The mourning women are howling. Even with fingers in her ears, Xuan-Xuan hears their loud cries from the big white tent that appeared overnight in the alley. On tiptoe, she peers over the windowsill and looks down three stories to the long line of people holding incense sticks outside the tent. They were here to pay their respects, they said. Her mama had died last night giving birth to a baby, a sister, they said. Her sister would come home but her mama would not, they said, but Xuan-Xuan has her own ideas. 

She is in Grandma’s bedroom. The smell of old clothes. Spittoon under the bed. She is in her family’s apartment building, 58 Hoping Road, Taipei, Taiwan. Mama made her memorize their address on her fifth birthday, a month ago, when Mama and Papa took a rare day off from the family’s factory and brought her to the zoo, where Mama got so angry that they came home early after Xuan-Xuan strayed from the peacocks and without telling anyone went searching for the bears.

Cupping fingers around her eyes, Xuan-Xuan pretends to scan Grandma’s bedroom with binoculars. The target is the top drawer of the dresser by the bed, where Grandma hides money. 

She notices for the first time a hole high up in the ceiling. Next year, a bird will fly through the window into that hole, and even after Papa opens a big chunk of the plaster, he won’t find the bird. It will take three days for the bird’s song to die, which Xuan-Xuan will remember years later, when she is old and has forgotten almost everything.

The dresser is two, three times her height. She plucks one hair off her pigtails and blows it afloat to invoke her favorite of Monkey King’s Seventy-Two Transformations: Size Enhancement. Then she breathes slow and hard, and waits for her legs and arms to grow.

Long minutes pass. 

Nothing.

She has to watch again how her fabled hero does it on TV in her favorite cartoon, but there is no time now. 

She swings one leg over the ledge of Grandma’s bed. Then another. Like a frog, like the fat, stubby frog that managed to climb out of an aluminum bowl in the kitchen, where Grandma has been cooking all morning for the relatives, but—no!—Grandma flicked the frog down with her spatula. Where are you going? The wok’s ready.

Xuan-Xuan climbs on the mahogany headboard and then leans out to pull on the dresser’s top drawer. Grudgingly it opens, heavy and squeaky like a pirate’s trunk full of treasures. She ignores the gold earrings and jade bracelets, and zooms in on the red envelope. Inside is a stack of Taiwanese dollar bills.

Someone shouts in the stairwell. Papa. 

Ma, the feng shui master is here! 

Papa thumps up the stairs and Grandma’s slippers patah-patah, and then they are talking right outside the bedroom door. Xuan-Xuan grabs the envelope and lands on the comforter, wiggles between the pillows, tries to hide. She waits and waits and grows old . . .

When she is fifteen she will give her virginity to a boy who makes her laugh. At twenty-two she will move to the United States to study biochemistry. She will change her name to Susan and settle in Silicon Valley, and for two decades her startup will be her life. She will marry a white man with a boyish grin and a linebacker’s gait, Alex, a venture capitalist. After their divorce, she will become a staunch atheist in search of a religion. At a Silicon Valley meditation boot camp, she will write down everything she knows about her mother on one page with room to spare. On the last day of her life, when she is a hundred and five, she will lie in her deathbed with her second husband by her side, and she will feel lucky despite the sadness that is just beneath the surface of everything. 

Time escapes from her fingers and hops, skips, jumps. It’s not that difficult really: you wiggle a little and you are there, in a different crevice of time. You close your eyes to the kid in the mirror and open to a face full of wrinkles. You lie down beside your lover, your cheek brushing against the pillow, and there you are again, five years old, hiding, waiting . . .

Finally, Papa thump-thumps down the stairs and Grandma pads back to the kitchen. Xuan-Xuan shoves the red envelope in her Monkey King backpack, and opens the bedroom door a slit. Heat rushes in. Down the hall, Grandma’s silhouette shifts in and out of dense smoke. The aromas of three-cup frogs and twice-cooked pork creep downstairs to their factory and drift upstairs to their roof deck, where they keep a German shepherd going insane with old age.

Just yesterday morning, Mama waddled up to the roof deck when Xuan-Xuan was riding her new pink bike and Grandma was hanging bedsheets out to dry. The dog pawed at Mama, almost tearing her favorite blue dress, which clung to her thin frame and swollen belly. 

Mama handed Grandma the red envelope. Ma, for this week.

Grandma frowned. How am I supposed to live on this? 

Perhaps . . . you should stop shopping at Japan Imports and Layaways. Mama rubbed the half-moon shadow under her eyes. 

You blame me? The factory’s broke only after you married my son, because you don’t know how to manage money! 

Xuan-Xuan tried to get Mama’s attention by riding the bike with no hands, but Mama was already stomping down the stairs and yelling, If you want more money, why don’t you go earn it like those girls at Treasure Island Alley? And Grandma was shouting, How dare you? I curse you that you fall into that hell! 

The dog pounced and Xuan-Xuan flipped over, taking down the clothesline. 

Why is Mama so bad? she said after Grandma pulled her out of the tangle.

Good kid, was all Grandma replied, her face glaring like red hot coal.

Xuan-Xuan doesn’t miss Mama, who never wanted to play, always hunched over a book filled with black lines and red ink, but Mama must have left because Xuan-Xuan sided with Grandma. On TV, Xuan-Xuan has watched Monkey King fight the Lord of Hell to bring people back to life, even erasing his name from the Book of Life Expectancy to become immortal. If Treasure Island Alley is Hell, she will go there to bring Mama back. (Continued…)

(Excerpted from New England Review, Vol. 43, No. 3)