On the dirt-beige sofa, Dad lies across the crooks of cushions like an em-dash, surrounded by a Jenga of student theses and chemical engineering textbooks, a royal blue cookie tin holding nail clippers that aren’t sharp and cables that don’t charge. Dipping his soles into lotion thick like congealed fat, its white logo fading from the red jar, he peels off dead skin and lets the rice-papery sheets curl on papers below. He dozes off, a tender pink heel still in his hand.

A sliding door away, a toilet looks over the highway from our balcony. Dad has filled both the bowl and the tank with mud, turning one broken toilet into two flowerpots. Around it—yellowed light switches, tubes of dried glue, loops of hose, then things I cannot name but believe to be useful because he says so—crisp plastics, rusty screws, tiny clips litter the tiles like twigs and leaves lining the forest floor. Dad plucks bits from malfunctioning gadgets and sprinkles them into the cupholder of our computer desk, the double sinks of the sunroom, the fruit bowl among unripe mangoes. The bigger things are harder to nest. They have to go under the spiraling stairs or go up to the seventh floor altogether, leaning this way or that in the cracked bathtub. A swing bench without the bench and a ping-pong table without the bounce still sit in the sunroom.

Mom jams our things into bags and boxes, throws them out to the paint-speckled stairway. Dad takes them back. They stoop by our door like stone statues of guardian lions for days. Hands propped behind her waist, neck sweat-licked, she whines, “I can’t believe I will die surrounded by all this trash.”

*

The first thing I rescued was an afternoon before the end of the school year. The fans flapped the damp, sour air in the classroom and I was passing notes with the boy behind, our hands brushing under desks. I peeped over the creases, I like her (her = you). Something stirred. I scribbled back, so you = I? and folded the pastel note back into a pea. The bell rang. He shot me a look, shredded it, and bolted for the restroom.

The boy’s face has long fuzzed into static. I only see my own hands picking out a strawberry pink notebook from the bookshelf that night. I pulled the words we exchanged from a spot sore like an overturned string in my brain. When the first pink page was full, I could already see a stack of notebooks stretching into my future. In the years after, I would spend many afternoons sitting on the windowsill, sifting through notebooks whose presence I remembered but not the days inside all the way back here. I would meet myself again—the girl from that afternoon, and I, reading through the pencil marks.

I pushed the notebook deep into my drawer. Before warning Mom and Dad against going through my desk, the worries were already flicking on, on—who else would read them, who else would care?

*

Dad picked me up in a Ford Fiesta coated in gold—a mud-like color that saved money on car washes. I was growing taller even though I would never be tall. When I stretched, my knees bumped into the back of his seat. He jolted—a tap was all it took in the traffic of Shanghai, where cars merged without blinking the indicator. Looking down at my own knees below the red-plaid skirt, I waited for this to pass.

Stuck on the elevated roadway lit red by taillights, I listened to Dad calling his co-workers. On the phone, Dad became Professor Li, spoke Mandarin not Shanghainese, his pitch too high and voice too loud like he distrusted the phone to get him across. Professor Li nodded even when the chemist on the other end couldn’t see, en-en, okay-okay bouncing off each nod like pinballs. They were planning on recycling CO2. 

Smokestacks stood perpendicular to the horizon, puffing out white vapor that wanted to rise but was bent by wind. It thinned into the atmosphere like children who grew up, boarded a plane into the sky and never returned home. But the chemists couldn’t let them go. I imagined Dad reaching up to the mouth of the smokestacks, scooping the vapor into steel tanks, and feeding it into a chain of chemical equations. Out on the right end, they became an ingredient that would make batteries, perfumes, pills, biofuel. At the end of the year, Professor Li’s name would be etched on the golden plaque of a prize, and Dad came home with an envelope fat with cash. He smoothed out the wad of pink bills into a fan and let me wave it, feeling its flutter.

*

We zhee-zhee’ed like mice into the thickets, chirped, Mimi, Mimi, and Mimi skidded toward us, his black-tabby body rubbing back and forth on our calves, ringed tail trembling like an exclamation mark.

Mom distrusted them—deceptive creatures ambushing on silent paws, pupils slimming into snake-like slits in the day and dilating into innocent gems in the dark. She grunted out, I begged in, and Dad held Mimi up by the neck. Along the staircase, Mimi stretched long, hovered still. 

