Her response:

People keep asking me why I don’t return to China. I tell them I can’t return to a place I’ve never been.

In March, Joy suddenly cheers up. “Maybe it’s because the winter is over,” Sam suggests. But that’s not it, because she still complains about the endless winter. Rather, there’s a boy…

My friend Joe asked me to join the Chinese Students Democratic Christian Association. I like the kids in the group. We discuss integration, interracial marriage, and family relationships. I’m learning a lot and it’s nice to see friendly faces, cook together, and eat together.

Quite apart from this Joe, whoever he is, I’m happy that she’s joined a Christian group. I know she’ll find companionship there. After reading the letter to everyone, I write our reply:

Your dad wants to know about your classes this semester. Are you keeping up? Auntie May wants to know ’what the girls are ’wearing in Chicago and if she can send you anything. I don’t have much to add. Things are the same or nearly the same. We closed the curio shop-not enough business to hire someone to sell that “junk,” as you always called it. Business at Pearl ’s is good and your dad’s busy. Uncle Vern wants to know more about Joe.

Actually, he hasn’t said a thing about Joe, but the rest of us are itching with curiosity.

And you know your auntie-always working. What else? Oh, you know the kind of things that go on around here. Everyone’s afraid of being called a Communist. During troubles in business or rivalries in love, one person can find a solution by labeling the other a Communist. “Did you hear so-and-so’s a Commie?” You know how it is, people gossiping, chasing the wind and catching shadows. Someone sells more curios; he must be a Communist. She spurned my affections; she must be a Communist. Fortunately, your father doesn’t have any enemies, and no one is ‘wooing your aunt.

This is my around-the-corner-and-down-the-block way of trying to get Joy to write more about this Joe. But if I’m Joy’s mother, then she’s definitely my daughter. She sees right through me. As usual, I wait to read the letter until everyone’s home and we can gather around Vern’s bed.

“You’d like Joe,” she writes.

He’s in premed. He goes to church with me on Sundays. You want me to say my prayers, but we don’t say them at my Christian association. You’d think that Jesus would be all we’d talk about at those meetings, but we don’t talk about Him. We talk about the injustices that were done to people like you and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa. We talk about what happened to the Chinese in the past and what’s continuing to happen to black people. Just last weekend we picketed Montgomery Ward because they won’t hire blacks. Joe says that minorities need to stick together. Joe and I have been getting people to sign petitions. It’s nice to think about other people’s problems for a change.

When I come to the end of the letter, Sam asks, “Do you think this Joe speaks Sze Yup? I don’t want her to marry someone outside our dialect.”

“Who says he’s Chinese?” May asks.

That sets us to twittering like birds.

“They’re in a Chinese organization,” Sam says. “He has to be Chinese.”

“And they go to church together,” I add.

“So? You always encouraged her to go to church outside Chinatown so she could meet other kinds of people,” May says, and three accusatory pairs of eyes glare at me.

“His name is Joe,” I say. “That’s a good name. It sounds Chinese.”

As I stare at the name written in Joy’s even hand and try to decide exactly what this Joe might be, my sister-forever my devilish little sister-ticks off other Joes. “Joe DiMaggio, Joseph Stalin, Joseph McCarthy-”

“Write her back,” Vern interrupts. “Tell her Commies are no-good friends. She’ll get in trouble.”

But that’s not what I write. What I write is not at all subtle: “What’s Joe’s family name?”

In mid-May I receive Joy’s reply.

Oh, Mom, you’re so funny. I can just imagine you and Dad, Auntie May, and Uncle Vern sitting around and worrying about this. Joe’s family name is Kwok, OK? Sometimes we talk about going to China to help the country. Joe says we Chinese have a saying: Thousands upon thousands of years for China. Being Chinese and carrying that upon your shoulders and in your heart can be a heavy burden but also a source of pride and joy. He says, “Shouldn’t we be a part of what’s happening in our home country?” He even took me to get a passport.

I worried about Joy when she left us. I worried about her when she got homesick. I worried about her hanging out with a boy when we had no idea who or what he was. But this is something different. This is truly scary.

“ China ’s not her home country,” Sam grumbles.

“He’s a Commie,” Vern says, but then he thinks everyone’s a Commie.

“It’s just love,” May says lightly, but I hear worry in her voice. “Girls say and do stupid things when they’re in love.”

I fold the letter and put it back in its envelope. There’s nothing we can do about any of this from so far away, but I begin a chant-something more than a prayer, something more like a desperate plea: Bring her home, bring her home, bring her home.

Dominoes

SUMMER ARRIVES AND Joy comes home. We bask in the soft music of her voice. We try to stop ourselves from touching her, but we pat her hand, smooth her hair, and straighten her collar. Her auntie gives her signed movie magazines, colorful headbands, and a pair of purple ostrich mules. I make her favorite home-cooked foods: steamed pork with salted duck eggs, curried tomato beef lo mein, chicken wings with black beans, and almond tofu with canned fruit cocktail for dessert. Every day Sam brings her one treat or another: barbecued duck from the Sam Sing Butcher Shop, whipped-cream cake with fresh strawberries from Phoenix Bakery, and pork bao from the little place she likes so much on Spring Street.

But how Joy has changed these last nine months! She wears pedal pushers and sleeveless cotton blouses that nip in at her tiny waist. She’s lopped off her hair and styled it into a pixie cut. Inside she’s changed too. I don’t mean that she challenges us or insults us as she did in her last months before she left for Chicago. Rather, she’s come back believing that she’s more knowledgeable than we are about travel (she’s been to Chicago and back on the train, and none of us have been on one in years), about finances (she has her own bank account and a checkbook, while Sam and I still hide our money at home, where the government-or whoever-can’t get it), but most of all about China. Oh, the lectures we hear!

She slaps her paws at the gentlest among us, her uncle. If the Boar-with its innocent nature-has a fault, it’s that he trusts everyone and will believe almost everything that’s told to him, even by strangers, even by swindlers, even by a voice on the radio. Years of listening to anti-Communist broadcasts have forever colored Vern’s opinions about the People’s Republic of China. But what kind of a target is he? Not a very good one. When Joy proclaims, “Mao has helped the people of China,” about all her uncle can do is say, “No freedom there.”

“Mao wants the peasants and workers to have the very chances that Mom and Dad want for me,” Joy presses adamantly. “For the first time, he’s letting people from the countryside go to colleges and universities. And not just boys. He says women should receive ‘equal pay for equal work.’”