She shook her head. “No, it’s not that.”

I waited, not sure if she was actually going to tell me.

“Kuo Ǎyí called this morning and told me not to come to Bible study anymore.”

And then I wished she hadn’t told me.

The Bible study group—held at the Kuo mansion once a week, on Thursday afternoons—was my mother’s version of women’s tea, brunch, book club, or whatever else it was that middle-aged women did. It was so important to her that she worked on Saturdays so she could have Thursday afternoons free.

She’d been going for as long as I could remember, bringing me when I was young to play with the other toddlers while the maids watched us. It had been my first introduction to the sharky community, not to mention Hongbo, and my Thursdays as a child were spent listening to other kids practice violin while I defended my marker drawings from getting eaten by Hongbo. Apparently, he had figured out at a young age that having marker ink near your face felt good, but he hadn’t fully connected the dots to his nose yet.

My mother had tried to get me to join Bible study when I turned eighteen, and on that Thursday afternoon before I’d left for UChicago, I had never been more grateful to be attending school halfway across the country.

First, all the women had pawed at my hair, then pinched my sides and told me I’d better watch the freshman fifteen, to which my mother nodded. Then we’d gossiped for thirty minutes about the latest community scandal: Jessica’s mother was absent today because she was staking out the high school to see if her daughter was dating behind her back.

Each whisper had been worse than the last.

I bet she’ll find Jessica with someone and smoking.

I’d put my money on Jessica suddenly needing to go visit the grandparents in about eight months. Or being absent out of the blue for—how long does it take to recover from an abortion?

Unless she’s with another girl, which is what I’d bet on—haven’t you seen her latest outfits?

I had been ashamed that I hadn’t said anything, and even more ashamed that my mother was regularly a part of this.

But I had rationalized it away with the fact that my mother hadn’t been as complicit, adding the more benign smoking comment and not encouraging the homophobic one.

Mrs. Kuo had then read one Bible passage as everyone mm-hmmed and amened, and after a very shallow, five-minute discussion of what it meant—“God is good”—the maids served expensive oolong tea from the highest mountain in Taiwan and flakey turnip-strip cakes.