"It is better to forget."

She had only met Uncle Yee once before, when she was four.

Her memory of him was faint – he already had been bald at the time, and bought with him a pair of pink jeans with a tiny butterfly embroidered on the left hip pocket. The elastic waistband of the jeans had left jagged red marks all across her pudgy tummy, and her mother had thrown them away the day after his visit.

Over the years, Emily had collected tiny bits of information from her mother about this man who she was to live with for the next two months. Uncle Yee was a stocky man of 48 years, 165 centimeters and 2 ex-wives. He wasn’t an uncle by blood, but close enough to the family to be called one.

During the car ride to St. Paul International airport, her mother had been unusually warm toward her, fussing over her bedhead and giving her apologetic looks for scraping the tires of the family Lexus against the curb.

“I’m just worried about you, you know you’ve been so sheltered all your life, and now we’re letting you run off to California for the summer.”

“Mom, you were the one who wanted me to go to San Francisco for the ‘experience’. It was your idea. You make it sound like some sort of teenage rebellion.”

“I know. But you’re just a baby you know. You’ve never even mopped the floors at home because we’ve always had Dalia around.”

Emily stared at the pair of canvas baby shoes that hung on the driver’s mirror. Black with tiny sea green caterpillars printed across the surface, the sneakers had been hers when she was just starting to learn how to walk.

“I still don’t understand why I can’t just intern for you or Dad this summer.”

“It looks bad on your resume, Emily. Daddy and I already make too much money. Andrea said that if you want to be competitive for Princeton, you have to do something that will show the admissions committee that you aren’t one of those kids who’ve never worked a day in their life.”

Emily’s mother glanced over at her daughter, who was biting her lip.

“Don’t worry, Uncle Yee make sure you’re taken care of. We went to high school together, back in the day, when I was still in Hong Kong.”

What Emily’s mother didn’t know was the conversation that Emily’s father had initiated last night, as Emily had been carefully folding her mother’s quilted parka into her canvas green duffel. According to his version of things, “friend” was a bit of a misnomer --- “Jilted lover” was the more honest label. Uncle Yee had worked in the same dim sum joint as Emily’s mother back her high school days, and they had gone out for nearly a week before she had relegated him back to the “friend-zone.”

“Not that she knows, but I think he was obsessed with her for many years. Obsessed. He never stopped writing her, even after she immigrated back to the states with me,” her father said. “It was disgusting. Your mother was married already.”

Emily wondered if he knew about the photo album she had found last summer, tucked away between two Reader’s Digests in her father’s study. Inside, she had seen for the first time, tinted photos of her father with chin length hair and bell-bottom jeans. And so many girls: girls with feathery bangs, metal bangles, kohl-rimmed eyes, ripped shorts, belly-baring tank tops, sitting on top of muscle cars, sipping from beer bottles, their arms around her father’s waist.

He took Emily to the mahogany filing cabinet where he kept all of his files from work, and pulled out a white envelope that had been stained yellow with time. Folded inside was a thin piece of unlined stationary, translucent like wax paper but colored like a Victorian rose. Emily’s father held the edges of Uncle Yee’s letter like it was a used tissue.

She couldn’t read a single word on the page, but she didn’t have to, to know that her father had intercepted something deeply intimate. Anyone could tell that much care had been inked into each stroke of each Chinese character.

Emily thought she saw a hint of cruel triumph in her father’s eyes as he put the letter back, and for a moment, questioned if she really knew her father at all.

Dinner, the night before Emily’s flight, was a tense affair. Her father, on the pretense of sulking over how Dalia had forgotten to fry an extra egg for him again, sat in stoic silence as her mother scooped bok-choy after bok-choy onto her place.

“I just feel so bad that we have to trouble Yee for the summer. He’s probably going to let you eat for free at his restaurant too,” she said, placing a seventh stalk of vegetable on Emily’s plate.

“That’s enough mom, thanks.”

