100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

1989 DAVID WONG LOUIE. Displacement from Ploughshares

DAVID WONG LOUIE was born in 1954 and raised in New York. His parents were immigrants from China, his father entering under an assumed name and his mother, by way of Ellis Island, also claiming another’s identity. They spoke only Cantonese, so that was his language too, until TV and kindergarten stole him. He earned a BA at Vassar and an MFA at Iowa and taught for many years at multiple schools before settling at UCLA, where he has worked for more than two decades.

Louie is the author of the novel The Barbarians Are Coming and the short story collection Pangs of Love, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Review First Fiction Award and the Ploughshares First Fiction Book Award and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Voice Literary Supplement Favorite. Louie’s work shares an interest in identity, alienation — in the psychic dislocation at the intersection of race, class, desire, and obligation. His fiction is widely taught and anthologized. Among other honors he was awarded Lannan Writing Fellowship and a Lannan residency. He lives in Venice, California, with his wife and daughter.

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MRS. CHOW HEARD the widow. She tried reading faster but kept stumbling over the same lines. She thought perhaps she was misreading them: “There comes, then, finally, the prospect of atomic war. If the war is ever to be carried to China, common sense tells us only atomic weapons could promise maximum loss with minimum damage.”

When she heard the widow’s wheelchair she tossed the copy of Life down on the couch, afraid she might be found out. The year was 1952.

Outside the kitchen, Chow was lathering the windows. He worked a soft brush in a circular motion. Inside, the widow was accusing Mrs. Chow of stealing her cookies. The widow had a handful of them clutched to her chest and brought one down hard against the table. She was counting. Chow waved, but Mrs. Chow only shook her head. He soaped up the last pane and disappeared.

Standing accused, Mrs. Chow wondered if this was what it was like when her parents faced the liberators who had come to reclaim her family’s property in the name of the People. She imagined her mother’s response to them: What people? All of my servants are clothed and decently fed.

The widow swept the cookies off the table as if they were a canasta trick won. She started counting again. Mrs. Chow and the widow had played out this scene many times before. As on other occasions, she didn’t give the old woman the satisfaction of a plea, guilty or otherwise.

Mrs. Chow ignored the widow’s busy blue hands. She fixed her gaze on the woman’s milky eyes instead. Sight resided at the peripheries. Mornings, before she prepared the tub, emptied the pisspot, or fried the breakfast meat, Mrs. Chow cradled the widow’s oily scalp and applied the yellow drops that preserved what vision was left in the cold, heaven-directed eyes.

“Is she watching?” said the widow. She tilted her big gray head sideways; a few degrees in any direction Mrs. Chow became a blur. In happier days Mrs. Chow might have positioned herself just right or left of center, neatly within a line of sight.

Mrs. Chow was thirty-five years old. After a decade-long separation from her husband she finally had entered the United States in 1950 under the joint auspices of the War Brides and Refugee Relief acts. She would agree she was a bride, but not a refugee, even though the Red Army had confiscated her home and turned it into a technical school. During the trouble she was away, safely studying in Hong Kong. Her parents, with all their wealth, could’ve easily escaped, but they were confident a few well-placed bribes among the Red hooligans would put an end to the foolishness. Mrs. Chow assumed her parents now were dead. She had seen pictures in Life of minor landlords tried and executed for lesser crimes against the People.

The widow’s fondness for calling Mrs. Chow a thief began soon after the old woman broke her hip. At first Mrs. Chow blamed the widow’s madness on pain displacement. She had read in a textbook that a malady in one part of the body could show up as a pain in another locale — sick kidneys, for instance, might surface as a mouthful of sore gums. The bad hip had weakened the widow’s brain function. Mrs. Chow wanted to believe the crazy spells weren’t the widow’s fault, just as a baby soiling its diapers can’t be blamed. But even a mother grows weary of changing them.

“I live with a thief under my roof,” the widow said to the kitchen. “I could yell at her, but why waste my breath?”

