Gold Boy, Emerald Girl Read Free

along well with Professor Shan, eccentricity being both women’s prized possession.
    I was aware of Professor Shan’s existence as much as I was aware of the other people in the neighborhood: If you live in one place long enough, you do not need to seek gossip and rumors; stories, all sorts of tales, will come to find you. Even for a family like ours, with a mother who rarely talked to people and a father who was, in my mother’s words, quiet as a dead log , stories would come in eavesdropped form while I waited in lines—and it seems that I spent my childhood perpetually in lines, waiting for eggs, cooking oil, meat, soap, milk, and other rationed goods, waiting to pay the rent and utilities, waiting to get my mother’s prescription filled at the pharmacy. That was where I had first heard bits and pieces of Professor Shan’s story, even before I met her: She had taught high school English in another district before her retirement. She had a son and a daughter, who, after graduating from college, had both vanished, reappearing every once in a while as visitors from America. People could not agree on how they had managed to leave the country, though the most reasonable explanation was that Professor Shan had relatives on her mother’s side who had fled to the States. Once upon a time there had been a husband, a much friendlier person than Professor Shan, but he had disappeared, too, and it was said that he had been sent to the American relatives just as their children had been; it was also said that he had taken up with a younger woman and started a Chinese restaurant with her in New York City, which might be true, as he was never seen in the neighborhood again.
    In any case, sitting in Professor Shan’s room on that first day, I could not imagine that the place had once been occupied by a family. There were no framed photographs or letters bearing foreign addresses, and the room, packed with the trunks, seemed too small even for Professor Shan by herself. She studied me while I looked around the room, then picked up an old book and turned to a random page. “Read the line to me,” she said. The book was the first one in a series called Essential English , which Professor Shan had used to learn English fifty years ago. The page had a small cartoon of a child on a seat, the kind one would find in a luxury theater. In the cartoon, the child, who was not heavy enough to keep the seat from folding back, smiled uncertainly on his high perch, and I felt the same. I had entered middle school earlier that month, and had barely learned my alphabet.
    When I could not read the caption, Professor Shan put the book back with the other volumes, their spines different colors that were equally faded. “You do know that you are not your parents’ birth daughter, don’t you?” She turned and faced me. “And you do know that no matter how nicely they treat you, they can’t do much for your education, don’t you?”
    I had not doubted my blood until then—I knew that my parents were different from most parents, but I had thought that it was their age difference, and my mother’s illness. Moyan: My mother sometimes said my name in a soft voice when my father was not around, and I would know that she had some secrets to tell me. A man can have children until he is seventy, she would say; a woman’s youth ends the moment she marries. Moyan, do not let a man touch you, especially here and here, she would say, gesturing vaguely toward her own body. Moyan, your father would get you a stepmother the moment I died, she would say, narrowing her eyes in an amused way; do you know I cannot die now because I don’t want you to live under a stepmother? In one of these revelatory moments she could have said, Moyan, you were not born to us; we only picked you up from a garbage dump—but no, my mother had never, even in her most uncharitable moment, said that to me, and in fact she kept the secret until her death, and for that alone I loved