He took over the sunroom and the terrace on the seventh floor. When I called, he came trotting down the edge of the terracotta roof, jumping onto the rail with seven floors of falling on his side. Some days, I found bloodied birds and bats, wings sunk mid-flight at my feet. He’d always placed them right at the threshold.

*

The 7 p.m. news aired. A boiled egg dropped to the ground, egg white quivering, and bounced up like a ping-pong ball right into the retailer’s hand. He testified—eggs were made from plasticizer and milk powder, molded round by newspapers. The camera closed in on something grey and crumpled on the ground as evidence. I wasn’t growing tall enough because this whole time, I was not swallowing plate after plate of scrambled eggs, but plate after plate of scrambled plastics.

No one should know better than a chemical engineer how assembling an egg from yolk to shell was like asking a man to pull life out of the lukewarm, sloshing sea. But I came home to the hens. Two had flapped onto the litter box roof, and a third was jerking her neck under. Dad held Mimi up by his neck and instructed, “Don’t attack the hens.” 

So he never did.

*

The rot of dead fish haunted the market. Mud-speckled trash bags slouched against the stalls, and flies circled around like vultures. As the vendors pulled the striped tarp over the vegetables, Dad clocked in—could he please have the bags? 

He came home with these industrial-size blue and black bags thrown over his shoulder and emptied the cabbage peels on the terrace. The chickens clucked close. Their beaks knocked, blood-red and jelly-soft combs quivering. Their tails twitched and out came shit, with specks of mucus-green and calcium-white, smearing all over the tiles, the rain ditch, and back onto the cabbage peels under their beaks. Mimi tiptoed by, paws stepping around for clean ground. In a few jumps, he climbed the ladder and disappeared onto the roof.

Once a week, Dad shoveled at the tiles and kept what he scraped off in a paint bucket. By the time the chickens were stewed into golden soup, he’d collected three. The shit rose in rain, downed in sun—the weather, its own tide. Long after, their shit stayed behind in joints and cracks, and we couldn’t scrape them out, the way I couldn’t take the yellow out of the plastic. I never invited friends home then or now. I still hold my breath when I come back, go up, push the door over its jammed track. The doves perching on the rail offend me. Mimi isn’t here to chase them away.

*

A snowstorm struck—any snow that didn’t melt on our hot city roads right away was a storm. On the terrace, the snow painted over the red enamel basins, softened the tooth-edges of aluminum boards he’d sawed up. I swept snow off the rail, watching the clumps scatter through grey air, swept until my knuckles felt like little rocks. Inside, by the bathtub, Mimi was swinging his tail from side to side, paws tucked under chest. I recalled—a cat’s body temperature was 38°C, like always living in a low fever.

Snow dripping down my jacket like a tail, I reached for his back—

He shrieked, spun around, arrow ends of his teeth on the back of my hands. His eyes traced the assault, from wet hands to arms in puffed sleeves leading to the shoulders, and found mine. His pink mouth hung open long enough for me to snatch my hands back. I checked them, palm and back. Not a mark.

*

I can still smell Dad’s lab—a plunging inrush, acidity. He liked to blast the AC with windows open so an occasional breeze breathed life back into our icy arms. We were making laundry detergent. Tide, Downy, Gain—“It was all surfactant, the same key ingredient,” he scoffed. His bucket, costing close to nothing, could clean our clothes just as well. Bending low to read through the smudged scale, he signaled me to stop pouring. The jasmine essence tickled the inside of my nose, so I poked my head out into the heat, watching white vapor rising out of chimneys to join the clouds. “Is that CO2?” I asked. He glanced, “Water vapor, mostly.”

Mom couldn’t touch his things here. The lab was his vault—stained papers lying on blue binders, my primary school textbooks and his college textbooks, couches my aunt handed over along with cockroach eggs. And there was something I didn’t know. At the bottom of his wall-to-wall shelf sat two flour sacks. Inside, they held cobblestones—tan, sand, grey, matte black. 

I knew Dad was a man who kept. I didn’t know Dad was a man who kept stones.

Cobblestones paved over his childhood home. They lived on the first floor of a three-story house in French Concession, a house the government took back when I was seven. I didn’t understand contracts. The house with milky-yellow paint dried into hooks just switched doors, locks, and denied us. When I could ride the subway into downtown by myself, my feet always carried me back even though the house had nothing to do with my day. I peered through the window bars like a thief—the place was torn open. Lustrous marble stairs wound by the corner. A chandelier hung from the high ceiling like this was a ballroom.

