Rinsing the dishes, Lindsey and Stephanie talked about Chinese superstitions about babies. “When you were pregnant did Pau Pau tell you not to eat orange foods because they’d turn the baby too yellow?” Lindsey asked. She added, “Are you going to shave his head? Pau Pau says they used to do that in the old days to make the hair grow in thicker.”
Her cousin looked at her like she was crazy.
“Did I miss your shower?” Lindsey asked.
“No, I only had one with my work girlfriends, but we’re trying to pick a date for Armani’s red-egg-and-ginger party.”
Stephanie looked out through the doorway to make sure someone was watching Armani. Satisfied to see her mother rocking him, she turned her attention back to Lindsey.
“Yeah, it’s really important to choose a lucky day for the red-egg-and-ginger party. Like, Pau Pau says the fourteenth is bad because in Chinese, the numbers sound like the words for ‘sudden death,’ or something like that. She wants the party on the twenty-eighth. She says the number two sounds like ‘easy,’ and eight is always lucky.”
From the next room, Kevin bellowed, “Hey, we’re ready!”
Brandon, Mike, and Cammie crowded around the karaoke machine as Kevin programmed the machine with pop songs they had selected. Even Mr. Owyang emerged from the back den to see what all the commotion was about. Meanwhile, Lindsey’s mother and aunts squabbled over which local newspapers had the best horoscopes.
Getting up to retrieve her baby, Stephanie walked into the living room as Michael walked into the kitchen to find Lindsey. She was sitting at the table and gluing the porcelain bowl. He helped her hold two of the broken pieces together as she applied the fixative.
“What eighties songs do you have?” Lindsey yelled out. Through the doorway she could see Cammie dancing The Robot.
Several songs later, Lindsey and Michael eventually joined her family on the sofa. Lindsey noticed Pau Pau standing alone by the window, gazing at the blue fog churning and tumbling through the dark sky. She called over, “Pau Pau, do you want to sing something?”
The elderly woman turned, her face brightening. She smiled at her granddaughter.
“I don’t know any these songs!” she protested. She shuffled over and eagerly took the microphone from Kevin.
“Sing anything!” he said.
“Yeah, Mom, sing anything!” Vivien encouraged.
Pau Pau looked up for a moment and tried to think of any song in English she might know. She nodded to herself, slowly recalling the words to one song she had learned long ago. She looked out to the faces of her children and grandchildren, and was pleased to feel their eyes on her.
She began, tentatively at first, and then stronger,
“It rained all night the day I left
The weather it was dry
The sun so hot, I froze to death
Susanna, don’t you cry
Oh, Susanna, oh don’t you cry for me…”
About the Author
In the fourth grade, KIM WONG KELTNER won a cutthroat spelling bee, which encouraged her aspirations as a writer. Over the years, she honed her ear for dialogue by listening to elderly Chinese women dish dirt over endless games of mahjong. She met her husband at a Chaucer seminar when she stretched out her hand and said, “Come with me if you want to live.” They now reside in San Francisco’s Sunset District, where all the other Chinese people live.
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Copyright
THE DIM SUM OF ALL THINGS. Copyright © 2004 by Kim Wong Keltner. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © DECEMBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061856754
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