“When you shower at his place, don’t use too much hot water. He doesn’t make as much money as Daddy, so you have to be considerate of other people. Don’t be a burden.”

When Dalia came in to serve the salt-baked chicken, Emily’s father leaned over and said in a low voice:

“Lock the door to your bedroom when you go to sleep at night.”

…

Emily cradled the 3x3 photo in her right hand as her mother drove. Frayed at the edges, the faded photo was a black and white headshot, of her pau pau staring straight into the camera with her dark, solemn eyes. Emily’s grandmother couldn’t have been older than 25, and was lovely in that old-timey Chinese way: lacquered lips, a small flat nose, thin shoulders, and thick hair pinned into an elaborate bun.

“How am I supposed to recognize pau pau with this picture? Don’t you have a more recent one?”

Emily’s grandmother had lived with them until Emily turned two, but Emily had no recollection of her grandmother’s face or voice. She had only a vague image in her head of the soft persimmons her grandmother would feed her.

“Sweetie, grandma grew up in the village. She doesn’t even own a computer. How do you expect her to email updated headshots to us?”

Her mother was lying, but Emily knew from the false lightness of her mother’s voice to push no further. Her mother wanted these last moments, before she shipped her daughter away to San Francisco for the summer, to be tender and tearful. The last thing Emily’s mother wanted was to be reminded of how she had done the exact same thing, many years before, when her own mother had become a burden.

Emily wished she had been there for the phone conversation where her mother talked Uncle Yee into hosting the daughter of the woman who never really gave him a chance. She didn’t even want to think about how her mother got her father to agree to leave his only child in the hands of his wife’s former flame.

Not that Emily’s mother had ever been particularly promiscuous or beautiful in her lifetime, but she had had quite the following in her peak years, with her wispy frame and thick black hair, which had been waist-long and glossy with health. Even now, in her matronly years, her mother’s facial expressions held a certain charm. All she had to do was furrow her brow, and the nearest salesmen at Home Depot would rush over to her aid. She was the kind of woman that needed to be helped, and taken care of – and apparently, the kind of female that haunted men even in her absence.

…

Uncle Yee was built like a former Marine who had stopped working out, the exact opposite of her father’s tall and boyishly thin stature. Whereas her father wore varying combinations of fitted cords and branded polo shirts, Uncle Yee’s uniform seemed to consist of a linen dress shirt – stained at the armpits – and suede brown dress pants that seemed two sizes two big, held up by a shiny black pleather belt.

It took Uncle Yee a few minutes to make his way toward her in the terminal. The closer he got, the more disturbed she was by the thick, scraggly eyebrows that curtained his face.

He greeted her with a hug that lasted a minute too long, the kind of hug that seemed more appropriate for a long lost friend than the daughter of a family friend. It was only when she squirmed slightly that he released her.

He spoke to her with what could only be described as child-like joy.

“You must be Michelle’s daughter! Emily, right? You speak any Chinese?”

“I can speak enough,” she answered evenly, in Cantonese.

“Waah, so smart! Just like your mother.”

He patted her on the head with a pleased expression. At 5’5”, he had barely an inch on Emily.

“Here, let me take your luggage.” “No, really, it’s okay.”

He took them anyway, throwing her two oversized duffel bags over his shoulder and dragging her thirty-pound suitcase behind him. Emily didn’t really feel too bad until she realized that Uncle Yee had parked pretty high up in the parking garage.

“Sorry Uncle Yee, I didn’t know we would be taking the stairs.”

“It’s okay, your Uncle Yee is used to manual labor! Plus, it’s faster this way!”

The positivity in his voice seemed a bit more forced by the time they reached his green Hyundai on the sixth floor.

“Here’s my baby!”

The smile on Emily’s face crumpled when she opened the passenger door to his sedan. She felt a little dizzy from the overpowering smell of Plumeria deodorizer, which did not mix well with the undertones of fish brine. As she started to step in, Uncle Yee noticed what she was doing and put his leathery hand on her bare shoulder.

