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  “I’m not your wife,”Agnes said, irritated. “I’m your daughter.”

  Her father screwed up his eyes, his fingers digging into his temple. Then he let out a loud, embarrassed laugh. Yet he seemed delighted by his mistake. “My daughter,”he said. “Please excuse me. Yes, of course, my daughter.”

  After she saw off her father at the airport, Agnes remembered the secret place he had told her about where he had hidden his money, and she decided to return to his apartment.

  In the living room, she stared at the scrolled paintings on the wall. Melons with their curling vines, a powder blue bird hanging on a branch too thin for its talons, a lopsided horse as fat as a cow scratching its neck against a tree. She took these scrolls off their hooks and rolled them up. Then she ran her hand along the wall, searching for a loose brick. She could not find one. She pressed her hands against the bricks until the skin on her palms tingled with rawness. Anyone who saw her groping this way would think she was mad.

  She looked in his desk drawers and underneath his mattress. She crawled around trying to find a loose spot in the carpet, but there was no part that would come undone. She could almost swear the carpet smelled faintly carcinogenic. Had he smoked a cigarette here? Maybe, after all, it was a habit he couldn’t leave behind.

  In his closet, she found a door to a crawl space that had been hidden by his clothes. She had to crouch through to get in. It was a place for storage and apparently had never been swept, the floor littered with sawdust. She couldn’t see much of anything and went back for a lamp, which she left in the closet as far as the cord could reach. There was nothing in the space except an old crumpled shirt, which she knew was not her father’s. But then in the dim recess where the light barely reached, she saw a yellow shape, which turned out to be a suitcase, and just looking at it she knew it was her father’s, something her parents had used when they still lived in Taiwan. The suitcase lay on its side, and there were gashes in the fabric which he had covered up with duct tape.

  Agnes sneezed twice when she unzipped the suitcase. She expected old clothes, maybe even the cash he had mentioned, but instead the suitcase was crammed full of letters. The envelopes were cold to the touch, permeated with the chill dankness of the room, as cold as a basement. Her father had thrown them in rather heedlessly, and the letters had conformed to the shape of each other. She could see this in the indentations of the envelopes, pressed and stuck together like so many leaves. Little rectangles of blue paper, with red and blue stripes along the borders. Aerogramme. Par avion. There were long, slender envelopes with torn sides, the corners cut out with scissors where the stamps had been. She recognized some of the names on the envelopes—Jia Wen, Wang Peisan, Zhou Meiping, Wu Yenchiu—various friends and colleagues of her father’s, though she was unsure if any of them were still living.

  In the pile, she spotted her own handwriting. A letter she had written to her father from Rochester. She had always been careless about her writing, and her characters now struck her as hasty and anonymous in their uniformity. She put the letter aside and searched through the pile for her mother’s name. She felt a strange sensation similar to the hope she felt whenever she saw her mother in her dreams. The envelope she reached for was covered with tea-colored stains, fantastically bent, curling around the edges. Though her mother’s name was on the front, the handwriting was unfamiliar to Agnes. She pulled out a tissue-thin sheet of rice paper, folded vertically in thirds. The letter was dated February 19, 1946. Her mother wrote with a strong, fluid hand.

  I have arrived safely in Yancheng. The doll you gave Shuling is quite beautiful and interesting. She is always playing with it, holding it in her hands, and I’m afraid she’ll break it, so I put it in a glass jar so that she can look but not touch. Let her appreciate it more that way. Her appetite has improved lately. You would be amazed to see how quickly she moves about, how she turns left and right as she walks. She tries to talk, and I still don’t understand her, but her hands point to different things, and I know what she wants.

  Agnes couldn’t finish the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. Better to forget, she told herself. Her fingers smelled of dust and old paper, and she stared vacantly at the suitcase full of letters. Had he left them behind for her? She wished she had never found them. On all the envelopes, his name. HsuWeimin. Addresses she had forgotten and others she had never known. All the places he had ever lived. Yancheng and Hechuan and Nanjing and Taipei. Then the last places. Bloomington. Washington, DC.

