The smaller front courtyard had gates that opened out to Dragon Springs Road. Years ago my mother had pushed broken furniture against one corner of the courtyard’s walls, tying wooden legs and chair backs together to steady the stack into a platform we could climb. From this perch we had spied on the world outside.

The honeysuckle that clambered across the top of the wall was bare of leaves, but the tangle of vines was still thick enough for concealment. Looking down to the left, I could see the front courtyard of the Central Residence, the home where Noble Uncle and his family lived. There was a door in the wall between the two front courtyards, but the only one who ever used it had been Noble Uncle.

To the right was the street. Standing on tiptoe I peered through the vines, hoping to see my mother’s figure alight from a sedan chair or rickshaw, but all I saw were our neighbors, unwitting and uncaring of my presence.

Back at the Fox altar I knelt down to pray, rocking on my haunches, gaze fixed on the picture pasted to the wall. My nostrils prickled with the musty fragrance of incense. Please, bring back my mama. But the Fox woman looked into the distance, and the Fox merely smiled.

“Fox spirits are almost always female,” my mother had said. “They can appear in Fox shape or as beautiful women. They help those who befriend them. Some are especially sympathetic to unfortunate women.”

Now I wondered at my mother’s words. Did she pray to a Fox because she was an unfortunate woman?

That night I dreamed that I had wandered out to Dragon Springs Road all on my own, when a dreadful knowledge seized me that my mother had gone away never to return. Fear jolted me out of sleep and into the gray light of early morning. I was utterly alone. I cried and cried, but my forlorn wails went unheeded. Curling up under the quilt, I sobbed myself back to sleep.

The next morning, I lay on the pallet bed with all my clothes on, quilt pulled over my head, trying to keep warm. The plate on the floor taunted me with reminders of chicken and sticky rice steamed in lotus leaf packets, the scent of garlic and sesame oil still clinging to the leaves. My stomach ached, a harsh kneading that twisted my insides. I tried chewing on a lotus leaf, but when I tried to swallow, the tough fibers made me retch and I spat them out.