“Come sit in the front with me! Don’t make your Uncle Yee feel like a chauffeur. Plus, there’s a lot of stains in the back, I’d feel embarrassed if you saw them.”

“Stains from what?”

“I transport a lot of seafood for the kitchen I work for. You’ll see soon enough! Our fish maw soup is quite famous.”

Uncle Yee seemed to recover his energy during the drive, and punctuated the silence in the car with questions about Emily’s family. For every two questions he asked about Emily’s mother, he asked about her father, but she could tell from the glaze in his eyes that he wasn’t really interested in those answers.

“So, it sounds like your dad’s company is doing pretty well. That’s great! When you were growing up, did your mother ever mention me? We were quite close.”

No, not really, Emily wanted to tell him. Not until her mother realized she could use you to babysit me for the summer while she tried to save her marriage.

“Ummm, I don’t really remember.”

“Ah, really? That’s too bad. Did your mother ever tell you of the time when we sneaked out of class early to go to the beach? She was so nervous on the train. She wore her hair back then just like you did, long and straight. Does your mother still have the same hairstyle?”

“No, I think she cut it when I was little. It’s barely past her ears now.”

He looked stricken, like she had just told him her mother was an amputee. “Uncle Yee?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you mind if I take a nap now? I’m a little tired.”

“Of course, of course. Jet lag. Don’t worry, you go ahead and sleep.”

Emily turned her head toward the window, and feigned sleep, looking at the passing cityscape, which was mutely colored in the San Francisco fog. On the winding freeway, they drove past glass buildings, steel buildings, concrete buildings, and scores of billboards. The most memorable one was a Gap billboard with two sun-kissed men touching each other intimately, wearing matching denim jackets and jeans. Nothing looked quite as Emily had imagined it.

…

It was 6 in the morning when she was awoken by Uncle Yee’s heavy footsteps and his off-tune rendition of Teresa Teng’s “Wishing We Last Forever.” It was the smell of salty meat that coaxed her feet out from the thick blankets and onto the cold plywood floor. As she stumbled down the hallway, she heard Uncle Yee say:

“Ah good, you woke up by yourself! You’ll have time to try some of Uncle Yee’s famous Chinese style-breakfast!”

Emily closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. She could already feel an ache forming in the back of her head.

When she entered the kitchen, Uncle Yee rose from the grey foldable table – which was covered with a suspiciously new table cloth – asked how much jook she felt like eating this morning. Emily shook her head and mumbled “there’s no need” in Cantonese, but he placed a blue-rimmed bowl of lean pork porridge in front of her anyway.

Every time Emily looked up from her bowl, she saw the yellowed teeth of Uncle Yee’s broad smile. She felt molested by his attentiveness, and was sure it showed on her face. Emily’s father always said the curl of her lips gave her emotions away.

“So, ready for your first day of work? I was thinking we both…” Emily shook her head.

“Actually, I want to say hi to my grandmother before doing anything else. Is that okay?

Do you know where she lives?”

He wrote the address to her grandmother’s retirement home on the back of a faded cargo receipt, reassuring Emily unnecessarily that she didn’t have to worry about hurting his feelings.

“Your grandmother is a good woman. You should spend as much time with her as you can while you’re over here.”

Excusing herself, Emily stepped outside of Uncle Yee’s apartment, and leaned on the green railing, which was chipping away to reveal a layer of greige paint. The morning light that glazed the streets of San Francisco Chinatown seemed to mimic the pale tones of the white corn that Emily’s mother had boiled for her as a child.

The Bay air was chilling and pungent with the smells that rose from the dumpster a few floors below, but it felt good to be alone. She closed her eyes and tried to let herself sink into the sounds of the city: the whirs of the passing cars, the shuffling footsteps of the preschoolers who were walking hand in hand with their grandparents, and even the reprimands screeched in broken English by the mother who lived three doors down.