Inside the pale green grids of school workbooks, I could pretend the chandelier never happened. This is a house of moist wood, wooden beams, wooden bed, soggy wood-meat air. From the rocking chair, my grandfather speaks to me, each syllable long like sticky rice. Slugs grow along the wall after rain. Only in the narrow strip of kitchen, the sun slants through. Mid-air, flour bits catch on a tint of gold. 

My grandmother is kneading dough. The hunch that started as a worktable posture has settled into her back. Her apron is sewn with flour sacks, washed thin and beige. A pinch, a squeeze—she makes tails, body, eyeballs, a goldfish. She brushes the scales out with a comb, sketches the fin rays with a toothpick, and places it in my hand so lightly because a squeeze can make it so kill it, too. I run into the grassless backyard, mosquitoes in a blood-frenzy dance under the sunset.

Through afternoons, weekends, years, she took the stones. When they loosened, she picked easy, like pulling a shaking milk tooth from the wet curve of baby gum. When it resisted, she took a hammer, tapped at its root. She picked just because the stone was about to fall and it made no sense to leave it. Decades of kneading dough had altered her right thumb. The flesh that should hug the nail bumped out like an extra bone. Her hand was invincible against this wall. In her flour sack, cobblestones clinked upon cobblestones.

Only if the stones could talk, I would clip a microphone onto the flour sack and ask, “What have you seen from the wall?”

*

Dad speaks for the stones. Bicycle wheels spun past fields where tail-wagging cattle watched everything with a side-eye, sped through the blue shades under sycamore trees. Maybe his father only kept one hand on the handlebar while the other patted the chest pocket at every crossroad.

I imagine the floorboards pop-pop-pop under heavy shoes. He blinked away from the orange cat clawing at the birdcage outside the kitchen window, picked up the pencil, scanning for where he last wrote. From the chest pocket, his father took out a can. He received it with both hands—Shanghai Coffee in a stout font, each character squared like a mug. The brown of chocolate trickled to the gold of caramel down the tin can. His hands were sweaty, so he rubbed them on his hem before he touched the seal, the pull tab. He pressed his nose close— 

Coffee, exotic fruits picked from exotic trees, grown in countries he couldn’t name and might never go, crossed oceans on cargo ships when foreign things barely touched Chinese shores. His mother sometimes double-bagged damp grounds from work. When cats sunbathed in the yard, she laid the clumps over a bamboo frame. The neighbors chattered as she stirred the dried-again, boiled-again coffee. She ladled it into their bowls, like soup. Unmistakably coffee-colored, mildly coffee-tasting. But here he had it, coffee brand new in this fist-size can. One pull, and he could lick on coffee like a cat licking fish, in tonguefulls, tonguefulls—

His father’s feet tapped, tapped. He handed the can over, watched his father lock it into the top chest of their chestnut bureau.

*

A scoop of nails from the walnut jar. A parcel of wooden planks. Pang, pang, pang erupted through his cat dream; Mimi squinted from the garden chair. Two planters popped up on the terrace. Dad emptied three buckets of shit he saved, poured mud left over from the toilet-flowerpot, sprinkled luffa seeds on top. Tender green vines spiraled onto chopsticks, coiled onto the swing frame with no bench. After the monsoon days, so humid that I felt like growing out gills, the gourds grew plump. Egg-yellow flowers drooped down their ends, bright like festival tents.

We had luffa and egg stir-fry, luffa and egg soup, the luffas being the sweetest we’d ever tasted. They ripened in batches. We had luffa and luffa stir-fry, luffa and luffa soup. The fibers thickened and tangled more each day, clogging my throat when I tried to wash them down like pills. I chewed—they had become bath sponge. 

“It’s still sweet.” I didn’t want to disappoint him.

Mom sighed, “Spit it out if you want to.” Dad was looking down into his own rice. I folded the mush into a napkin.

*

I tried to find these dates in my pink notebook—

I didn’t write anything on the day we met Mimi. Didn’t write on the day we took him home.

*

Mimi sprawled on his side under the sun. I wanted to believe he had crawled out from under the bed bunk, had seen the first light as the sun rose. Dad handed me gloves he saved from the crayfish restaurant. I argued, though I didn’t say I wanted to hold him one last time. He insisted, uttered something about bacteria. I listened and crouched down.