When the widow was released from the hospital she returned to the house with a live-in nurse. Soon afterward her daughter paid a visit, and the widow told her she didn’t want the nurse around anymore. “She can do me,” the widow said, pointing in Mrs. Chow’s direction. “She won’t cost a cent. Besides, I don’t like being touched that way by a person who knows what she’s touching,” she said of the nurse.

Nobody knew, but Mrs. Chow spoke a passable though highly accented English she had learned in British schools. Her teachers in Hong Kong always said that if she had the language when she came to the States she’d be treated better than other immigrants. Chow couldn’t have agreed more. Once she arrived he started to teach her everything he knew in English. But that amounted to very little, considering he had been here for more than ten years. And what he had mastered came out crudely and strangely twisted. His phrases, built from a vocabulary of deference and accommodation, irritated Mrs. Chow for the way they resembled the obsequious blabber of her servants back home.

The Chows had been hired ostensibly to drive the widow to her canasta club, to clean the house, to do the shopping, and, since the bad hip, to oversee her personal hygiene. In return they lived rent-free upstairs in the children’s rooms, three bedrooms and a large bath. Plenty of space, it would seem, except the widow wouldn’t allow them to remove any of the toys and things from her children’s cluttered rooms.

On weekends and Tuesday afternoons Chow borrowed the widow’s tools and gardened for spending money. Friday nights, after they dropped the widow off at the canasta club, the Chows dined at Ming’s and then went to the amusement park at the beach boardwalk. First and last, they got in line to ride the Milky Way. On the day the immigration authorities finally let Mrs. Chow go, before she even saw her new home, Chow took his bride to the boardwalk. He wanted to impress her with her new country. All that machinery, brainwork, and labor done for the sake of fun. He never tried the roller coaster before she arrived; he saved it for her. After that very first time he realized he was much happier with his feet on the ground. But not Mrs. Chow: Oh, this speed, this thrust at the sky, this UP! Oh, this raging, clattering, pushy country! So big! And since that first ride she looked forward to Friday nights and the wind whipping through her hair, stinging her eyes, blowing away the top layers of dailiness. On the longest, most dangerous descent her dry mouth would open to a silent O and she would thrust up her arms, as if she could fly away.

Some nights as the Chows waited in line, a gang of toughs out on a strut, trussed in denim and combs, would stop and visit: MacArthur, they said, will drain the Pacific; the H-bomb will wipe Korea clean of the Commies; the Chows were to blame for Pearl Harbor; the Chows, they claimed, were Red Chinese spies. On occasion, overextending his skimpy English, Chow mounted a defense: he had served in the U.S. Army; his citizenship was blessed by the Department of War; he was a member of the American Legion. The toughs would laugh at the way he talked. Mrs. Chow cringed at his habit of addressing them as “sirs.”

“Get out, get out,” the widow hissed. She brought her fist down on the table. Cookies broke, fell to the floor.

“Yes, Missus,” said Mrs. Chow, thinking how she’d have to clean up the mess.

The widow, whose great-great-great-grandfather had been a central figure within the faction advocating Washington’s coronation, was eighty-six years old. Each day Mrs. Chow dispensed medications that kept her alive. At times, though, Mrs. Chow wondered if the widow would notice if she were handed an extra blue pill or one less red.

Mrs. Chow filled an enamel-coated washbasin with warm water from the tap. “What’s she doing?” said the widow. “Stealing my water now, is she?” Since Mrs. Chow first came into her service, the widow, with the exception of her hip, had avoided serious illness. But how she had aged: her ears were enlarged; the opalescence in her eyes had spread; her hands worked as if they were chipped from glass. Some nights, awake in their twin-size bed, Mrs. Chow would imagine old age as green liquid that seeped into a person’s cells, where it coagulated and, with time, crumbled, caving in the cheeks and the breasts it had once supported. In the dark she fretted that fluids from the widow’s old body had taken refuge in her youthful cells. On such nights she reached for Chow, touched him through the cool top sheet, and was comforted by the fit of her fingers in the shallows between his ribs.