…

She knocked and knocked, and finally kicked the mustard-colored door that her grandmother supposedly lived behind. Emily could hear a shuffling inside, and wondered if Uncle Yee had retrieved the correct address from his memory.

“Hello?! Is anyone there? I’m Emily, Michelle’s daughter.”

No one opened the door for her, and she started to worry. What if pau pau was mad at Emily’s family for not visiting her all these years? Emily’s other grandmother, the one who lived in Connecticut, got mad if Emily didn’t call her at least once a week.

Emily resolved to wait for her to come out. She imagined a scene where she kneeled by her grandmother’s side and clung to her grandmother’s sleeve as she tried to explain how her mother liked to only contact people when she needed their help.

“I am an unfilial grandchild,” Emily would weep, in perfect Cantonese. “I only knew how to think about my own life and never thought to call you.”

She had no idea how long she sat in that air-conditioned hallway before an elderly man with a beige and brown mesh baseball cap emerged from the adjacent door. He crinkled his wrinkled, liver-spotted face at Emily when he saw her sitting in a half squat in front of her grandmother’s doorway. In broken English, the man asked her:

“You looking Lai Tai Tai?

She asked if he knew when Mrs. Lai would be back. “She probably inside. Just go in. She not able hear you.” Emily turned the doorknob with alarming ease.

The man read the expression on her face and laughed. “Mui mui, what do you think we have worth stealing in here?”

…

Pau pau lived in a windowless room. Emily was impressed by her grandmother’s ability to hoard so much furniture into such a tiny space: a three-person couch, two poorly refurbished computer chairs and a large green mahjong table. All around the room were artfully stacked piles of old Chinese newspapers, striped Filipino Skyflake cracker boxes, and dusty tea tins. Three pairs of black pleather comfort shoes were lined up neatly by the door, right below a hook that carried a tiny red and yellow backpack with a Dalmatian printed on its main compartment.

An elderly lady in loose floral trousers and a solid grey tunic stood in the center of this delicate balance, wiping the dust off of a cube-shaped tv set with a wet Starbucks napkin.

Emily’s eyes swept over the woman’s thick hair, which reminded her of her own, except that it was paper-white and cut like someone had used a pair of safety scissors.

Pau pau caught sight of Emily by the doorway, and acknowledged her with the kind of look that one gives the neighborhood mailman. As Emily approached her grandmother, Emily was struck by the loveliness of her pau pau’s wrinkles, which were etched gracefully around her flat nose and thick lips.

“Grandmother, it’s me. Lai Zhi Kei’s daughter,” Emily said in Cantonese, throwing in her mother’s maiden name for good measure.

Pau pau stared at Emily’s face. It struck Emily that her grandmother might not understand her Cantonese, since they spoke with different accents. Not that Emily had ever tried a Toisan village accent, but before she could even try, her pau pau turned and walked into another room, reappearing with a cassette tape.

Emily fidgeted as her grandmother rewound the tape at 3x speed.

In the video, Emily’s mother wore a tight, puff sleeved wedding dress and dark red lips. Her mother looked young and awkward in a way that Emily had never seen her before. All of the photos of her mother around the house were either graceful studio portraits or jubilant group shots of her mother surrounded by her b-school friends.

Her grandmother paused the tape at a moment when Emily’s mother was cutting the tiered cake with back turned from the camera. She tapped her finger on the TV screen and looked at Emily, her half open mouth formed in an expression of delight. Shutting off the TV, Pau pau patted Emily’s forearm.  Pau pau felt the length of Emily’s hair and beamed, as if to say “look how long it is!”

Her grandmother looked at the timepiece on her wrist – a light green piece of plastic with a Mickey knockoff on the watch’s face – and lifted a checkered brown wool vest that was draped on the nearest computer chair. Emily was startled when she felt her pau pau’s cold hands touching her elbow and pushing her forward. She could feel deep crevasses on her pau pau’s palm, lines from time that Emily could never fully understand due to the barrier of language between them.

