possessor deserved, but it had to be done for my cousin’s sake.
“Some nights later, by the glow of a forbidden candle, and with my heart pounding, I retrieved the Shanghai Moon and held it out to him. He took it from me with a child’s interest in a sparkling, pretty thing, admired it, and gave it back. He didn’t seem to understand. ‘This is the Shanghai Moon,’ I said. ‘It was Aunt Rosalie’s. Cousin, in this life she cannot come back.’
“He smiled as though I was kind but simple-minded. ‘No,’ he said. ‘When I find the Shanghai Moon, she will come back.’
“Possibly you can imagine how it was for me then. A child alone with this secret, this quandary! Three more times in the next months I tried to show the gem to him, and three times he denied the jewel I had was the missing Shanghai Moon. Until finally he became angry with me. His shouting and his tears brought Uncle Paul running to see what the trouble was. Neither of us would say. In my terror of being discovered I professed ignorance, and my cousin said only that I had been teasing him. Uncle Paul asked us please to find ways to be kind to each other. Then he sat us down and said he had something to tell us that would make us sad, so he was going to tell us now, when we were sad already. He was going away, he said, leaving Shanghai. He was on his way to America, a beautiful place, and we were to stay with Kai-rong and Grandfather, but someday we could come see him in America, too. A few weeks later, he sailed from the harbor.
“I never again showed the Shanghai Moon to anyone, from that day to this. Aunt Rosalie’s death, my cousin’s anger, Uncle Paul’s leaving us—all these things were bound in my mind to the gem. As I grew to manhood, of course, I came to understand that the truth was both simpler and more complex than my childhood fears had made it. Still, it was years before the magic powers of the Shanghai Moon ceased to hold me, and to frighten me.”
Mr. Zhang turned the brooch in his fingers. “Those powers have never ceased to hold my cousin. He grew up obsessed with the gem. In time he began to laugh at his former connection between its return and Rosalie’s. The fantasy of a grieving child, innocent and foolish. Or so he said, and no doubt believed he believed. But his obsession did not diminish. Nothing interested him but gems. He read and studied, became an authority, and when we arrived here he took up his profession without hesitation. And, freed of the embargo against the