I had to become good at cooking, and fast. According to Mr. Gao’s men, food would draw in the local immigrants, and they would share stories while eating, imagining my tiny home a haven from government surveillance. The men would help by having their spies recommend the restaurant. They wanted it operating at maximum capacity before the school year began, before the university students returned to campus and fostered any radical ideas. If I did not prove useful, they would send me back to Taiwan.

Mother had taught me two dishes before I left. They were pretty much the only two dishes she had picked up since moving away from Shanghai, away from Ah-shin.

One was a simple stir-fry of anything green.

“The more oil and salt you add, the better it will taste,” she promised. “Garlic, too.”

Once I was confident in my stir-fried greens, I progressed to beef noodle soup.

“American beef is very good,” Mother told me.

I allowed myself a week to work on both recipes, most of the time experimenting with substitutes I found in the American grocery stores.

A noodle soup with meat and a side of vegetables. If I had leftover flour from the noodles, I would bake an apple pie, which I learned how to do from the bag of flour. Those were the only things on my menu, and once I ran out of food, I closed the store for the day. It was lucky that I did not need to make money. I could never have handled running an actual restaurant. I only needed customers who would talk.

Nobody came the first week. I was in a neighborhood surrounded by houses, far from street traffic. If the spies were directing people to me, they were not doing a good job. The second week, I drew up flyers, putting my drawing skills to use for the first time since we were children. I drew the soup, the vegetables, and the pie, included imitation calligraphy characters with my address. Then I wrote the name.

I called it Phoenix 708 after the restaurant’s street number.

Nearly all the customers who eventually came were male. There was a time when I would have loved the idea of all those men coming to see me, paying me money, complimenting my mediocre food, if only because it was faintly reminiscent of meals they remembered from home. I would have looked forward to their visits, flirted, laughed, and entertained when they brought their friends. But even though it was my job to loosen their mouths, I mostly kept to myself. I tried to recall your mother’s easy hospitality, her gentle, convincing nudges, channeled her as best as I could. It exhausted me though. By dinner most days, I was meek and quiet, much more like my mother than yours.