Mrs. Chow knelt at the foot of the wheelchair and set the washbasin on the floor. The widow laughed. “Where did my little thief go?” She laughed again, her eyes closing, her head dropping to her shoulder. “Now she’s after my water. Better see if the tap’s still there.” Mrs. Chow abruptly swung aside the wheelchair’s footrests and slipped off the widow’s matted cloth slippers and dunked her puffy blue feet into the water. It was the widow’s nap time, and before she could be put to bed, her physician prescribed a warm foot bath to stimulate circulation; otherwise, in her sleep, her blood might settle comfortably in her toes.

Chow was talking long distance to the widow’s daughter in Texas. Earlier the widow had told the daughter that the Chows were threatening again to leave. She apologized for her mother’s latest spell of wildness. “Humor her,” the daughter said. “She must’ve had another one of her little strokes.”

Later Mrs. Chow told her husband she wanted to leave the widow. “My fingers,” she said, snapping off the rubber gloves the magazine ads claimed would guarantee her beautiful hands into the next century. “I wasn’t made for such work.”

As a girl her parents had sent her to a Christian school for training in Western-style art. The authorities agreed she was talented. As expected she excelled there. Her portrait of the king was chosen to hang in the school cafeteria. When the colonial Minister of Education on a tour of the school saw her painting he requested a sitting with the gifted young artist.

A date was set. The rumors said a successful sitting would bring her the ultimate fame: a trip to London to paint the royal family. But a month before the great day she refused to do the minister’s portrait. She gave no reason why; in fact, she stopped talking. The school administration was embarrassed, and her parents were furious. It was a great scandal; a mere child from a country at the edge of revolution but medieval in its affection for authority had snubbed the mighty British colonizers. She was sent home. Her parents first appealed to family pride, then they scolded and threatened her. She hid from them in a wardrobe, where her mother found her holding her fingers over lighted matches.

The great day came and went, no more momentous than the hundreds that preceded it. That night her father apologized to the world for raising such a child. With a bamboo cane he struck her outstretched hand — heaven help her if she let it fall one inch — and as her bones were young and still pliant, they didn’t fracture or break, thus multiplying the blows she had to endure.

“Who’d want you now?” her mother said. Her parents sent her to live with a servant family. She could return home when she was invited. On those rare occasions she refused to go. Many years passed before she met Chow, who had come to the estate seeking work. They were married on the condition he take her far away. He left for America, promising to send for her when he had saved enough money for her passage. She returned to Hong Kong and worked as a secretary. Later she studied at the university.

Now as she talked about leaving the widow, it wasn’t the chores or the old woman that she gave as the reason, though in the past she had complained the widow was a nuisance, an infantile brat born of an unwelcomed union. This time she said she had a project in mind, a great canvas of a yet undetermined subject. But that would come. Her imagination would return, she said, once she was away from that house.

It was the morning of a late spring day. A silvery light filtered through the wall of eucalyptus and warmed the dew on the widow’s roof, striking the plums and acacia, irises and lilies, in such a way that, blended with the heavy air and the noise of a thousand birds, one sensed the universe wasn’t so vast, so cold, or so angry, and even Mrs. Chow suspected that it was a loving thing.

Mrs. Chow had finished her morning chores. She was in the bathroom rinsing the smell of bacon from her hands. She couldn’t wash deep enough, however, to rid her fingertips of perfumes from the widow’s lotions and creams, which, over the course of months, had seeped indelibly into the whorls. But today her failure was less maddening. Today she was confident the odors would eventually fade. She could afford to be patient. They were going to interview for an apartment of their very own.

“Is that new?” Chow asked, pointing to the blouse his wife had on. He adjusted his necktie against the starched collar of a white short-sleeved shirt, which billowed out from baggy, pin-striped slacks. His hair was slicked back with fragrant pomade.

