She went to secret classes at night. She had a hunger for knowledge. Because there were no schools, they met nights at the teahouse on the corner. Dr. Bread-baker, she called the man who had been a soldier once, taught English, reading, and writing, even algebra with the missing equation. Someday she would go to her father. They could not know who her father was. It would change their view of her to know that she was half American. She felt guilty about this. When she saw the other children of American fathers who had no place to stay, no food, she gave them coins and hard-boiled eggs.

She was bamboo, growing so fast, so lovely, so fluent you could read all of it on her narrow face, all her feelings and languages. There were old songs inside her, and the sound wind makes as it passes through the bamboo forest.

She remembered, later, on the afternoons she rested, some of them. She remembered the line of people on the road, having to leave with their babies and goods. She remembered leaving her grandmother crying in the boat, Grandmother with a pot of flowers and the chicken, something alive that she hadn’t lost and thought she needed and Lin with her fish. She cried when she remembered this. But no one knew if they were “Yards” who assisted the Americans, communists, or ordinary villagers and whichever, they were threatening to any of the groups, as if there had been no such thing any longer as a simple human being, a villager. The child she had been was an enemy to someone. Everyone was one kind of enemy or another. Even a child, a little girl who carried a jar with a red goldfish in it.

The flower business grew. As it became more prosperous, they built a wall and even a door that opened and closed. Lin arranged her place just so, everything in order, a teapot and two cups, a jar of flowers, a pillow, her box of things, including her father’s map and his name and address in America. Later the husband built Lin shelves for her things and added hooks for her clothing. Sometimes Lin made enough extra money at tips and small jobs that she could buy a Coca-Cola or, better, a silk blouse. Lin grew. She loved the returning forest and as she grew older she went there each day in the morning mist. Tall and narrow, with a single braid of black hair, she walked into the clouds. She returned looking radiant. Everyone noticed her. They saw her beauty.

“Isn’t our Lin lovely?” said the old man to his wife as she lavished cream on her face.

“Our Lin.” She snorted, unable to admit to herself her own feelings for the growing girl. And yet one day, a year or so back, she had gone to Lin’s mat and put her arm around the sleeping girl and cried into Lin’s hair. Lin heard her sobs.