Burning Bush

E.P. Chiew

Fat dumplings bring good chi; the podgier the more auspicious the prospects for wealth. Li-Chun's dumplings are positively engorged. Her dead husband would not have wanted it to be any other way. Chirrh! Who was she kidding? Zhi-Ming would have just as soon noticed the dumplings as he would if she was screwing the pastor at their local church. Which she is and which he didn't. Notice, that is. Few things merited his attention, unless they were monumental, such as Ta-Ting getting bad grades, accidental throwings of his newspaper clippings or their house sliding downhill a few yards by virtue of sitting astride shifting tectonic plates. Well, a few fat dumplings for his shrine then, cosied up next to the Laughing Fat Buddha, on the shoulder-high specially-prefabricated mantelpiece. May he dine with bulging cheeks!

All this percolates in her shivery unconscious as Li-Chun chats on the phone with her sister Pen-Ma, receiver cradled between head and shoulder. Her hands work deftly, scooping pork-and-chives mix into a palm-sized circle-shaped wrapper.

Zhi-Ming had died intestate. By rights, the Hollywood house is hers. "She wouldn't dare contest it," Li-Chun says. "I'll bet my Gucci purse."

"You think?" Pen-Ma says.

His mistress had had the audacity to attend his funeral in her crisply-pleated black pant-suit and spiky stilettos, grinding her cigarettes out by the rhododendron clogging the church lobby before coming in. Glamorous dark shades veiled her eyes, but there was no mistaking the Prada bag slung over her arm. Pen-Ma added insult to injury by digging her elbows into her back.

"What?" she'd hissed.

"That bag's at least two thousand dollars."

"What's the matter with you? Can't you see who it is? I should go over there and slap her face. If I had me some dirty dishwater, I'd empty it over her." Li-Chun ground her teeth.

Pen-Ma dove back into her seat, and for the rest of the eulogy, she kept her mouth shut.

Only three months ago the funeral had been. Yet, Li-Chun feels as if she's lived her whole life alone, that her time with Zhi-Ming had never been. How can someone be gone so quickly, only leaving behind residues of emotions and memories like sticky resin? She folds the wrapper in half, then with thumb and forefinger pinches the ends together quickly, a kneading motion that bears dumplings the size of miniscule clasped purses. Two rows of them now lie beached, white and curled, against each other on a tray.

Pen-Ma switches topic. "How's Pastor Lover-boy?"

"Ach, it would've been a perfect revenge. It would have rankled Zhi-Ming like sitting on an anthill." Such sweet revenge she'd been planning, she could taste it like stewed chicken kidneys. Timely, because she'd just found out, through an inadvertent call from a real estate lawyer's office, that he'd bought a mansion up in the Hollywood hills for his mistress, while simultaneously telling her to rein in expenses, such as Ta-Ting's piano lessons and her weekly pedicures. Perfect too, the revenge would have been, because Pastor Chen would sermonize Zhi-Ming about his infidelity while he would be perfectly aware this God's servant is diddling his own wife.

"He's still worth the price of revenge then?" Pen-Ma giggles.

"I gave him last month's Glamor. Fifty ways to stimulate the G-spot. He read it in the john. Revenge has side benefits."

"Can I give him a wink in church on Sunday?"

"Don't you dare." Li-Chun counts the New Year dumplings on the tray in her head. She picks up another wrapper, dabs it with beaten egg. She scoops and stuffs, scoops and stuffs. A shuffling noise makes her lift her head. Ta-Ting, her nine year old son, is standing at the doorway, a book in his hand and a box of matches in the other. How much has he heard? Li-Chun panics. But there is an impassive expression on Ta Ting's face. He holds the box of matches out. "I'm going to light the bush on fire and talk to it," he declares.

"What?" Li-Chun swipes at a falling lock of hair. "Gimme them matches. You know you can't play with that. Now, isn't it time you go study your Bible? What time is your lesson with Pastor Chen?"

"Can I eat a dumpling?" Ta-Ting approaches the kitchen counter, pincers a raw dumpling, stares at it. Li-Chun neatly plucks it from his hand and places it back on the tray. She flaps at him. "Go now. Shoo!"

