She had a son right off the bat, then two daughters, then three boys in a row. She gave them classical Chinese names I can’t remember anymore, as well as whimsical English ones: Power, Pretty, Pineapple, Pirate, Purple, and Peanut. Those are my half-brothers and half-sisters—you met Uncle Peanut last week at dim sum, remember? Father was overjoyed because it meant his family line was assured. He didn’t exactly neglect me and Emily, but let’s just say we were on our own a lot with only poor Amah, our childhood nanny hired from a nearby village when Emily was born, to watch out for us. Driver Lim and his wife, Auntie Lim the geomancer, were there, too, but they weren’t much involved in our actual upbringing. To say Emily ran amok was a major understatement. She took Mother’s death as personally as she took Father’s neglect and did everything fun and bad that she could dream up. As time went on, Mother’s intact bedroom became spookier and spookier, and Emily ran wilder and wilder. As for me, because I felt sorry that Emily had no mother, I mothered her. I knew that I wanted to be a doctor, but I put my own dreams aside because I didn’t know well enough to look out for myself. Though I hadn’t caused it, I felt guilty about my mother’s death and wished I’d been gentler and more diplomatic with her.

The other unspoken truth in my family, besides the equine hideousness of my father and me, was that the pills Dream Horse made did not promote the health and longevity of the people. To the contrary, they made people ill. We branded the pills to appeal to people’s commitment to themselves as Chinese and to the idea of China as the Middle Kingdom.