Little Chan pointed at the tiny bird flying behind her, leaping from tree to tree, chirping its monotonous song. The emerald bird lifted its head to expose its red throat and pink feathers as it prepared to mate.

—So you like birds, her father Don José Colón de Juan Dolio said, grateful that the young boy had survived his journey. —That’s a tody bird. It never flies alone. Are you alone?

Little Chan stared back at him with blank eyes. Don José assumed he was about six years of age from the size of his head. After many years of watching the sea ebb and flow, the way the color of the water changed with the mood of the sky, it was the first time he didn’t bury bones. Throughout his life, he saw the carcasses that washed up offshore from people who didn’t survive their journeys to his land. And when time permitted, he gathered the bones and buried them in the sand to honor their arrival.

—Little Chan, it’s an honor to have you, Don José said and bent down to take his hand. —Are you hungry?

Little Chan looked around. His eyelids and hair were full of sand and salt. His clothes damp with seawater.

At lunch, Don José served Little Chan first to show that he should feel at home with his new family. The young Caridad giggled as if she had found a treasure and it was for her to keep.

At first, little Chan didn’t understand that he would never see his family again. He took the long journeys on the small fishing boat with Don José in the hope he’d find his mother and father. Although there was very little he understood, he knew there was something different about him, that he belonged somewhere else. No matter how hard he tried, he could not recollect one memory from the first years of his life. Traveling workers explained to Don José that Little Chan looked like the Chinos from Panamá. —Cuba, hombre. —You’re a Chino from Cuba, said another. —There’re a whole bunch of Chinos in Jamaica. That’s where you’re from. They had shiploads heading to Jamaica to work the cane.

But little Chan couldn’t remember anything but his name.

From the edge of the sea, Don José’s shack, in the thick of the bushes, was a small sanctuary that protected his wife and three daughters. Even when the bloody wars overturned his island, rulers emerging only to be humbled by yet another ruler, Don José relied on the sea, like his father and his grandfather, all of whom understood the language of the water.

Before little Chan’s arrival, Don José had taken the fishing trips alone. For years he looked forward to being alone with the sea. At first, Don José resisted little Chan’s persistence in joining him on the boat but soon found that he enjoyed little Chan’s company. For hours the old man and little Chan sat on the boat waiting for the fish to bite. With his new friend, the sea took on a fresh palette and the clouds acquired a variety of names as little Chan tried to find the animals in nebulous shapes. It was the first time Don José shared the stories he had learned from the sea.