…

Walking through eight sloped blocks of central Chinatown with her grandmother was a trying experience. Pau pau was slow and steady like a turtle, hobbling at the same speed for all eight blocks. Emily followed her grandmother into a broad alleyway and knocked on the first gated door to their right. A middle aged woman with a giant mole below her right nostril opened the door for them.

The linoleum flooring of the room inside was scuffled by many soles, a few of which Emily attributed to the screaming preschoolers who ran around in Hello Kitty hair ties and Dragonball Z sneakers. Elderly men who were presumably their grandfathers sat with their legs crossed on foldable chairs, revealing colorful argyle tube socks.

Her grandmother pushed Emily along, until they reached a group of elderly men huddled around a mahjong table. They wore matching uniforms of Costco baseball caps, muted windbreakers and off-brand sneakers. A dusty red clay statue of the Guan gong god sat right above the men’s heads on a ledge, glaring at any evil spirits that might threaten to disrupt the gambling that was happening in this room.

Pau pau sat down on a stool behind one of the men, and he turned around. When he saw who it was, he smiled and handed her a bag of napkins that had been sitting by his feet.

Emily recognized the pattern of liver spots across his wrinkled face. “Oh hey, you live on my grandmother’s floor!”

“Yes. You found your grandmother. Good, good. Your father here? He usually comes around this time.”

Emily paused.

“You’ve met my father before?”

“Yes, he usually this time comes over, brings your grandmother Chinese food for lunch. He very filial, if my own son would come see me like that I very happy.”

Emily just looked at him. She turned to pau pau and in her best imitation of a Toisan accent asked if this was true.

The other men at the table started laughing. The liver-spotted man bit back a smile and said:

“Mui mui, are you trying to speak Toisanese to your grandmother?”

It was Emily’s worst nightmare. She stopped listening for a few moments to pick up the piece of her pride that had fallen onto the floor. When she returned, the men who had returned to their game again, and were now talking about her stupidity in Cantonese apparently.

“…what happened to her?”

“I think she was that way from birth.”

“No cure back then, no cure now. Things haven’t changed that much over the years.”

Emily couldn’t believe the sass that was coming from these men, who barely even knew her. How dare they judge her, based on one mistake?

“My son told me the other day that soon they’ll be able to fix these kinds of things. Some mice, who were deaf from birth, got their hearing after scientists put stem cells into their bodies.”

The liver-spotted man turned around and gave Emily a sympathetic look. “Maybe one day your grandmother can hear. She not that old. Still has time.”

Emily was reminded of an ancient Chinese proverb that went something along the lines of: “He who assumes people are talking about him is a big fat idiot.”

She looked at her grandmother, who was studying the liver spotted man’s mahjong hand, and said in a low voice in Cantonese to the man.

“I had no idea my grandmother was deaf.”

“It’s okay, I figured your parents never spoke with you about her deafness.”

“It’s all in the past, I don’t know how a daughter treat her mother that way. Send her own mother to new place and leave her ex-husband to take care of his mother in law. In the village, these things would never happen.”

“I didn’t know my mother had an ex-husband.”

The liver-spotted man’s eyebrows were nearly touching together in confusion.

“I’m talking about your father. How could you not know this? Look, here he comes right now.”

Indeed, Uncle Yee, in a stained white apron and loose khaki pants, was walking toward them. He held a plastic bag of take-out boxes in his right hand. He didn’t nearly as surprised to see Emily here as she was to see him. He greeted Emily with a pat on the head.

“Emily! Have you eaten yet? You can share with your grandmother. She doesn’t have time to finish all of this anyway. She has to go pick up her food stamp rations in about an hour.”