He was so cold. He was cold like air, and I didn’t know air was cold. His warmth had slid away from him along a tipped gradient of heat I couldn’t see, fusing with the late autumn all around me. I lifted him into his favorite box, the box he slept in for his last year under my desk when we realized he could no longer jump from the roof. Now he could always curl inside, nose to tail. But his spine wouldn’t bend, his tail wouldn’t bend. I was suddenly grateful for the gloves, so I didn’t have to learn this cold, hands-on cat.

Dad pressed him down. I sobbed no, no, what if he snapped like a popsicle, popped into halves down the spine? So I had a stiff cat that was too long and a box that was too short at my feet. I felt stupid and wept. From the bins Mom stacked then covered with a tatted curtain, Dad found a mooncake bag. It blessed us with family reunions perfect like the full moon.

We walked and the holiday-red bag dangled between us. When tears weren’t thick like cataracts, I looked at Dad. Sweat glued his hair to the skull. He wore slip-on leather shoes; I wore slip-on Vans. We walked past the thicket where we met him. We walked into a bush with blue florets growing up to our knees. The three of us could walk into forever until Dad stopped by a tree, a tree where Mimi could sharpen his claws on. The shovel that had cleaned after the chickens was now digging the ground. 

One handle each, we sank the bag. “His head should be facing south,” Dad muttered, measuring the cat against the sky. I looked down. The white of his chin. The M on his forehead. The angle of his brown nose. Mud was pouring on his tail, belly, neck. The last shovel sealed his face. But I hadn’t counted how many rings around his tail yet.

Dad swept under the cracked bathtub—a black-flicking-to-white whisker, coarse and cold like a fishing line; a crescent of a nail, and I pressed the hook of it into my palm. I have an urge to go back to that little patch of Earth, to dig until my nail beds are raw and pink until I see the tiny skull so I can know he is still real. Maybe we should have skinned him before burying him, so I can always wear him like a scarf.

*

Leaning into the pantry, Dad feels for a round tin can the size of his fist. He will drive it to the museum collecting brands born and bred in Shanghai. His coffee will sit under soft lighting with softer velvet underneath. Strangers will stop by, read the caption, calculate what they were doing that year—

It’s no longer where he left it. He searches, again, as if the pantry is a cave, all folds and crevices, and a metal can, a shell that can hide but not run away. It is neither here nor there. His temples skip, skip. Thrashing blood muffles his ears but his chemist hands keep steady, removing wine bottles, tea bags, bone-china cups until there are only smooth walls. 

Mom must have picked it up, studied it. Or she overlooked it completely, just holding her breath when she felt the rust, sandpaper-rough in her hand. Her arm straightened ahead as she stepped around the dining table, rushing to the kitchen. The can dived under dripping mango peels, through tissues moist then dried with snot, hit the bottom with a thunk. She washed her hands with soap. Only then, she felt safe again. 

“What does the coffee can look like?” I ask Dad many times as I write. The chat bubbles travel thirteen hours backward to reach my college apartment in Chicago. Something that mustn’t be lost is lost, and it’s up to me to make it useful. The chat bubbles pause when he searches, his body sunk in the cushion of the dirt-beige sofa, one hand scrolling, the other rubbing his heel. 

“It looks just like this.” In the picture, this pixel dissolves into that, like coffee spilling through the can, becoming one with the moist dark. 

*

I’ve promised Dad to come home this winter break to bury his father. From the airport, he drives to my grandmother’s apartment. We all live there now. She will last longer this way. I bow to my grandfather’s photo perched on the chestnut bureau. I sleep on Dad’s childhood palm-cot bed—if I stretch, my feet will knock on the bed posts, though I’m only five feet tall.

Dad ferries me between this home and the home I grew up in. He naps on the dirt-beige sofa when I dig around my room. December light, an insipid white, filters through the corner window, the glass speckled with rain and dust. When Dad wakes, he hurries me. The nylon bag is already heavy with a funeral-black coat and boot socks and books at my feet. I sit down on the windowsill and touch the white paper box. The dust is thick. All I need is to lift the lid by a corner, lift just enough to catch a peep of that pink—then something else seizes me. A sticky note, still clinging to the windowpane through all those years I’ve left home—

“—Dad never threw anything away.” Faded burgundy ink on pink paper paled by the sun. The cursive runs as if my hand was chasing the sentence before it could scuttle back into the cleft it came from. I touch the note—it’s cool like the winter outside. I consider pasting it into the kraft notebook I write in now. But I don’t. I haul the bag to the door and tell Dad I’m ready to go home.