Dragon Chica. Mai-lee Chai

not to her wizened face anyway. Ma said I had to be kind to the old woman. Ma made me bring her cups of water during the day, when it was hottest and the other women were still in the field. The Witch was too old to do such work so she did laundry for the others, sitting on the edge of the river, beating clothes against the rocks there.

      When I brought her some of the water Ma boiled and kept in a pot in our house, she’d drink it, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, then she’d smile at me with her red-black teeth.

      The Witch had come to our house a few days before Pa died. Ma had wanted her to listen to his chest. The Witch said the spirits that controlled his head were out of balance. She said we needed to gather a special kind of bark from the trees in the forest and to boil it into a tea for Pa to drink. But Ma had not been able to leave the camp that night or the next. On the third night, Ma had disappeared for several hours, when everyone else was asleep and I lay awake, listening. She had returned just as the sun was rising, the pig was waking and the soldiers began to walk in twos and threes once again after settling down for the night. The soldiers were not supposed to sleep at night, but sometimes they did. If I pressed my ear to the cracks in the floor, I could hear their snores. Ma returned to her bedroll next to Pa’s, pulling her mosquito net closed. She was pretending to sleep, so that the others would think she had lain there just like that all night long, but I could hear her breaths, too fast and shallow. I lay still, and she did not know that I had seen her return.

      That morning, Ma boiled the bark tea for Pa, and the whole house smelled like rotting fungus and river water, the tea created such thick clouds. Ma was afraid the soldiers would smell it and then they would guess that she had left the village in the night, ventured past the fields and into the forest, where we were forbidden to walk. But the wind was strong and it blew the steam across the river, where the scent was lost among the odors of the fish and the mud and the reeds.

      Pa couldn’t drink the tea, however, even though Sourdi held his head while Ma poured the liquid down his throat. He coughed and choked and then vomited the green liquid back up onto his chest. Ma cried then. I saw her wipe her tears on the back of her hand quickly, drying her face just as fast as her tears could flow, so that when she left to work in the field, the soldiers would not see that she had cried.

      In my dream, I was watching the Witch sing Pa’s soul to sleep when he stopped breathing.

      All at once, the wind returned, rushing through the reeds beside the river, causing silver fish to leap from the waves. I heard them splashing. I hoped the wind would carry Pa’s soul far away from our village, away from the soldiers, someplace safe.

      Because the wind had returned, the Witch stopped her song. Instead she threw her head back and howled like an animal. Her mouth fell open, wide as a python’s about to devour its prey.

      I woke up screaming.

      Sourdi put her arms around me, telling me it was just a dream, just a nightmare, I should go back to sleep.

      We were lying on the air mattress in our new bedroom in Auntie and Uncle’s big house.

      I cried. The wind rushing through the cornfields outside sounded like the witch’s singing.

      “I can’t breathe,” I whispered to Sourdi. “There’s no air.”

      Sourdi told me to ssssh. She made her voice soft and low, she blew against my neck, she turned into the wind that used to blow through the open windows of the house on wooden stilts by the brown river in the village where we lived during the war.

      She made her voice softer still, until it was a song, a song about a shepherd boy and a weaving girl who lived among the stars in the sky. They were in love but they lived too far away, separated by galaxies, so they could see each other only once a year. It was a sad song, but not a frightening song, not a witch’s song, but a young woman’s love song.

      Sourdi’s voice grew softer, just a tickle of breath on my skin, and I could almost sleep again.

      “Ssssh,” she whispered, “it’s just a dream, just a dream.” Her voice disappeared into my ear.

      My eyelids grew too heavy, they shut across my eyes, and I was almost asleep again.

      “Just a dream...”

      I smiled, sleepy-like, just for her. But she was wrong. It was a memory.

      CHAPTER 7

      First Days in the Silver Palace

      The Palace was beautiful. The six booths were covered in cherry red vinyl, a framed print of Angkor Wat in silhouette hung on the wall, a pink plastic chrysanthemum sprang from a bud vase on every table. Someone had even filled the vases with water to make the flowers seem more real. At the far end of the dining room, in the corner, was a little shrine with a pitched roof and curved eaves. A ceramic God of Wealth was seated within, behind a tiny urn for incense and a plate of miniature plastic peaches. The shrine plugged into the wall, and two red candles on either side of the pagoda glowed.

      The spigots of the soda dispenser shone as did the table tops, the window glass, the tile floor. Everything was sparkling clean, brand new, ready for action.

      “You should have seen it when we first arrived,” Uncle said, shaking his head. “Dirt everywhere. A big hole here.” He pointed to the ceiling. “Like a bomb had gone off. And the floors! Water everywhere.”

      Our first day of work in the Family Business, while we waited with excitement for our customers, Uncle told us happy stories. The cook, for example. The cook wasn’t just some old Chinese guy down on his luck, willing to work anywhere, he was a bona fide chef, top tier. Back in the day—several decades earlier—he’d had his own restaurant that was so renowned, people lined up for hours just to peer in the windows at the other people eating inside. Reservations had to be made months in advance, and even then that wasn’t always early enough. In his youth, Uncle said, our Palace’s chef had apprenticed in a Shanghai gangster’s favorite restaurant in Phnom Penh. Oh, the extravagant banquets he’d prepared then! Hardened criminals rubbed elbows with ex-Kuomintang government officials, gun molls sat mere feet from fur-clad Tai Tai’s with their foreign businessmen husbands. A French priest had condemned the restaurant’s signature dish—a ginger-infused mitten crab clay pot stew—as sinful because its vapors encouraged the mixing of the races.

      I squinted through the smoke in the kitchen at the skinny man, who sat in his undershirt on a stool, a cigarette dangling from his lips, while he flipped through his Chinese newspapers, ignoring the soup pot bubbling on the stove. I could almost imagine the young culinary prodigy Uncle was describing.

      Uncle said he considered himself a lucky man to have found such a chef through the classified ads in Houston. A very lucky man indeed.

      The cook was well-versed in the five major flavors— hot, sour, sweet, salty, bitter—and the eight regional styles. He could prepare snacks as well as banquet foods, meat dishes, cold dishes, dumplings, noodles, seafood, and vegetables, although, his eyesight not being what it once was, he could no longer be expected to carve melon rinds into the shapes of dragons or phoenixes or other mythical creatures. Of course, he had slowed in his old age, needed more time to prepare each dish, and could not always be trusted not to cut himself with the cleaver. Plus, he sometimes forgot the recipes, salting some dishes twice and leaving the centers of others uncooked. And once, he’d actually dropped the ashes of his cigarette into a bowl of curry. But Uncle said he had learned to work around these minor problems.

      While we waited for customers, Uncle told us how everything was now in place for success. “Now that you are here,” he said to Ma with a smile, “our luck will certainly change for the better.”

      When Uncle had first purchased the Palace, he’d seen the Native Americans walking on the sidewalks, their dark straight hair, their chiselled faces, and he thought to himself, with all these Chinese here, why didn’t they open a restaurant before?

      Everything was perfect: no gangs, no competition for forty miles—the next nearest Chinese restaurant being in Sioux City, Iowa,