“I think it’s the daughter’s,” said Mrs. Chow. “She won’t miss it.” Mrs. Chow smoothed the silk undershirt against her stomach. She guessed the shirt was as old as she was; the daughter probably had worn it in her teens. Narrow at the hips and the bust, it fit Mrs. Chow nicely. Such a slight figure, she believed, wasn’t fit for labor.

Chow saw no reason to leave the estate. He had found his wife what he thought was the ideal home, certainly not as grand as her parents’ place, but one she’d feel comfortable in. Why move, he argued, when there were no approaching armies, no floods, no one telling them to go? Mrs. Chow understood. It was just that he was very Chinese, and very peasant. Sometimes she would tease him. If the early Chinese sojourners who came to America were all Chows, she would say, the railroad wouldn’t have been constructed, and Ohio would be all we know of California.

The Chows were riding in the widow’s green Buick. As they approached the apartment building Mrs. Chow reapplied lipstick to her mouth.

It was a modern two-story stucco building, painted pink, surrounded by asphalt, with aluminum windows and a flat roof that met the sky like an engineer’s level. Because their friends lived in the apartment in question the Chows were already familiar with its layout. They went to the manager’s house at the rear of the property. Here the grounds were also asphalt. Very contemporary, no greenery anywhere. The closest things to trees were the clothesline’s posts and crossbars.

The manager’s house was a tiny replica of the main building. Chow knocked on the screen door. A radio was on and the smell of baking rushed past the wire mesh. A cat came to the door, followed by a girl. “I’m Velvet,” she said. “This is High Noon.” She gave the cat’s orange tail a tug. “She did this to me,” said Velvet, throwing a wicked look at the room behind her. She picked at her hair, ragged as tossed salad; someone apparently had cut it while the girl was in motion. She had gray, almost colorless eyes, which, taken with her hair, gave her the appearance of agitated smoke.

A large woman emerged from the back room carrying a basket of laundry. She wasn’t fat, but large in the way horses are large. Her face was round and pink, with fierce little eyes and hair the color of olive oil and dripping wet. Her arms were thick and white, like soft tusks of ivory.

“It’s the people from China,” Velvet said.

The big woman nodded. “Open her up,” she told the girl. “It’s okay.”

The front room was a mess, cluttered with evidence of frantic living. This was, perhaps, entropy in its final stages. The Chows sat on the couch. From all around her Mrs. Chow sensed a slow creep: the low ceiling seemed to be sinking, cat hairs clung to clothing, a fine spray from the fish tank moistened her bare arm.

No one said anything. It was as if they were sitting in a hospital waiting room. The girl watched the Chows. The large woman stared at a green radio at her elbow broadcasting news about the war. Every so often she looked suspiciously up at the Chows. “You know me,” she said abruptly. “I’m Remora Cass.”

On her left, suspended in a swing, was the biggest, ugliest baby Mrs. Chow had ever seen. It was dozing, arms dangling, great melon head flung so far back that it appeared to be all nostrils and chins. “A pig-boy,” Mrs. Chow said in Chinese. Velvet jabbed two fingers into the baby’s rubbery cheeks. Then she sprang back from the swing and executed a feral dance, all elbows and knees. She seemed incapable of holding her body still.

She caught Mrs. Chow’s eye. “This is Ed,” she said. “He has no hair.”

Mrs. Chow nodded.

“Quit,” said Remora Cass, swatting at the girl as if she were a fly. Then the big woman looked Mrs. Chow in the eyes and said, “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. There’s not a baby in the state bigger than Ed; eight pounds, twelve ounces at birth and he doubled that inside a month.” She stopped, bringing her palms heavily down on her knees, and shook her wet head. “You don’t understand me, do you?”

Mrs. Chow was watching Velvet.

“Quit that!” Remora Cass slapped the girl’s hand away from the baby’s face.

