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I left my tray where it was, and Tommy sipped his soup. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever watched him as a boy, eating.

“I don’t know much about you, you know.”

“Not much to know, boss.”

“I
wish you
wouldn’t call me that. Henry said your family’s been here for generations.”

“How is Henry?” Tommy’s voice was dead calm.

“The same.”

He nodded and let it go. “Not here, but in this country. My great-grandmother came from Szechuan. Her parents sold her to
a trader
who shipped her to California as a prostitute. My great-grandfather sold trout and salmon to the miners, he fell in love with
her, paid a saloon owner one hundred dollars—fish money, my grandmother used to call it. They had three children, two died
as babies.”

I put down my spoon.

“When the whites in California started killing Chinese workers around the turn of the century, my great-grandparents took
their son and came to New York. They opened a poultry store. My grandfather passed the business on to my father before I was
born.”

The baby that didn’t die. I pushed the unbidden thought aside. “You chose not to carry on the tradition.”

He leaned back in his chair and wove his arms into a defending brace. “My parents gave me an American name. They made me promise
to stay in school, make something of my life.”

I suspect he didn’t mean it this way, but the last phrase came out sounding like a dare. I bit into my sandwich and waited
for him to unfold his arms. Tommy’s parents had been shorter than I was at ten years old. Flapping among the bodies of chickens,
talking and laughing with customers as their steel blades flew faultlessly, chopping off heads and wings.

“Where are your parents now?”

“Both dead.”

“Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

He dropped his arms and stared at the people streaming past us on the other side of the glass. Commuters whose day had finished
early, bustling for trains that would take them back to those beachfront towns.

“There are people in Chinatown who have lived in New York all their lives and never set foot north of Broome Street.” He turned
abruptly back to me. “Until I was fifteen years old, I was one of them.”

I pushed my tray onto the empty table next to us. The only other customers now were a pair of young men in ill-fitting business
suits who talked intently over monstrous hot fudge sundaes. The heel of the
darker of the two jerked up and down as he talked, as disconnected and earnest as the panting of a loyal dog. The other man’s
feet never moved.

“Why did we change seats?”

“I don’t sit with my back to the door.”

I inadvertently looked around as the two men got up and left.

“Why?”

“Occupational hazard.”

“Social history is dangerous?”

He picked up his sandwich, took a huge bite, and chewed slowly. Seamlessly. If he swallowed, I didn’t notice.

The year Tommy Wah was fifteen years old was the same year my family left Chinatown. The last year I saw Lao Li.

It was not Li who introduced us, but in my mind Tommy and I were linked by him. Li Tsung Po. Lao Li. A mutual acquaintance?
No. More.

I first met him one cold autumn day when I was eight and had strayed too far from home. I didn’t recognize the street or shops
and was just starting to get nervous when I came upon an enormous, brightly painted pillar rising like a god’s leg in front
of what was then a small curio store. Of course I stopped. Who could resist? Within the sculpted pictures lay a world of peacocks,
mountains, golden leaves. A vivid green and gilt dragon wound round and round, his head rising into the clouds. Tiny white-robed
women carried fruit in the palms of their hands; men held lanterns to light the way. It was magical.

The shop behind the pillar was long and narrow and dark as a wizard’s den, the only source of light a lamp on a desk at the
back. There sat an old, old man with a face so thin that knives of shadow stretched beneath his cheekbones.

He called out in a deep, gruff voice, “Come in, come in. Hurry up.”

“I’m lost,” I said from the doorway. “I need to get back to Mott Street.”

“Mott Street?” He cocked his head and pulled on his chin, then slowly rose from his desk and, leaning heavily on an ivory
cane, shuffled
in my direction. His black robe skimmed the floor. His white hair and spindly beard made me think of cobwebs. I couldn’t move.

He reached the front of the shop and pointed down the street to the right. “Mott Street is there. Not far.” His front teeth
glittered, solid gold. His eyes were tiny insects tucked behind old-man lids.

Before I knew what was happening, he grabbed my hand and pressed it between his own. “You call me Lao Li.”

His palms were cold and I could feel the long bones just beneath his skin. It was like shaking hands with a dragon.

“You are Maibelle,
dui

My hand jerked, but he had it clamped so tight that, instead of pulling away, I lost my balance and fell backward into a pile
of brocaded cushions. Having failed—or refused—to let go, Mr. Li fell on top of me. We lay motionless for several seconds,
and I’d just convinced myself that I’d killed him when he gave a roar.

“Jingren de!”

The sound erupted from deep down, the rumbling of a wizard who knew my name. Then a gurgle and shudder ran through his body,
gathered into a yelp, and the old man finally rolled off of me.

“Hee, hee. Hee, hee!
Qing.”
He motioned me to rise, though he was still flat on his back.

I started for the door, but the sight of him sprawled on the floor held me. The black robe was twisted around his legs. His
cane had been thrown to one side, the lion carved into its handle snarling up at me. The old man just lay there chortling
at the ceiling.

I asked if he was all right, which started him up again, and though I tried to hand him his cane and help him to his feet,
he was laughing so hard he could barely sit. When he took my hand this time, his palm was warm and his eyes bright.

