A Paper Son Read Online Free

subjects.
    â€œI’ll put them up for you,” she said.
    â€œI’ll do it later,” I said. After a week or two I hung them all above my headboard, so I wouldn’t have to see them while I was lying there. Joy saw them, looked around at all the other empty walls, and put her hand over her mouth. She dumped me a few days later. We had the big talk at her loft, after a tense lunch of pho and spring rolls. Collage was her medium—she built reproductions of corporate logos out of combat photographs. A Chevron logo made of mass gravesites loomed on the wall above us as we sat on her couch; across the room, the golden arches comprised assault rifles. It was the standard break-up conversation until she told me that she really liked the concept of me, but she had misgivings about the execution. At that point I knew it wouldn’t be too hard to get over her. She collected the paintings and prints and I puttied and painted over the holes they’d left in my wall, and went back to being content.
    Now in my banker’s suite I tossed Franklin’s flier onto my desk beside my laptop, and prepared a cup of tea. Outside the storm attacked with the frantic energy of a novice fighter in the first round. I felt strangely calm now, and ready for the family at the railing. I had an idea now of why they were there, and what I was going to do with them. The water settled and there they were again, with the twilit city spread out in front of them. The woman’s name was Li-Yu, I decided. Her children would be Rose and Henry. Her husband would be called Bing. The city wasn’t San Francisco—it was too dark, too far away. I decided on Canton, the origin of uncertain journeys somewhere in my own family’s distant past. The year would be 1925. I opened my laptop. From the deck of the steamer, I wrote, they can see what must be nearly all of Canton.

From the deck of the steamer they can see what must be nearly all of Canton. In the day’s last light the city’s buildings look secretive and dangerous as they crouch inside a smoky haze, their haunches illuminated by diffuse, flame-colored lights from unseen sources. The wharf uncoils and reaches toward the ship like a dirty claw. The air is cold, and smells of fish and garbage. So this is it, Li-Yu thinks. The fabled heart of China.
    It has been hours since they steamed past that outer armada of islands, past Hong Kong, and were swallowed by the hills and plains of Guangdong. The Pearl River, Bing said, looking inland, northward, his excitement clear. Li-Yu had spent weeks at sea, and weeks before that, trying to absorb some of this excitement, but none of it had settled in her. Even now, with the end of their journey so close, and the oppression of the ship’s steerage compartments nearly behind them, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was offering herself and her children to the throat of a hungry dragon. She watched the hills and rice paddies glide past, wondering what sort of river could so easily consume a ship like this.
    She knew well a version of this country, one she had pieced together from thousands of miles away, from her parents’ stories and from clues like the smell and feel of the clothes and the few things that had survived their trip across the Pacific, the year before Li-Yu was born. In her mind the countryside was dotted with mist-shrouded mountains and temples with roofs curling like phoenix wings, its halves divided by that stupendous wall. The government consisted of soldiers, their columns bristling with rifles, marching through the grainy landscapes of news clips and magazine photographs, and of the boy Puyi in his embroidered silk robes, with his hat and his haughty stare, an emperor without an empire, and now nothing more than a commoner. Before seeing this view of Canton she felt she might have known something about its cities, having been raised in the Chinatowns of Stockton and Oakland and San