“Times like this I’d say it’s a blessing my Aunt Eleanor’s deaf,” said Remora Cass. “I’ve gotten pretty good with sign language.” From her overstuffed chair she repeated in pantomime what she had said about the baby.

Velvet mimicked her mother’s generous, sweeping movements. When Remora Cass caught sight of her she added a left jab to the girl’s head to her repertoire of gestures. Velvet slipped the punch with practiced ease. But the blow struck the swing set. Everyone tensed. Ed flapped his arms and went on sleeping. “Leave us alone,” said Remora Cass, “before I really get mad.”

The girl chased down the cat and skipped toward the door. “I’m bored anyway,” she said.

Remora Cass asked the Chows questions, first about jobs and pets. Then she moved on to matters of politics and patriotism. “What’s your feeling about the Red Chinese in Korea?”

A standard question. “Terrible,” said Chow, giving his standard answer. “I’m sorry. Too much trouble.”

Mrs. Chow sat by quietly. She admired Chow’s effort. She had studied the language, but he did the talking; she wanted to move, but he had to plead their case; it was his kin back home who benefited from the new regime, but he had to badmouth it.

Remora Cass asked about children.

“No, no, no,” Chow said, answering as his friend Bok had coached him. His face was slightly flushed from the question. Chow wanted children, many children. But whenever he discussed the matter with his wife, she answered that she already had one, meaning the old woman, of course, and that she was enough.

“Tell your wife later,” the manager said, “what I’m about to tell you now. I don’t care what jobs you do, just so long as you have them. What I say goes for the landlady. I’m willing to take a risk on you. Be nice to have nice quiet folks up there like Rikki and Bok. Rent paid up, I can live with anyone. Besides, I’m real partial to Chinese takeout. I know we’ll do just right.”

The baby moaned, rolling its head from side to side. His mother stared at him as if in all the world there were just the two of them.

Velvet came in holding a beach ball. She returned to her place beside the swing and started to hop, alternating legs, with the beach ball held to her head. “She must be in some kind of pain,” Mrs. Chow said to her husband.

The girl mimicked the Chinese she heard. Mrs. Chow glared at Velvet, as if she were the widow during one of her spells. The look froze the girl, standing on one leg. Then she said, “Can Ed come out to play?”

Chow took hold of his wife’s hand and squeezed it, as he did to brace himself before the roller coaster’s forward plunge. Then in a single, well-rehearsed motion Remora Cass swept off her slipper and punched at the girl. Velvet masterfully side-stepped the slipper and let the beach ball fly. The slipper caught the swing set; the beach ball bounced off Ed’s lap.

The collisions released charged particles into the air that seemed to hold everyone in a momentary state of paralysis. The baby’s eyes peeled open, and he blinked at the ceiling. Soon his distended belly started rippling. He cried until he turned purple, then devoted his energy to maintaining that hue. Mrs. Chow had never heard anything as harrowing. She visualized his cry as large cubes forcing their way into her ears.

Remora Cass picked Ed up and bounced on the balls of her feet. “You better start running,” she said to Velvet, who was already on her way out the door.

Remora Cass half smiled at the Chows over the baby’s shoulder. “He’ll quiet down sooner or later,” she said.

Growing up, Mrs. Chow was the youngest of five girls. She had to endure the mothering of her sisters, who, at an early age, were already in training for their future roles. Each married in her teens, plucked in turn by a Portuguese, a German, a Brit, and a New Yorker. They had many babies. But Mrs. Chow thought little of her sisters’ example. Even when her parents made life unbearable she never indulged in the hope that a man — foreign or domestic — or a child could save her from her unhappiness.

From the kitchen Remora Cass called Mrs. Chow. The big woman was busy with her baking. The baby was slung over her shoulder. “Let’s try something,” she said as she transferred the screaming Ed into Mrs. Chow’s arms.