Tapping her grandmother on the shoulder, Uncle Yee pointed to an empty mahjong table and mimed eating a bowl of rice. Pau pau nodded, and plodded over the table with child-like obedience. At that point, Emily must have looked at Uncle Yee with a stricken expression because he took one look at Emily’s face and pulled her aside.

Emily did her best to channel the calmness she had seen her mother display when Emily’s father accused her of siphoning money from their joint account.

“Nothing. The liver-spotted man seemed to know a lot about my life, that all.” “The liver-spotted man?”

“That man. Over there. He told me a lot of things I didn’t know, like how you’re my father. How could you possibly be my father? I look nothing like you.”

Her last words came out more harshly than she intended. Uncle Yee looked troubled.

“Of course not, you look a hundred percent like your mother. I never said anything about you being my daughter.”

“They also called you my mother’s ex-husband!!”

“No, no they just assume so because I drive your grandmother to her doctor appointments, bring her food for her meals and pay her bills.”

“You really don’t have to do that. My dad has a lot of money.”

Uncle Yee’s expression – for the first and only time during her entire trip – hardened. “I’m sure your father makes a lot of money. Otherwise Michelle wouldn’t have left and…”

He caught himself.

“But that does not matter. All in the past, the less you know the better. Plus I live in the same city as your grandmother. No reason why I shouldn’t help her. Your grandmother treated me like her son when we were all in Hong Kong together.”

Uncle Yee gestured toward pau pau who was in the middle of slurping a very long rice noodle.

“Your grandmother really had determination you know. When the Japanese came to rape and kill in China, she survived. When her husband died and left her alone in Hong Kong with her daughter, she survived. When her daughter brought her to America and then sent her away to live by herself, she survived. Through all this, she survived and still gave, and never had anything mean to say about anyone!”

He chuckled at his own little joke.

“Really, she was better than my own mother. When I was growing up, my mother always built me up with comments like ‘you are no use at your studies, you better get a job or no woman is ever going to let you marry her.’ Even now my mother remembers too much of the past, bringing up things I did wrong as youth. Your grandma? Always welcomes me with a happy face, like she has no memory of bad things.”

He laughed again, at his next thought.

“I only fly back to Hong Kong to see my parents once a year. I come see your grandma every day. Isn’t that funny?”

…

Two months from that moment, Emily opened the door to Uncle Yee’s apartment to the sound of Anita Mui wailing a “Song of Sunset” in her raspy, mournful voice. The Cantonese ballad was so loud that she could not immediately distinguish where these sounds of tragedy were coming from. As Emily took off her shoes, her ears picked up a male voice singing, slightly off tune, with Anita Mui. She crept over to Uncle Yee’s bedroom, and sure enough, saw him sitting upright on his bed room in his wool pajamas, singing as he looked through a stack of photo albums.

Uncle Yee was so immersed into his own world that he didn’t even notice her watching him from the doorway. When Uncle Yee sang, his mouth opened dramatically, like he was proving to an audience that he wasn’t lipsyncing. When Anita Mui hit a low note, he sang even lower and louder. He would periodically stop to take a swig from a half-empty bottle of milk was on his nightstand. Emily had only seen her father do this once before, with a Pretenders song when he was very drunk at a Christmas party.

When Emily could watch no more, she crept back to her bedroom, locking the door behind her.

…

Uncle Yee, despite his robust size, sometimes reminded Emily of a wounded swallow. Sometimes, when she forgot herself and who Uncle Yee was in her father’s eyes, Emily likened him to this fragile and soft songbird. He didn’t sing like one, but his caring for her reminded me of one.

There would be the little notes about heated porridge slipped under Emily’s door when she woke up after Uncle Yee left early to do some work at the restaurant. The only time he chastised Emily - for arriving home after midnight - he left her a ten dollar bill and tiny packet of mutely colored chocolate rocks, the Asian kind made with imitation cocoa. It was hard not to be touched after a while, by the ugly sweatshirts he left by the front door on cold front days and how his frame always slackened at the mention of her mother’s name.

