1
Seattle, Washington
2015
Susanna's dining table is long, meant for more people than just me and her. At every place setting there is a plate and enough slim silver cutlery that I could make a traditional Chinese cutting of the tablecloth; it is an eerie scene. Once there were three eating at this table every day, of course: Susanna; Peter, her first husband; and Liana, my granddaughter. Then came the divorce; then there were two. Then Susanna married Dean, and there were three again. Then Liana left for college. Then there were two again. And now Dean is gone.
I am here tonight, but my daughter acts like she is alone.
Susanna sits across from me, reading on her phone, her eyes moving visibly beneath the lids. All the food on the table has just been taken out of the fridge.
I take a sip of my tea. It is hard and gritty.
"Something wrong, Ma?" she asks.
"It's so cold in here, that's all. Did you take this whole house out of the fridge?"
A short sigh. "You didn't have to stay for dinner."
How could I go, after the conversation we have had?
I had not thought about Maidenhair House in several decades, but now the memory burns brighter than the light overhead. Susanna, naturally, does not see the effect her reminder has had on me; she thinks Maidenhair is like any other murder mystery she has ever encountered, gone rancid with time. I wonder how she learned that I was there that night, but it surely involves more devices, more squinting, more poorly lit rooms.
I imagine a list of women's names, one after another. I imagine Susanna struggling to make sense of it, and in the end, believing what she sees.
The greatest surprise is not her discovery of my presence, nor her self-proclaimed investigation.
The greatest surprise is that my daughter has gotten out of bed.
She has hardly left the house since Dean died, three months ago.
"Yes, I was at Maidenhair," I say, and her eyes widen. "But I have never spoken of that night to anyone. Not because I have something to hide, but because I have had no desire to turn over the past like the dirt of a grave."
It has the effect on her that I hoped for, and simultaneously dreaded: Susanna sets down her phone and diverts her full attention to me.
"But you're willing to talk about it now?" she says.
I notice that she hasn't picked up anything to eat with; she has become as skinny as a bamboo stake. "If you do something for me in exchange."
"What is it?"
"I want you to find out why I remember being attacked, so many years ago, from the perspective of my attacker."
"The thing you described earlier, you mean?"
"That is my condition."
"Forgive my bluntness, Ma," she says wearily, "but I'd say it was a trick of your imagination. Your brain trying to protect itself from whatever happened. But if you want me to find out who attacked you, I suppose we can try. When was it? Not when you were growing up? Because 1930s Shanghai, we're talking Japanese soldiers, gangsters, drug dealers, criminal overlords," she says, like I might not know, like I wasn't there. "It might be difficult to-"
"I didn't say who. I said why."
"Well, it'll have to wait either way. I've booked a flight to Hong Kong, for research."
Susanna sucks air in through her nose, as if to prepare for my objections. I do have objections. I want to say: On the subject of somebody's brain trying to protect itself from what has happened, why are you suddenly so drawn to a story like Maidenhair? To old deaths; to open-ended deaths? You say you want answers; I think you do not want answers. You want to hunt. You want to chase. You want to run. You want to spend your time on people who cannot die in your arms, because they are already dead.
But at least she has gotten out of bed.
Perhaps this is the start of a new stage of grief. First, she could not move at all. And now she cannot stay still.
For the rest of the meal, Susanna keeps her head turned so that her hair hangs over her face, blocks my view of her. Her hair should be streaked with white, but it is dyed dark. Dollhouse hair. To go with the dollhouse food and the dollhouse house. All she is missing now is the dollhouse husband. I should tell her about the day I ran into my own future husband, her future father, in a bustling marketplace in Tsim Sha Tsui: I was idling near the hundred-year-egg stall when a young man approached me. He had to stoop to speak to me. I had missed breakfast that morning, and I was hungry; over the rumbling of my stomach I heard him apologize for disturbing me. He was irresponsibly handsome, handsome enough that I forgot one hunger and remembered another. He held out a hand, turned upward. I think you’ve dropped this-
I grabbed my white peony flower hairpin out of his palm.
