But Lian struggled out of the nursemaid’s grip. She ran along the hallway then paused, suddenly feeling like an intruder as she stood in front of her parents’ bedroom door. It was shut, but light shone through the space between door and floor. The cries stopped, replaced by gasping sounds. It couldn’t be her mother making those dreadful, strange noises. She had to see for herself. She slid quietly on bare feet along the hallway to the adjoining bathroom. The bathroom was dark, but the inside door connecting to her parents’ room stood ajar.

Lian knelt cautiously beside the thin wedge of light and peered in. Her mother crouched on the floor, face veiled by her unbound hair. She rocked back and forth, something dark and bulky clutched to her chest, eyes fixed on the wall between two windows. The wall where her parents’ wedding photograph hung in a black-lacquered frame. Then her mother began sobbing again. The gasping noises, Lian realized, had been her mother catching her breath. Her mother’s sobs turned into cries. The howls of a wounded animal, of a woman on the edge of madness. No longer defiant.

Unable to move, Lian crouched mesmerized. Helpless to comfort her mother. Ashamed to be spying. Finally, her mother collapsed and the bulky object she had been cradling dropped to the floor with a thud. It was one of her father’s old boots, scuffed brown leather.

Lian ran outside, her small feet scarcely feeling the cold. It had been raining all evening, but now light from a full moon gleamed on the courtyard’s slate paving stones. Raindrops glittered from shrubs and trees, and she saw each one with perfect clarity, saw how precariously they clung to bare branches. When her amah caught up to her and wrapped her in a quilt, Lian didn’t protest at being carried back to bed.

This was why Lian didn’t object when her mother took them away from Harbin a week later, leaving behind the courtyard home, her school friends, and her amah. Why she obeyed without a word as they moved from one shabby Peking neighborhood to another. Why she never complained when her mother insisted on an idiosyncratic and secretive life.

“We must be invisible as foxes in hiding, Daughter,” she said. “It’s the only way for us to stay safe.”

Lian didn’t argue because she was willing to do anything, absolutely anything, never to see her mother like that again.

Chapter 6