…

One summer night, in what would be the last month of her stay, Emily woke up in the middle of the night from thirst, and forced herself to get out of bed for a drink. The soles of Emily’s feet winced from the cold hardwood flooring, and everything in her body was whispering for her to dive back under her blankets, but the dryness in her throat prevailed.

The light was on in the kitchen. Emily could see Uncle Yee standing by sink, with his back turned toward her. He was still wearing his stained work uniform.

Uncle Yee whirled around, and Emily saw that he held a glass of milk in his right hand.

His other hand rested on a photo album that lay flat on the counter. Emily pretended not to notice, and walked over to the fridge.

“Hey Uncle Yee, what are you doing up so late? Don’t you have work tomorrow?” “I could say the same to you. It’s nearly 2 a.m.”

Emily pointed to the fridge and mimed drinking a glass of water. Uncle Yee gave a weak chuckle.

“Here come sit down with Uncle Yee after you’re done stealing food from my refrigerator. Do you want to see some pictures of your mother when she was younger?”

She chose a bottle of malted soymilk and sat down at the little grey card table that Uncle Yee owned, the bachelor’s version of a dining table.

Uncle Yee dragged a plastic chair over to the adjacent side and began to narrate a faded colored photo of Emily’s mother posing in front of a blossom tree. She had a half-smile on her face, but the look in her kohl rimmed eyes was a little distant. The heavy blue eye shadow and orange-red lipstick made Emily’s teenaged mother look like an Asian Cyndi Lauper – who Emily had always thought looked too old to play a fun-wanting girl. She raised an eyebrow at her mother’s off-shoulder red top and white capris, which were a little too tight in Emily’s opinion.

And her mother chastised her for wearing denim minis to school?

Uncle Yee touched her hand.

“Okay if I switch into Cantonese? The feeling is better.” Emily nodded.

“This photo I took myself. It has a lot of meaning for me, I took it of her during our first date to Lai Chi Gwok Park and we were so happy – wait, did your mother ever tell you we dated? Sorry, this must be so awkward for you now that you know. Don’t worry, it’s all in the past. I know she’s married now. I was with other women after her, you know.”

Emily took a sip of malted soy and shrugged very slightly so that her movement could have been mistaken for a shoulder twitch.

Uncle Yee took the photo out from the plastic pages and held it in his hand as he continued.

“We both were so joyful that day because I had finally gotten the courage to ask her out the other night, when we were working on homework together. She was so smart you know.

People always thought I helped her with her math homework but it was the other way around. She seemed a little shy on the phone, didn’t say much during our date, but I could tell she loved me. I could tell from her eyes.”

Emily bit her lip. Every word that left Uncle Yee’s mouth sickened her, yet drew her into their story. Emily stared at her soymilk as she asked the next question.

“So what happened?”

“Well your mother and I, well we weren’t going to the same place in life. She was so beautiful, so smart and popular – she made the best grades out of all of the girls in our class. I had to let her go.”

The word slipped out of Emily’s mouth before she could stop it. “Why?”

“She told me herself. We were having late night food - milk tea and pineapple buns at her favorite chachan teng – and she told me she would always love me, but that it wouldn’t work. She told me herself, and I could see it in her eyes that she did mean it.”

Emily looked at Uncle Yee, whose voice had cracked during the last sentence. Uncle Yee reached over and grabbed her hands.

“Your face looks like it pities me. You don’t believe me. It’s okay, you weren’t there. I understand. All that matters is that I know.”

Emily tried to gently pull her hands away from his, but Uncle Yee’s grip was firm. She tried to phrase her next words soothingly, in the same way that her mother spoke to Emily when she threw temper tantrums as a toddler.

“I believe you, it’s okay Uncle Yee.”

