After graduation, Nelson told his parents that he’d decided to put off college to go traveling for a year. “Kids do it all the time in Europe,” he assured them, as if Europe were just a couple of towns over. “It’s called a gap year.” He embraced them when he left, promising he’d be okay. At first, when relatives and neighbors used to ask about him, their parents would mournfully tell of postcards sent every few months—from Alaska, Montreal, Greenland, for Pete’s sake. This is a good place. Don’t worry about me, he’d write. But they did worry. That he’d get hurt working on a trawler or chopping trees or fall in with a bad crowd and forget he was loved, needed. Year two, a postcard came from Peru. Year three, nothing.

During those first few years, Mayling contacted everyone from high school she could think of, looking for Nelson spottings. She checked online message boards in English, Chinese, and Spanish. But whatever leads came up she kept to herself, not wanting to get their parents’ hopes up. More often than not, they led nowhere. Eventually she decided it was out of her hands. Her brother, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be found, and there was nothing else to do but continue reassuring her parents that their son was fine, just fine. After some time, they knew to stop asking, eventually submitting to a kind of bright, fragile stoicism sometimes associated with the prematurely bereaved.

Then one morning in July Mayling got the call. Nelson announced that he was passing through San Diego in a few days en route to Mexico, and could she put him up for a night. Mayling thought fleetingly of that phone call as she drove, and of the dulled astonishment she’d felt—not so much that her brother had called, but that he hadn’t sounded like a stranger.

“Take this exit, would you?” said Nelson, turning down the radio. When they got off the ramp, he stuffed the camera into his duffle bag and pointed to a Chinese restaurant up ahead.

“At five o’clock?” said Mayling.

“I’m starving,” Nelson pleaded, “and I’ve really missed this shit.”

As the young, ponytailed waitress showed them to a booth, Nelson whispered something to her that provoked a bashful giggle from the girl. He ordered for the both of them—fried noodles, a whole roast duck, and garlic bak choy—in Cantonese that was so halting it made Mayling wince. She thought briefly of Saturday mornings at Chinese School, taking vocabulary tests and reciting poems while Nelson snuck off to the skate park or the video arcade. Still, she saw it as an opportunity to warm him up to talking about himself.

“Glad to see you’ve kept up the Chinese,” said Mayling “I suppose you can say ‘roast duck’ in ten different languages now.”