“Okay, Mei-be.” He let me pull him up.

“How do you know me?”

He shook his head. “I know lot of things. Come, Jade Maiden, I show you. My shop is very special.” And then, as if I were
his most valued customer, he led me on a tour.

A
case near the entrance contained a trio of jade bracelets thick as doughnuts and a pair of tiny brocaded shoes inset with
pearls and black jet. “If you are a girl in Old China,” Li said, “you wear these when you grow up.”

It was a sobering thought, since the bracelets were so heavy I could hardly lift them and already my feet were far too big
to fit inside the shoes. Besides, they were all the wrong shape.

As if reading my mind, Li told me, “In China you wear tight bandages, stop bones from growing, then you have lotus feet and
shoes will fit.”

He smiled.

I said it sounded like torture, and people in Old China must have been very mean.

He replied that in China passion and pain could not be separated.

In one corner sat a rickshaw with worn leather seats and several wheel spokes missing. The handles were burnished and smooth
as skin, and when I touched them, they were moist, as if with sweat. Mr. Li would not let me sit in the rickshaw because it
was liable to break, but he insisted I try the store’s centerpiece, a rosewood throne inlaid with ivory clouds and jade serpents,
the legs carved into elephants. It was very uncomfortable, but that hardly mattered because as soon as I was settled, Mr.
Li told me of man-eating demons and water dragons ("claws made from lightning, teeth sharp like swords") and an emperor-magician
who turned his wife to stone ("that wife ask too many questions").

As he talked, his long, bony fingers moved like tentacles. I felt his black eyes watching from beneath their great sprouting
brows, but I could not decide whether he viewed me with fondness, pity, or amusement.

Finally Lao Li led me to the back of the store, where the air was thick with peanut oil smells from the noodle shop next door.
There, one whole wall was covered with photographs from the time when his antiques were new.

There were scared-looking children and stern old women wrapped in elaborate gowns. The women’s hair was arranged in geometric
shapes
that stood up and out from their heads. They had the look of evil queens from some distant, alien planet. The men, always
photographed separately and often in Western dress, seemed far less threatening. They had tufted eyebrows, wisps of beard,
and cheeks that were either very round or hollow, like Mr. Li’s.

But the pictures that intrigued me the most were not of Chinese at all. They were a series of sepia portraits of a white woman
and what I assumed was her family. She had sad eyes and hair as light and curly as mine. She wore long pleated dresses with
lacy trim and waists tied with broad pale ribbons. I would never have guessed she was photographed in China if it weren’t
for her chair, with that same inlaid wood and elephant carving, and the children standing beside her, the baby in her lap.
Though dressed in starched white playsuits and gowns with ruffles and bows, these children had hair and eyes as black as those
of the kids in Chinatown—the ones who really belonged there, that is, not “foreign devils” like me.

When I asked who the lady was, Lao Li wouldn’t answer directly. Instead, he took me behind the counter and pulled up a couple
of stools. He poured himself a bowl of tea and gave me a walnut cookie, then told about white witches who cast spells over
China men.

The witches stole the enchanted men’s babies for their kingdom in the sky. They raised the children as their own, teaching
them wondrous magic. But when the babies were grown, the witches grew distrustful and hurled them back to earth. When the
children knocked on their fathers’ doors they found that the China men had new babies and did not remember the old ones. The
men saw them only as witches, and begged them to go away. And so the white witches’ stolen children were forced to remain
forever between the earth and sky.

“Is she one of the witches?” I searched the portrait above my head for signs of mystical powers.

“Ah,” said the old man fluttering his palm. “This question you ask your father.”

“My father? You know my father?”

Mr. Li smiled.

“But
how
do you know my father?”

“Jade Maiden,” warned Lao Li, still smiling, “you ask too many questions.”

That night I asked my parents if they knew Mr. Li, and as he’d implied, they did. Li Tsung Po was his full name. He’d operated
a pawnshop in Shanghai before the communist takeover, and my mother said he had the best Oriental antiques in the city. My
father, bluntly and without explanation, called him a thief and forbade me to see him again, but when I asked about the pictures,
Dad was silent, then started to leave the room. He reached the doorway, turned, and said, “Witches cannot be photographed.”

I
n used bookstore on lower Broadway I bought twenty back issues of
National Geographic
with photographs by Marge Gramercy. I have them here by my bed, in the darkroom, scattered among this next batch of gadgets
awaiting the camera’s eye. Not coffee-table reading or framable art, the magazines serve as a private warning system and reminder
of what I hoped to accomplish by coming back.

Marge Gramercy was no one I knew before stumbling across her obituary, but she has slowly, reliably turned into a role model,
confidante, and friend. The longer I live in her home, the more deeply I imagine her. Through these photographs I see where
she traveled, how she saw, what she thought and loved. By extension I can see the woman herself, as she kneels before the
grieving windswept child in this portrait of the Andes. I picture silver hair braided long down her back, skin the color of
a sandstorm. I admire her hand-dyed vests and khaki pants, combat boots, and wild tribal earrings given by native women in
exchange for Polaroids of their children.