"Who're you talking to, Mama?" Ta-Ting's eyes are round and curious.

"Just your Aunty Pen-Ma. Now go."

"I've finished my homework. I AM WHO I AM," Ta Ting intones. He starts running around the kitchen in maddening circles, whooping and yelling, "I AM WHO I AM!"

"Pen-Ma, I'm going to have to call you back later." Li-Chun hangs up. She tries to catch his flying sleeve. "Can't you see I'm busy here? Go put up your dragon paper cuts for New Year. You don't want to miss any red packets, do you?"

"FINISHED!" Ta Ting continues running around the kitchen. His hands pinwheel, then he chops the air with them as if they are rotor blades.

"TA-TING! Stop!"

He suddenly stops and perches his chin on the kitchen counter. He needs a haircut, Li-Chun thinks, but recently, she's been preoccupied.

"Is Pastor Chen staying for tea again today?"

Li-Chun blushes. "Perhaps. It depends on his schedule."

"I hate it when he does that," Ta-Ting declares. One hand finger-walks up the side of a bowl. "He stays so long. Besides, he's too skinny and he smells."

"Ta-Ting! Show some respect to your elders." Li-Chun turns her back, tries to act busy arranging dumplings that don't need arranging. How much does he know? Usually, after his lesson, Li-Chun sends Ta-Ting off to her neighbor's, where her son Alex has a PlayStation. The arrangement has worked out most conveniently for both Ta-Ting and her.

"Papa says he's a hippo . . . a real crud."

Li-Chun whips around to see her son eye her balefully.

"What're you talking about? Your papa seldom went to church."

"He told me. He told me in the hospital."

"Ta-Ting! Stop making things up. Now go and play outside."

"He did! He did!" Ta-Ting dashes out of the kitchen. Li-Chun can hear her heart thudding. Is it possible Zhi-Ming knew what was going on before he died? Anger rises like a submerged knot. All her life, her culture has venerated the dead. Ancestors glower over each present generation like saints and martyrs, and her gut twists itself into unholy pangs of resentment and bile at the thought that her cheating husband has succeeded in joining these exalted ranks, forcing her to kowtow before his gleaming portrait with its snaggle-toothed smile and flinty eyes. She stabs his sooty-ashed urn morning and evening with acrid incense, and she imagines it's her husband's carious body underneath his tomb she's prodding. Her fingers itch to poke his portrait in where his eyes are. Her heart boils and froths with unfulfilled outrage.

Li-Chun can hear her son outside now, careening around, screaming at the top of his lungs. Listening, she makes out the words of a church hymn, "Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light!" With Zhi-Ming's betrayal still lodged in her heart, she contemplates how neatly he'd sidestepped her revenge by falling ill. Not with any evanescent subliminal disease, but with a crippling, monstrous, galloping brain tumor that the doctors didn't even dare to biopsy, because the odds of death by biopsy were about even with the tumor killing him.

The heroics Zhi-Ming enacted, even to the last, when he was blind and had to be fed intravenously! Heavily sedated, his eyeballs rolled from side to side, unseeing even as they searched, piteous even without expression, a desperate entreaty for time. Li-Chun had had to watch, asphyxiated, as the mistress, that trollop, came to visit, all pretense and fallacious concern for the boss' wife. But what she resented most was the mistress' clandestine touch of ownership, index finger on her husband's wrist, where a Chinese doctor would check for pulse, gently stroking. Well, life has avenged her, hasn't it? Better than if she'd tried to kill him herself. However, she never wanted him dead and this heavy grudge inside her, insidious and deep, lies heavy like her own adamantine cross-to-bear.

An hour later, Li-Chun sniffs the air and smells something burning. She looks at her oven and the stove. Then, yelling in panic, she rushes outside to see flames licking upwards from the stunted hedge, brittle, desiccated from a few months prior.

"Ta-Ting! Ta-Ting!" Li-Chun screams. The heat from the bush engulfs her.

