Mrs. Liang didn’t blame herself right away. She was proud when Tien left home for the first time, despite not finishing school. Proud when Tien sent the two-page glossy spread from the American magazine. Tien would call from Hong Kong, from Hollywood, from Bangkok. Soon she’d settled in a place called Hoboken in America. Why had she stopped sending magazine photographs? Mrs. Liang prodded. Tien always changed the subject (she couldn’t send those magazines). Why don’t you come visit here in New Jersey? she asked her mother. Tien could fly them over (she was making plenty of money now). But Mrs. Liang only laughed. What would they do in America, in New Jersey? What would she do with the seamstress shop? No, she told Tien, it’s much too far, too complicated. Her husband would hate the journey besides.

Mr. Liang, in fact, would have loved the journey. He’d always dreamed of the American West. He had an unaccountable fondness for John Wayne, and his favorite film was True Grit (which in Mandarin he knew as “A Man of Honest Dirt”). But Mrs. Liang put her foot down. She refused to go. It was Tien’s duty to come home to see her mother and father. Not the other way around.

The truth was, flying terrified Mrs. Liang. She wouldn’t even set foot in a plane. She’d had premonitions yet had told no one. Why hadn’t she listened to them more carefully? Why had she made her only daughter fly? How grudging she’d been, how selfish. If only she’d gotten on a plane earlier, her daughter would still be alive. She was more thickheaded than an ox. Hadn’t her husband always said so?

In the end, Mrs. Liang had to do what she’d refused to her whole life: she got on a plane. What was the point anymore? She half hoped they’d crash as well, to end her anguish, to get closer to her daughter. She’d boarded the plane at Chiang KaiShek International Airport in a paroxysm of tears, her husband and a young stewardess helping her into her seat. She wasn’t afraid; all fear had emptied out of her since that night. She felt, instead, in every step, entering the plane, strapping herself to the seat, that she was reliving the last moments of her own daughter’s life.

In the garden, she plucked more flowers. She didn’t recognize any of them. They were so unlike the flowers she knew from home. How drab and colorless they were. How parsimonious. But they’d have to do. Would her daughter be satisfied with them? She didn’t know; neither did she know if Tien would ever forgive her. She’d been haunted by visions of her daughter ever since arriving on the island, waking dreams of Tien wearing a dress stitched entirely of seaweed and pearls.