All she needed to do, her mother said, was remember that their family name wasn’t “Jin” anymore. From now on, she was Hu Lian. They would never go back to Harbin. Lian’s mother poured a little hot water into a napkin and wiped tangerine juice from Lian’s hands.

Lian sounded out her new name quietly. “Why are we Hu? Why not Chang or Lee?”

“Because ‘Hu’ sounds like the word for ‘fox,’” her mother said. “It will remind us that we must be as cunning as foxes. We must be invisible as foxes in hiding.”

For the first time since Lian’s father died, her mother smiled with real warmth. There was even a look of mischief in her eyes. Lian still didn’t understand why they had to change their name or hide away in Peking, but if it meant her mother smiled more, she would.

There were so many things they’d had to leave behind. The shelf of toys beside her bed. The kitchen table and the high chair where she perched to watch her mother and the cook wrap dumplings. The blue bicycle she rode around and around the courtyard garden. Her father’s Library of Legends. There were just too many volumes. More than anything, she regretted leaving his books behind. She hoped she wouldn’t forget the evenings curled up beside her father, his quiet voice reading the stories out loud to her.

In Peking, they moved into a poor but quiet neighborhood inside a maze of narrow lanes. In their new home, her mother’s determined efforts to erase their previous life meant they lived a frugal and secretive existence. Instead of selling the house in Harbin and closing out all bank accounts, her mother had taken some of their money but left enough behind to support the fiction that they had intended to come back.

Her mother had been an orphan at a mission school run by Americans. In Peking she found work as a typist for an American tobacco company. She went to work with her hair pulled back in a matronly bun, wore dowdy, drab colors that made her look ten years older.

When Lian was thirteen, her mother began worrying about a neighbor. He was a widower, a dry goods merchant with two small children and a sickly, elderly mother.

“He’s always hanging at the shop door, watching for me,” her mother said as Lian set bowls, spoons, and chopsticks on the table. “I think he’s a spy.”

“All shopkeepers stand by their doors,” Lian said. The man always rushed to the counter whenever she and her mother entered his store. She thought it more likely the man found her mother attractive. He was tall and large-boned, with a big nose and bold features that hinted of northern ancestry, perhaps Russian blood.