Her son emerges from behind. In his hand he holds a Bible, open to the Old Testament. Solemnly, he holds up a hand as if to bless her. His face is fiery red from the fumes. His voice roars over the crackling bush, "Mama, I have something important to tell you. GOD SAYS I AM THE CHOSEN ONE."

Pen-Ma swears by therapy for anyone having a mental meltdown, like PeptoBismol for acid reflux. Li-Chun and Ta-Ting are waiting to see Dr. Martin in a cream-colored antiseptic lobby, a psychologist recommended by her late husband's neurologist. He and Dr. Martin are tennis buddies, which Li-Chun figures to be a solid reference, despite all her misgivings about psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo.

There are no plants, the entrance door faces the bathroom, which is bad feng-shui and even the receptionist looks as if she's had too many washes. She smells of apple blossoms and her hair waves around her face with humid fullness.

Sitting with her Louis Vuitton purse carefully balanced on her lap, she glances at her child. Ta-Ting is methodically pinching first the left then the right side of his face. She flaps at him. "Stop fidgeting."

Obediently, Ta-Ting sticks his hands under his armpits. "What are we doing here, Mama?"

The receptionist is buzzed. She picks up the phone, listens without saying a word, replaces the receiver and looks across at them. "Dr. Martin will see you now." An android couldn't be more stoic.

Dr. Martin opens his door and Li-Chun receives a shock. His features are as Chinese as hers, stubbed-nose, flat angling cheeks, thin wire-rims wrapped around his eyes. He's also very short, and all these leave Li-Chun with a feeling of being hoaxed. Immediately upon entering his office, she scans for some hidden sign, photos on the wall, encased racket peeking out from crevice between bookshelves and computer desk, anything to indicate that he's indeed a tennis player. She ushers in Ta-Ting, who proceeds to cross one feet over the other, and stands with arms akimbo next to the leather couch. She urges him to sit, but he merely scratches his cheek, a gesture reminiscent of his father, and recrosses his arms. Then, his gaze sweeps out past the beveled bank of glass to the skyscrapers facing them, his mouth slowly opening like fish releasing air-bubbles.

"Dr. Khoo very kindly called me before you visit."

Li-Chun immediately notices the grammatical mistake. She plumps herself on the leather couch, tucking her bag under her armpit.

"He explained you situation. I'm very sorry to hear about you husband."

Li-Chun half rises. What kind of quackery is this?

"You disturbed by something." Dr. Martin then holds out a hand. "Please, I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm here to help, if I can. We only need talk about whatever you feel comfortable discussing."

Li-Chun sinks back down. A memory rises unbidden. Two days after Zhi-Ming's funeral, Li-Chun had found her son shredding his report cards in his room. Or so she thought, until later when gathered up in a pile on the kitchen's block island, she noticed a pattern to the ripping. He had neatly torn holes through each card, holes of different shapes and sizes. Her questing mind checked to see if he desecrated only "C's or "A"s, but the distribution was random. She asked him the meaning of what he was doing, but he only cowered as if he was being hit. This rent her heart. Li-Chun gathered up her son and said, "You can rip anything out you like, just not Mummy's purses and shoes, ok?"

Li-Chun now takes a leap of faith. "Dr. Martin, I need to explain something to you." She quickly reprises this scene from memory to him, while Ta-Ting listens as if they are talking about some other unfamiliar boy. His eyes light up with magisterial wonder, a kind of impishness.

Dr. Martin listens, nodding occasionally. He seems to be jogging in place as he bobs up and down on his adjustable softly-padded executive chair. After Li-Chun finishes, he still sits there, jouncing up and down. Inwardly, Li-Chun begins to tick like a metronome. She glances at Ta-Ting, who has edged over to the windows, and now stands tracing his fingers up and down the glass, making snake-like tracks on the crystalline clearness.

Embarrassed, Li-Chun mumbles, "He's a very very bright boy. Nearly top of his class, every year."

Dr. Martin smiles. He reaches back to his desk and retrieves pad and pen. He leafs over the cardboard cover. "Ta-Ting, do you like to drew?"