Ed was a difficult package. Not only was he heavy and hot and sweaty but he spat and squirmed like a sack of kittens. She tried to think of how it was done. She tried to think of how a baby was held. She remembered Romanesque Madonnas cradling their gentlemanly babies in art history textbooks. If she could get his head up by hers, that would be a start.

Remora Cass told Mrs. Chow to try bouncing and showed her what she meant. “Makes him think he’s still inside,” she said. Ed emitted a long, sustained wail, then settled into a bout of hiccups. “You have a nice touch with him. He won’t do that for just anyone.”

As the baby quieted, a pain rolled from the heel of Mrs. Chow’s brain, down through her pelvis, to a southern terminus at the backs of her knees. She couldn’t blame the baby entirely for her discomfort. He wanted only to escape; animal instinct told him to leap from danger.

She was the one better equipped to escape. She imagined invading soldiers murdering livestock and planting flags in the soil of her ancestral estate, as if it were itself a little nation; they make history by the slaughter of generations of her family; they discover her in the wardrobe, striking matches; they ask where she has hidden her children, and she tells them there are none; they say, good, they’ll save ammunition, but also too bad, so young and never to know the pleasure of children (even if they’d have to murder them). Perhaps this would be the subject of her painting, a nonrepresentational canvas that hinted at a world without light. Perhaps—

Ed interrupted her thought. He had developed a new trick. “Woop, woop, woop,” he went, thrusting his pelvis against her sternum in the manner of an adult male in the act of mating. She called for Chow.

Remora Cass slid a cookie sheet into the oven and then stuck a bottle of baby formula into Ed’s mouth. He drained it instantly. “You do have a way with him,” said Remora Cass.

They walked into the front room. The baby was sleepy and dripping curds on his mother’s shoulder. Under the swing High Noon, the cat, was licking the nipple of an abandoned bottle. “Scat!” she said. “Now where’s my wash gone to?” she asked the room. “What’s she up to now?” She scanned the little room, big feet planted in the deep brown shag carpet, hands on her beefy hips, baby slung over her shoulder like a pelt. “Velvet—” she started. That was all. Her jaw locked, her gums gleamed, her eyes rolled into her skull. Her head flopped backward, as if at the back of her neck there was a great hinge. Then she yawned, and the walls seemed to shake.

Remora Cass rubbed her eyes. “I’m bushed,” she said.

Mrs. Chow went over to the screen door. Chow and the girl were at the clothesline. Except for their hands and legs, they were hidden behind a bed sheet. The girl’s feet were in constant motion. From the basket her hands picked up pieces of laundry which Chow’s hands then clipped to the line.

“Her daddy’s hardly ever here,” Remora Cass said. “Works all hours, he does. He has to.” She patted Ed on the back, then rubbed her eyes again. “Looks like Velvet’s found a friend. She won’t do that with anyone. You two are naturals with my two. You should get some of your own.” She looked over at Mrs. Chow and laughed. “Maybe it’s best you didn’t get that. Here.” She set the baby on Mrs. Chow’s shoulder. “This is what it’s like when they’re sleeping.”

Before leaving, the Chows went to look at Rikki and Bok’s apartment. They climbed up the stairs. No one was home. Rikki and Bok had barely started to pack. Bok’s naked man, surrounded by an assortment of spears and arrows, was still hanging on the living room wall. Bok had paid good money for the photograph: an aboriginal gent stares into the camera, he’s smiling, his teeth are good and large, and in his palms he’s holding his sex out like a prize eel.

Mrs. Chow looked at the photograph for as long as it was discreetly possible before she averted her eyes and made her usual remark about Bok’s tastes. Beyond the building’s edge she saw the manager’s cottage, bleached white in the sun. Outside the front door Remora Cass sat in a folding chair, her eyes shut, her pie-tin face turned up to catch the rays, while Velvet, her feet anchored to the asphalt, rolled her mother’s hair in pink curlers. Between the big woman’s legs the baby lay in a wicker basket. He was quietly rocking from side to side. Remora Cass’s chest rose and fell in the rhythm of sleep.

