“What are you talking about?”

“He drives home from work every day and not once has he come by to say hello, but the one day he sees me working in my yard, he can’t help but come and spit in my face.”

“You’re being dramatic.”

“He offered to give me a number for a company he hires to clean up his yard, knowing full well we can’t afford to do that. He is not stupid, Swee Hua. He is management and knows exactly how much money we make. He came here to rub it in my face that I have to do my own work in my own yard, while he sits in his house reading the newspaper as someone else cleans his.”

“Not everything is about you, Ah Loy. He was just being friendly. Our girls are friends, after all.”

Father said nothing else and finished putting the leaves in a garbage bag. I didn’t know whether Father was being too sensitive, but the salt had been spilled, and his offended feelings were like millions of tiny grains spread on the ground. It was impossible to pick them all up again.

The celebration Mother was looking forward to was taking place because Auntie Carrie Kwan had given birth to baby Billy, and he had survived his first 100 days. Since it was now considered safe, a red egg and ginger party was planned to introduce him to the world. Mother explained to me that a woman had to be in confinement for the first 100 days of a baby’s life to stay hidden from ghosts who would snatch the life out of the baby or bring bad hong into the mother’s body, causing her to get sick.

Some women would have visitors during the period of confinement, thereby making the months of nesting and healing more tolerable, but Auntie Carrie’s husband, Uncle Ming Kwan, forbade it. The baby was his first-born son, so he didn’t want to risk anything happening to the boy. Uncle Ming was so strict that he also insisted on minimal contact over the telephone. I overheard Mother explaining to Auntie Miriam one day that Auntie Carrie did not require a lot of convincing, as she also believed that the feng, as Uncle Ming called it in Mandarin, or hong, as Mother called it, could come through the receiver and grab her or Billy. She did not want to go through the pain of confinement only to have a tricky wind make her suffer for the rest of her life. Mother told Auntie Miriam that she knew of women back home who suffered lifelong severe migraines, or worse, because they did not respect the power of the hong during their period of confinement.

This meant that Mother relied on me to carry messages and gossip via Auntie Carrie’s daughter Holly, who was always waiting by the school bus to hand me a note in exchange for Mother’s note. Holly was in grade three, a grade lower than Bea. My sister and I felt bad for Holly for being the only Chinese girl in her class, but she was very loud and could not be trusted to keep a secret, so we tried to avoid her. On the playground, I pretended not to hear her call my name, and I implored her not to call me Jie Jie. I hoped this strategy would help me make friends with the girls in my class, but inevitably, they would notice Holly calling me and run off.