Li-Chun looks at her son. He puffs out his cheeks, having inhaled a lot of air, and he stares back at the doctor unblinking. His jaws work under the strain, and his cheeks indent here and there as the pocket of air dances around. Dr. Martin waits.

Li-Chun makes to rise from the couch. Dr. Martin leans forward. Something in his posture stays her. She looks from doctor to son. Dr. Martin waits. Li-Chun again feels like a ticking metronome, one that's likely to combust. She wants to talk about what happened over Chinese New Year with the burning bush; she wants to rage about her husband's betrayal, his untimely demise; she wants to have a lot of things clarified and understood.

Finally, Ta-Ting exhales. "Yes, I like to draw," he says.

"Will you drew something few me on this piece of paper?" Dr. Martin extends the pad and pen. Ta-Ting looks, scrunches up his mouth but says nothing.

"Anything you like," Dr. Martin urges. "Whatever comes to you mind. A rainbow or an animal?"

Ta-Ting grimaces.

"Maybe Spiderman or his nemesis, Dr. Octopus?"

This seems to work. Ta-Ting turns to Li-Chun for reassurance. With her heart in her mouth, she nods. He takes the pad and pen, hunching his shoulders over. "Don't look," he admonishes both the doctor and Li-Chun.

As he draws, Dr. Martin slips into casual chit-chat. He asks where they live, and what she enjoys about her Pasadena neighborhood. Li-Chun realizes that what she has mistaken for grammatical errors is actually an inability or recalcitrance of Dr. Martin's tongue and soft-palette to form the sound "oar." Thus, when he speaks, "more" sounds like "mew" and "for" like "few." It liberalizes her attitude towards him. That, and his manner towards Ta-Ting, patient and unexpectant.

Ta-Ting now thrusts the pad back at Dr. Martin, and Li-Chun gasps as she sees what he has drawn. It's straight out of Ta-Ting's pictorial Bible. A formidable rendition of a bearded man throwing a long cane at the ground, the opposite end of which has already changed into a writhing snake.

Dr. Martin looks up. "This is very, very good."

Li-Chun is unsure whether Dr. Martin means the drawing is good art or whether he senses some sort of psychoanalytic breakthrough. But his next words dash her hopes. "You like magic then, do you?"

Ta-Ting crosses his arms. "I AM WHO I AM," he drones.

Li-Chun has had enough. She's paid good money for the session and she wants some results, not this time-wasting bait-and-switch. "That's Moses from the Bible. Last week, he lit up the bush in our front yard like a menorah. Ta-Ting has been under a lot of strain. It's normal considering his father just died three months ago. I'm no psychologist but even I can tell you all this strange behavior he's been exhibiting are symptoms of a deeper stress. It's not rocket science, now what are we going to do about it?"

Dr. Martin looks felled by her aggression. He takes a deep breath, gets up from his seat and starts pacing up and down.

He says, "May I suggest this, Mrs. Wang? May I suggest separate sessions for you and Ta-Ting? I'd like to see Ta-Ting without your supervising presence," this makes Li-Chun bristle with anger, "and I'd like to see you alone. I think that would ultimately be the most beneficial route."

"Oh, so you can charge us double?" Li-Chun storms to the windows, drags Ta-Ting's hand. She strides to the door. "What kind of a roughhouse Chinese-equivalent to Martin are you anyway?"

Just then, Ta-Ting shouts, "The G-spot is an area sensitive to steam and lotion inside the Virginia and is the fucking point of female sex world a-ro uzi."

The shrink tells her Ta-Ting's "biblical" play-ups are attention-seeking behavior, that he is trying to seek certainties and meaning in the death of a beloved parent, that he is temporarily "disturbed," possibly "unhinged" in his inability to deal with his grief because of his young age. Li-Chun sits and listens, squaring her shoulders, hands damp and slippery on the clasp of her Balenciaga as she creaks the leather couch to good effect. Dr. Martin takes off his wire-rims.