Driving home, they passed the boardwalk, and Mrs. Chow asked if they might stop.

Chow refused to ride the roller coaster in the daytime, no matter how much Mrs. Chow teased. It was hard enough at night, when the heights from which the cars fell were lit by a few rows of bulbs. As he handed her an orange ticket, Chow said, “A drunk doesn’t look in mirrors.”

The Milky Way clattered into the terminus. After she boarded the ride, she watched Chow, who had wandered from the loading platform and was standing beside a popcorn wagon, looking up at a billboard. His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his legs crossed at the shins. That had been his pose, the brim of his hat low on his brow, as he waited for her finally to pass through the gates of Immigration.

“Go on,” an old woman said. “You’ll be glad you did.” The old woman nudged her young charge toward the empty seat in Mrs. Chow’s car. “Go on, she won’t bite.” The girl looked back at the old woman. “Grand-muth-ther!” she said, and then reluctantly climbed in beside Mrs. Chow.

Once the attendant strapped the girl in, she turned from her grandmother and stared at her new companion. The machine jerked away from the platform. They were climbing the first ascent when Mrs. Chow snuck a look at the girl. She was met by the clearest eyes she had ever known, eyes that didn’t shy from the encounter. The girl’s pupils, despite the bright sun, were fully dilated, stretched with fear. Now that she had Mrs. Chow’s attention, she turned her gaze slowly toward the vertical track ahead. Mrs. Chow looked beyond the summit to the empty blue sky.

Within seconds they tumbled through that plane and plunged downward, the cars flung suddenly left and right, centrifugal force throwing Mrs. Chow against the girl’s rigid body. She was surprised by Chow’s absence.

It’s gravity that makes the stomach fly, that causes the liver to flutter; it’s the body catching up with the speed of falling. Until today, she had never known such sensations. Today there was a weightiness at her core, like a hard, concentrated pull inward, as if an incision had been made and a fist-sized magnet embedded.

Her arms flew up, two weak wings cutting the rush of wind. But it wasn’t the old sensation this time, not the familiar embrace of the whole fleeting continent, but a grasp at something once there, now lost.

Chow had moved into position to see the riders’ faces as they careened down the steepest stretch of track. Whenever he was up there with her, his eyes were clenched and his scream so wild and his grip on his life so tenuous that he never noticed her expression. At the top of the rise the cars seemed to stop momentarily, but then up and over, tumbling down, at what appeared, from his safe vantage point, a surprisingly slow speed. Arms shot up, the machine whooshed past him, preceded a split second earlier by the riders’ collective scream. And for the first time Chow thought he heard her, she who loved this torture so, scream too.

As she was whipped skyward once more, her arms were wrapped around the little girl. Not in flight, not soaring, but anchored by another’s being, as her parents stood against the liberators to protect their land.

Some curves, a gentle dip, one last sharp bend, and the ride rumbled to rest. The girl’s breath was warm against Mrs. Chow’s neck. For a moment longer she held on to the girl, whose small ribs were as thin as paintbrushes.

The Chows walked to the edge of the platform. He looked up at the billboard he had noticed earlier. It was a picture of an American woman with bright red hair, large red lips, and a slightly upturned nose; a fur was draped around her neck, pearls cut across her throat.

“What do you suppose they’re selling?” he asked.

His wife pointed at the billboard. She read aloud what was printed there: “No other home permanent wave looks, feels, behaves so much like naturally curly hair.”

She then gave a quick translation and asked what he thought of her curling her hair.

He made no reply. For some time now he couldn’t lift his eyes from her.

“I won’t do it,” she said, “but what do you say?”

She turned away from him and stared a long time at the face on the billboard and then at the beach on the other side of the boardwalk and at the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and at the horizon where all lines of sight converge, before she realized the land on the other side wouldn’t come into view.