This young man asked me if I wanted a hundred-year egg.
By then I was corroding like iron, from the wanting of things.
"You have my condition," I say to my daughter. "Let me know what you decide."
Susanna does not answer.
Hundred-year egg has a tough, almost impenetrable crust, but on the inside it is soft. It is weeping.
The tapestry of clouds in the distance has lifted, revealing the outline of the Cascades. Susanna has surprisingly agreed to drive me home; bent over the steering wheel, she rubs at a red splotch of skin on her wrist. The car’s touch screen display glowers rudely at us. I have no idea why the navigation is turned on; Susanna should not need directions to my home, at least not before nightfall.
I wonder if it is always nightfall now, for my daughter.
A phone call flashes on the screen: Liana. Susanna doesn't pick up.
"Is Liana still having trouble sleeping?" I ask, after the ringing dies. "The insomnia, the nightmares?"
"So Peter says," she replies. "Now apparently she's . . ."
"She's what?"
"Seeing things," says Susanna, in a breath.
"What does my granddaughter see?"
"I don't know."
"Perhaps if you took her calls you would know."
"Peter says she isn't liking grad school. He doesn't think we should make a big deal out of it."
"Have you spoken directly to him? To either of them? Or you only communicate through those bubble messages that make my temples ache?"
Susanna is too busy rubbing the red spot raw to respond. Liana came up from LA shortly before Dean's death, and mother and daughter have not seen each other in person since. Liana didn't visit for the funeral because there wasn't one; Susanna arranged a quick cremation before making a permanent burrow of her bedcovers. These past few months she has seen nobody but me, and only because I have a key to her house. Only because I refuse to go unseen.
I have been so gentle with her. I have hovered over her like a cloud.
What good has it done?
Now she is finally leaving her house, but going to Hong Kong instead of LA. Now she will finally raise her head again, but only as high as her touch screen.
“You really shouldn’t be living alone anymore, you know, Ma,” Susanna says, opting to go on the offensive. “Weren’t we talking once about getting you a place at-”
"At least I do not live in your house. It is a cube."
She flinches at my tone.
"There are memories like nails sticking out of the walls in that place, Susanna. No wonder you are so pallid and sick-looking. You are bleeding out. You should sell it."
"All this was different for you, alright?" she says, her hands rigid on the wheel. "You didn't love Dad the way I loved-"
She can't finish, but her voice is bitterly triumphant. As if to say: Admit you didn't love him. Admit that you don't know what it's like for me.
"It depends on what you mean by love," I say. "I cherished him. I miss him. But I did not wring myself out like a cloth for him, and he would not have wanted it. You have to understand that by the time I met your father, I had no desire for something so fragile that it would fall to dust in my hands. I had been swimming, gasping for air, for so long: What I had with Dad was a boat. We built it together, knowing it would carry us however far we needed to go."
"Well, I didn't want a boat. I wanted something else," she says hotly, "and I got it."
"If you had a boat right now, maybe you wouldn't be so stuck in place."
"You and boats. Sometimes you can't just-can't just move forward like that, Mama! That easily! That quickly! I'm not ready to sell the house. I'm just not. I-"
"Have you decided whether to accept my condition?"
Silence again, but this time it is more like static. It has begun to rain. Susanna turns on the wipers, which creak moodily across the windshield. "I want to take care of Maidenhair first," she says, "and then-yes. I can look into your-attack."
She scratches again at her wrist, and this time she draws blood.
It was September 1953, the last time I laid eyes on Maidenhair House.
But the real story begins many years before that.
I gaze at my daughter, the sweep of her jaw, the craters of her eyes, the frayed shawl of her hair, the way her sweater is buttoned all the way up the neck, nearly a noose.
"I'm going with you to Hong Kong," I say, and she jolts back in surprise.
"Are you kidding?" she exclaims.
