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Fourteen
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Fourteen Grandma Yeh had given Suyin her jade pendant; she called it a special amulet, a talisman. Suyin liked its pear shape. Grandma said it was a peach-the peach of longevity that grew in the Garden of Immortality and that Kuan Yin hid from the other gods to share with humans because she pitied them. Humans, Grandma said, were much to be pitied. The old statues in the Har Paw Villa showed our terrible sufferings: incurable sores, toothaches, starvation, sword and fire, wild animals and wild men, amputations, madness, demons. She said there were more than a thousand thousand ways to suffer , but even then humans suffered most from a shortened life. Until Kuan Yin stole the peaches of long life for them. She was sorry she had laughed at Grandma's story. Every girl in school had one of these jade pendants, and everyone seemed to have had her mom or grandma tell her a grotty story to go with the jade. Her mother had made her apologize to Grandma, but Grandma wasn't mad at her. In fact, she said she was smarter than all the other girls because she knew it was only a madeup story. It was really Jesus Christ who helped them. Only, Grandma used words like salvation and heavenly father. This time Suyin didn't laugh because her mom was keeping her eye on her. Suyin wondered if Grandma was with Jesus in Heaven or with Kuan Yin in the Garden of Immortality. She didn't like JOSS and GOLD to think of her as dead. Maybe that was why Grandma had given her the pendant-as a talisman for remembering. Every time Suyin saw the jades hanging from the necks of all the Cho Kang girls she thought of them as millstones of memory. They looked so light-green and cream and white and translucent, curved and delicate. But her mom said that true jade was one of the hardest stones and could be cut only by another jade. Jade reminded her ofher mom and Auntie Ellen; they looked like small skinny women, but she knew how tough they were. Wearing Grandma's amulet was like wearing her memory and the memory of her mother and Auntie Ellen; it was like wearing the memory of women. She almost wished Grandma hadn't given her the pendant. Now she was like all the girls in Cho Kang, and maybe like all the Chinese girls in Singapore. Sometimes she thought memory was only another grotty story, like Grandma's story about Kuan Yin andJ:!:te peach of longevity. Her mother and Auntie Ellen never forgot she was just a child. Or perhaps they forgot that she was still a child, because they were always telling her what to do, what to expect, what to be prepared for, how she had to be strong. She just wanted to be a kid; she wanted to feel safe. She wanted to think life was easy, that she could be happy and have fun. Not all this about how life was work and studies and passing exams and struggle and fear and making the right choices because one wrong choice could mean disaster. Maybe all that was true, but she didn't want to hear it every day. Chester was the only one who never talked that way to her. Sometimes Suyin thought he was a Martian because he talked all the time about having fun. What fun she'd have learning the subway system in New York, how college was so much fun because she'd get to choose the college that was right for her and she could take whatever courses she liked, that she'd have fun trying out all the thirty-one flavors at the BaskinRobbins near his home because Baskin-Robbins had only twelve flavors in Singapore. Maybe that's what fathers did-have fun. But somehow Suyin didn't think that was so in Singapore. Even at school games 252 [34.201.8.144] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 05:49 GMT) LANDING she could see how glum they were. They smiled only when their children won. And they never smiled at her, because she wasn't Chinese. Mom didn't want to talk to her about what was really important . Like why she knew Chester was her father and why no one said he was. And like why Henry, whom she had met for the first time at the church service...