  Agnes stood up, wiping the dust off her fingers. In the kitchen, she found an empty trash bag, and she returned to the crawl space, grabbing letters by the fistful and throwing them inside. How cold and brittle they were! She would never read them, she knew that, and their presence was a small stone in her heart. Nothing lasts, and she was not a sentimental person.

  “You cannot blame me,”she said out loud, as if her father were in the room, watching.

  Somewhere in the sky, her father lives. Perhaps he is asleep, perhaps looking out of his window, the clouds washing past in a dizzying blur of motion. In the rush of the plane, does he too sense that there is nowhere for him to go?

  A VISIT TO THE SUNS

  June was waiting inside one of the terminals at the Los Angeles airport. Her uncle had called to say he was stuck in traffic and would be an hour late, and she opened up a newspaper that someone had left behind on the seat beside her. The newspaper, the Mainichi Daily News, was one she had never heard of. She flipped through the pages and began reading an article about hikikomori, socially alienated youth who rarely come out of their rooms. Apparently there had been a disturbing case of one hikikomori who abducted a nine-year-old girl at knifepoint and forced her into the trunk of his car. He kept the girl in his bedroom for the next nine years without his mother knowing, even though she lived in the same house.

  The man, Nobuyuki Sato, had wrapped adhesive tape around the girl’s hands and feet at first, then trained her to speak quietly, not to touch the door or get off the bed without his permission. Whenever she disobeyed, he punched her or used a stun gun on her arms and legs. After a while, the girl lost her will to escape. She said she felt as though she were tied up with invisible tape, and she stayed in the room even when Sato left the house without locking the door. As there was little she was allowed to do, the girl said she stepped on the bed in order to feel alive. She was found in a sleeping bag by health officials called in by Sato’s mother. The mother didn’t know who the girl was and said she hadn’t been allowed in her son’s room for over twenty years. The girl had been starved and was too weak to get out of the bag by herself. She didn’t want to cross over the red tape Sato had placed on the floor in the shape of a box and asked the officials to let her stay where she was.

  June felt a little sick after reading the article and was glad to set the newspaper aside. She wandered around the terminal and went inside a gift shop, where she bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker for her uncle, even though he probably wouldn’t drink it, and a box of chocolates for her cousins. Then she found a restroom and rinsed her face with cold water. By the time she stepped outside, almost an hour had passed, and she hoped her uncle would come soon. She thought once more about the girl, Fusako Sano, and what she had said about stepping on the bed in order to feel alive.

  According to the article, most hikikomori were not violent. That was a relief, as June couldn’t help but think of her younger brother in college. He was no psychopath, of course, but it was always a struggle to get him out of his room. The few times she saw him each year, when both of them were home for the holidays, he seemed to exist solely in front of his computer. He stayed awake until the wee hours playing an online game in which he assumed the role of a sorcerer who could breathe underwater and had a pet cockroach. Their mother delivered food to him on a tray, and when June berated her for spoiling him, her mother was quick to defend herself. “If I don’t bring food up to him, he’ll eat junk food,”she said. “Or nothing at all!”


  A few times June had burst into his room and tried to drag him out of bed by pulling on his arm. “We’re going to a restaurant, don’t you want to come?” But he only wrapped the blanket tighter around himself, sealing his body in an impenetrable cocoon and refusing to open his eyes. When he was a child, he had sought her out every evening because he was bored or lonely. She was nine years older than he, busy with school and her own friends, and when he knocked on her door, she often considered him a nuisance and told him to go away. She relented sometimes when he asked her to read to him, but she knew he didn’t really care about the books and only wanted to be close to her. She had never been able to get him to read on his own.