"Why shouldn't I go? I have been acquiring air miles for decades. It would be upsetting to die without having used them. I have achieved special status with the airline by now; I can get excellent upgrades." Susanna is still protesting, but we have reached our destination, the small bungalow I shared with my late husband for almost half a century. I want to tell my daughter: Do not go back to your cube house. Do not live in a box. Boxes are what people are buried in. "There is even an extra-fast line, for going through immigration," I tell her. "That is the most important thing."
"That's the important thing? You're eighty-five years old, Ma! Who cares about extra-fast lines in immigrations? You can't just-"
Someone who is eighty-five, that's who. Someone who could fall down dead at any moment, anywhere, right where she is standing. Someone who lived too long on the line, between one country and another; who refuses to die in the in-between place.
2
Kowloon, Hong Kong
September 1953
The final customer of the day is an old lady with flaming white hair and a gold-capped cane, like a scepter. A lavish green cloak strains from her shoulders to her feet, sweeping the aisles clean as she browses. She chatters low, as if to herself, a sly stream of gossip about this shoe-shiner's love affairs and that washwoman's slug of a son-in-law. She does not appear to require any assistance, so Mei begins to redress the window display: The brass Buddhas and Jingdezhen porcelain plates must be swapped out for burnished chicken-blood and field-yellow stone. Away come the small model ships and the mother-of-pearl mahjong sets, and in go the festive Mid-Autumn lanterns.
Mrs. Volkova often says that Mei should hang up some of her traditional paper cuttings. Perhaps Mei's signature design, the unfurled peony flower, because aren't such cuttings meant for windows? Isn't light meant to stream through the slits in the paper; the negative space?
But Mei keeps her designs tacked to the walls in the back. She believes that the sun would only spoil them.
The evening has grown stale and silent. Volkov’s Curio Shop should be long closed by now, but the visitor will not leave. You need the patience of the goddess Tin Hau not to snap like a pencil tip, putting up with people like this; or else you need to be in customer service. Mei sands her teeth together, swipes the sweat from her forehead. It might still be worth it: She senses that this woman could afford to buy this whole building, squat and derelict and dirty as it is, and the wealthy do not often find their way to this part of Kowloon.
The lady says: "You've heard of George Maidenhair, I presume?"
The red diamond character banners slip right through Mei's hands.
Immediately, she gathers them back up. There is nowhere to faint in a display like this, except face-first on the Buddhas. After speaking so long without a stop, now the woman is awaiting a reply, but how can Mei respond? Yes, Auntie, I have heard of George Maidenhair. I have spoken his name; I have screamed it into my hands. Yes, Auntie, and he would have heard of me. But look how I am many years, and hundreds of miles, and one entire country, away from all that.
Look how well I can string these banners, without my hands even shaking-
The old woman repeats the four syllables of George's full name. She says that he ran an infamous business empire back in Shanghai. That he all but owned the Paris of the East. That he married the former silent-film actress Holly Zhang. Surely Mei knows of him, because even the fish-slingers down at Lei Yue Mun know of George, even the rickshaw drivers so skinny their shirts get sucked into their stomachs, even the addicts in their dens and divans lying as still as effigies, even the Triad thugs who have never left the blackened courtyards of Kowloon Walled City-they all know him.
But everybody says they know everybody, in a city nearly built on top of itself, like Hong Kong.
As she listens, Mei turns the character fú upside down, so that luck pours out for the Mid-Autumn Festival. It feels like she might be standing on her head. Heat is rushing to her cheeks; they must be as red as the banners.
For a moment she wants to bring this whole window display crashing down.
For a moment she wants to see everything she has spent so long putting up ripped to shreds.
George Maidenhair: taipan and business mogul. George Maidenhair: American-born; Oxford-educated; hell-bound. George Maidenhair, with a laugh as hearty as Tientsin cabbage soup, without any soul. George Maidenhair, whom they called the Golden Man back in Shanghai: some said for his good-luck, ferry-light, tossed-yolk yellow hair, others said for his money, but Mei would say because he was a false god. George Maidenhair, who cracked Mei's entire life down the middle, the way she could one of these porcelain plates, forever beyond repair.
Copyright © 2025 by Kristen Loesch. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