She wriggled her hands loose a bit more. What happened next, blurred the kitchen background for Emily. The muted yellow lightbulb hanging above the sink, the plastic stool she was sitting on, the lacey white table cloth that her forearm rested on – all of that became blurry for Emily. All she could focus on was the way Uncle Yee traced his finger lightly against the insides of her wrists. Chills went through her body as she watched him draw little swirls on the insides of her forearm.

Then as if Uncle Yee broke out of his trance, he got up and left without a word.

When Emily sat down on her bed, she could feel her knees, hands, shoulders, and ears, everything shaking. She laid on top of her blankets for what felt like hours before sleep stole her. Emily woke up around the day around noon and found that Uncle Yee had slipped a note under her door.

On the back of the paper, he wrote:

“I’m so sorry. I forgot myself. Please don’t tell your mother.”

Emily left the house with every intention of wandering into every shop that would take her father’s MasterCard, but instead found herself walking deeper into Chinatown. Out of a habit that had been reinforced hundreds of time this past summer, Emily’s feet stopped at the intersection of Pacific and Stockton, and turned onto the street where her grandmother lived.

Pau pau was inside her room, watching TV as she used a toothbrush – a plastic cheap one that her dentist gave her - to scrub a brown stain that was on the collar of her white blouse.

Emily sat down next to her grandmother and stared at the silent screen. Her grandmother was watching a rerun of the TVB classic – Journey to the West – that had come out a few years ago. Emily’s eyes were on Dicky Cheung in his furry monkey costume as he argued with the enthroned Jade Emperor on screen, but her mind was on yesterday, and everything before.

Lock the door to your bedroom when you go to sleep at night.

The way his rough hands had held onto her smooth ones, even as she had tried to wriggle out of his grasp.

Waah, so smart! Just like your mother.

The heaviness of his hand as he touched the top of her head with his fingers, but snatching it away again.

She told me herself. We were having late night food - milk tea and pineapple buns at her favorite cha chan teng – and she told me she would always love me, but that it wouldn’t work. She told me herself.

The way his eyes had lingered on her face, her hair sometimes when Emily had talked to him during work.

No reason why I shouldn’t help her. Your grandmother treated me like her son when we were all in Hong Kong together.

The cartons of restaurant food that Uncle Yee brought for pau pau every day at the mahjong club room.

Your grandmother really had determination you know. When the Japanese came to rape and kill in China, she survived.

She had survived.

Emily looked at her grandmother, who was engrossed in a scene where Dicky Cheung was wrestling with a darkly painted bull god.

She imagined a man, hovering over her pau pau. A man wearing tall combat boots, khaki cargo packs and a rifle across his chest.

Pau pau is young, maybe Emily’s age, dressed in loose pants and a peach buttoned shirt with tiny peonies embroidered on the collar. It was the shirt that Emily’s grandfather had given her when their engagement was formalized.

His eyes taking in her thin frame, thick hair and smooth lips, the Japanese soldier pushes the barrel against pau pau’s head. The man’s frustration builds as pau pau refuses to obey his orders to get on her knees, and he pushes her to the ground. The weight of the soldier is heavy on pau pau, but thankfully she is not fully conscious during the whole rape. When he is done, he does not shoot her like the others. Maybe he took her silence for stoicism and was touched in the deepest part of his soul, by the honor he thought he saw in the stillness of this Chinese woman.

He leaves her, and she lays there on the dirt ground for a long time before she shakily gets up again, and into her engagement clothes.

Emily imagined that pau pau’s thick hair at the time as mangled and dirt-filled – not sleek and white as it has become with the cleansing power of time.

Pau pau looked over at Emily, who was staring with her wide, wet eyes.

Her grandmother reached into her pocket and pulled out a tiny cylinder of haw flakes, a sweet food that Emily remembered eating as a child after Dalia made her drink bitter herbal soup. Ripping off the thin paper top of the package, she handed Emily a nickel sized cookie, as if to say “Here, take this and call me in the morning.”