  The last time June was home was in December, four months ago. During that visit, her mother had entreated her brother, “Do not become like your pet gerbil!” This gerbil had always been cared for by June’s mother and lived a circumscribed life in the corner of the laundry room, often gnawing on the bars of its cage. June felt sorry for it and gave it newspaper to shred, but her mother claimed the ink was bad for its teeth. June had bought a wheel for it to run on, but the rodent was too stupid to exercise. It ate and grew fat and nested beneath tissue paper and pine shavings, and June could not imagine a more pitiful, monotonous life.

  A quarter of an hour passed before she saw a blue van pull up onto the curb. A thin, graying man with a receding brow sprang out of the driver’s seat and approached her. His eyes were startled, not resting on anything in particular, and he kept craning his neck and looking around him. She smiled, but he gave no sign that he recognized her.

  “Hello, Uncle,”she said.

  He stared at her for a moment and seemed overwhelmed by his own thoughts. “That all you have—nothing more?” he asked her.

  “That’s it,”she replied. “This is for you.”She gave him the plastic bag with the liquor and chocolates, and he nodded without looking at what was inside. When he seized the other bag she was carrying, she tried to resist out of politeness, but he had a wiry grip and finally she had to let go.

  The back of her uncle’s van was cluttered with a stack of newspapers, half-opened boxes of the merchandise he sold, mostly pens and watches, and cardboard trays of iced coffee and fruit drinks. He cleared a space for her bag and handed her a warm can of mango juice. “You like?” he said. June thanked him and took a seat in front. He had covered all the seats with tattered straw mats to protect the fabric, and, besides being uncomfortable to sit on, they made the van seem shabbier than it was.

  Her uncle was silent until they reached the highway. Then he smiled through clenched teeth, his eyes darting over at her. “June, you talk to Helen, okay?”

  “Yes, of course, Uncle.”

  He sighed. “You talk to her, right? Helen’s mind not so good.”He rapped the side of his head with his knuckles. “She isn’t like you, right? Your father said Ph.D. at Berkeley!”

  “Actually, I’m only getting a master’s.”

  “You know Helen failed two courses last term? You know how we find out? Her roommate told us. Helen is lying to us for a year now. Her mother and I are . . . how do you say it? We are tongku.”His hand fluttered over his chest. “Brokenhearted. Very sad hearts. Maybe she lose her scholarship. It’s because she’s involved in this crazy . . . what do you call it? What’s the word?” A car honked at him as he swerved into the other lane.

  “A cult?” June said, buckling her seat belt. She had already heard the story from her parents.

  “These people! They see you lonely, and say, ‘We are your friend.’ And Helen feels—she wants to help them, right?—and they... what you call it? Xi nao.”

  “Brainwash?”

  “Brainwash, yes. And she writes a check! They wash her brain, and she writes a check!” He broke into sharp laughter. “You religious?” June shook her head. “You strong, right?” her uncle said, making a fist. “I say to Helen these people aren’t your true friend. You can trust me, your mother, your cousin with a Ph.D. Because we are family, and only family is your true friend.”

  June didn’t know what to say to this. The last time she saw Helen was almost ten years ago, when her uncle’s family spent Christmas at her parents’ home in Washington, DC. Helen was a quiet, withdrawn girl with long, shadowy hair who didn’t seem to mind that her own parents ignored her and doted instead on her younger brother, Gerard. Helen wasn’t pretty — her eyes were too small, her nose too big, and she had inherited hermother’sthicklips— but she was gentle and serious, which June appreciated and thought unusual for a child.

  According to June’s mother, Helen had come out of the library one afternoon and been approached by a young Korean woman who had given her a pamphlet. And Helen had gone to one of the services by herself and now wore a tiny silver cross around her neck. Her parents didn’t mind at first that their daughter had found Jesus Christ. The people Helen associated with were polite, neatly dressed, and spoke with melodious voices. It was hard not to be impressed by their calm spiritual glow. The young women were especially beautiful with their clear moon faces and wore no makeup to show off their luminous complexions. Everything seemed okay until Helen’s roommate, a short Taiwanese girl who had been her best friend since high school, arrived on their doorstep with a scowling, tragic face. She had come unwillingly, forced and accompanied by her parents, who insisted that she tell the Suns all that was happening to Helen.

  It seemed that every moment of Helen’s life was taken up by her new church, and her roommate hardly saw her anymore. In the evenings there was devotion time, Bible study, prayer meetings. On the weekends, besides worship, there were picnics, retreats, dinners, bowling, puppet shows, church skits, and singing. Helen was always baking cupcakes. When the group found out that Helen was artistic, they asked her to make handmade cards for all the people leaving on missions. She was discouraged from associating with nonbelievers except for the sole purpose of ministering to them. The roommate felt that the church had taken Helen away from her and bitterly complained to her parents about it. Of course, her parents would not have interfered, they told the Suns, in an ordinary falling-out between friends. But their daughter had said Helen was failing her classes and giving away all her savings to the church.

  “What we give her, she gives away,”her uncle said with a sad laugh. “You think it’s easy selling watches? I run around all the time like a chicken that’s lost its head. You look at my office. I keep a stack of business cards—some good, some bad. And I drive all over the place. People say no, I come back. Sometimes they throw me out of their store, they are so sick of this face!” Her uncle sniffed, touching the side of his nose with his thumb. “It’s not easy. I used to sell briefcases, but everyone has a laptop now. Who needs briefcases?”

  “It isn’t easy,”June said. She felt bad for her uncle. Ever since she could remember, she had felt sorry for him. He always seemed to be struggling. Of her father’s five siblings, he was the youngest and, unlike her father, who got his Ph.D. in the United States, her uncle had been a mediocre student in Taiwan and now made a precarious living as a salesman. June’s mother liked to emphasize how poor his family was. Before June flew out to Los Angeles, her mother said she would be giving Gerard five hundred dollars for his high school graduation, and she reminded June to pick up the check when her uncle took her out for dinner.

  Of course, her uncle wasn’t truly poor. When her grandfather died, his children inherited equal portions of his land in Taiwan, and her uncle sold his share and used the money to buy the house he now lived in. No doubt things were still tight for him. When June’s older sister got married two years ago, his family could not afford the extra expense of attending the wedding, and her uncle sent the bride and groom a pair of fake Rolex watches that fogged up in humid weather.

  It must have been an unusual extravagance on her uncle’s part when his family flew all the way out to the East Coast to visit hers ten years ago. June remembered she went to bed before her uncle’s family arrived late at night, a
nd in the morning she found her cousin asleep downstairs on the red flowery couch, June’s large gray cat curled beside her. It was snowing outside, and the scene reminded June of a picture in a magazine. Helen’s face was dreamy and remote as the snow fell lightly through the windows. The cat gazed at June, his mouth curved as if he were smiling.

  Helen opened her eyes and sat up on the couch, blinking. “I’ve never seen snow before,”she said when she looked out the window.

  June laughed. “You haven’t?”

  “It doesn’t snow in California. Is this your cat?” Helen tried to stroke his head, but the cat jumped off the couch and walked beneath a table, where he couldn’t be touched.

  “He’ll love you more if you ignore him,”June said.

  Helen didn’t listen to June’s advice. The cat was banished to the basement when Helen’s parents found out—they thought the cat was dirty and might trigger one of Gerard’s asthma attacks—but for the rest of the trip, whenever Helen could, she snuck down to the basement and tried to lure the cat from its hiding place. The cat was not afraid of her, only disinterested. He often perched on top of the vertical end of a mattress that leaned against the wall, and Helen would entreat him to come down, repeating his name and clicking her tongue as he stared at her with supercilious calm. The only thing that tempted him was a can of treats that she would shake, and then the cat would yawn and approach her dutifully, lifting each piece from her hand with a delicate tongue, careful not to bite her.

  Her uncle’s family returned to Los Angeles, and two weeks later June received in the mail a softly colored ink portrait of her cat that Helen must have drawn from memory.

  Dear June,

  I miss Manny very much. I hope you like this picture I did of him. I’m sorry he had to live in the basement when we stayed at your house. He must be happier now that he can go upstairs.