For the last four weeks, her own progress has been slow. The shrink tells her possibly she is enraged at herself. Possibly, her anger is directed towards the person who died for no other reason than that he died. He tells her anger has many faces; the other side of anger is sadness and loss. Possibly, her anger matches her sadness in equal measure and intensity.

Li-Chun ponders this. If anything, she's angrier than before therapy started. If anger's underside is sadness, she finds it as persuasive as Ta-Ting thinking he is God's New Moses. More than once, Li-Chun has found him kneeling in front of the Laughing Fat Buddha pleading for the Pharaoh to release "his people."

When she tells Pastor Chen this, he gives her a sermon about worshipping false idols. And he does this while they are still breathless and disheveled on the carpet. Angrily, she snatches up her bra and covers her chest. "You're missing the point," she says.

Chen peels himself off the carpet and starts dressing. "I know you're a good Christian, Li-Chun, but you must understand, our God is a jealous wrathful God and will tolerate no competition." He sits down on the bed to pull on his socks. "Like many of my parishioners, I know you think you should give as many hits to the jackpot as possible, but our God is different. You can't win heaven like that. There's only one road, and that road is through fidelity to Jesus Christ."

"You mean, like Zhi-Ming and his harlot, and me and you?"

Chen stops cold. He eyes her uncertainly. Sitting in his boxers and his holey socks, he looks more like a bony carpetbagger than a respected man-of-the-cloth.

"You need to be less aggressive, Li-Chun. Seek God's forgiveness."

There's no decent way to contradict one's pastor, no matter how often one screws him.

So, she tells this to her shrink, by way of preamble. "I don't need to seek anybody's forgiveness. Certain people, even as they lie churning in their grave, need to seek God's forgiveness."

"How was you week?" Dr. Martin replies, unfazed.

"Just wonderful! Ta-Ting is commencing his mass exodus. Soon, I'll expect to see the slaughter of first-borns."

Dr. Martin leans over his desk and scribbles a note. Li-Chun eyes him suspiciously.

"Let's talk about that today. Tell me about these antics of Ta-Ting's. How do they make you feel?"

Li-Chun throws up her hands. "Oh, I don't know. Bewildered, I guess. Worried. Angry that he won't talk to me. The usual stuff."

"What else?"

Li-Chun pauses, scrabbling for words. When Ta-Ting was two, he had a bout of fever above 102 for a week. Every night, all night, she sat holding him in her arms, feeling his feverish tremors, willing it out of him and into her. Doctors who ask stupid questions have never known despair. "I'm very worried. I don't understand why he thinks he's Moses. It's mystifying. What does it all mean?"

Dr. Martin taps his fingertips together. "I've told you what I think it means. Why don't you tell me what you think it means?"

"Pastor Chen coaches him on the Bible every week."

"So you think there's a connection between his behavior and the lessons?"

Li-Chun colors. "I didn't say that. Maybe he's just enthusiastic, needing to reenact in detail what he's learned. He can be artistic, you know?"

"But you think not?"

Li-Chun pauses. "I have this feeling he wants to tell me something. But he won't talk to me."

"What do you think he's trying to tell you?"

Li-Chun explodes, "I haven't a clue! If I did, I wouldn't be here, would I?"

Dr. Martin switches topic. "Tell me about you church. What's it like? How long have you been going?"

Li-Chun senses a delaying tactic but she acquiesces. At the end of a long forty minutes, Li-Chun has roved over her entire church history, emphasized her fervent beliefs, even called herself a "sinner," but somehow, managed to studiously avoid any mention of her affair.

Just as she gets up to leave though, Dr. Martin says, "Perhaps the next time Ta-Ting reenacts a biblical episode, you should indulge him, play along."

"Why?"

"If you believe he's seeking communication with you in the only way he knows how, playing along, engaging by his rules, is a way to signal you're listening."

"Hmmm . . . perhaps."

"I was just thinking. That's unusual for a pastor of a large congregation, is it not? To take such an interest in one little boy?"

Li-Chun's head snaps up. "What are you implying?"

Dr. Martin shakes his head. "Nothing at all. It's heartwarming to hear that there're still such dedicated priests out there. The one stray lamb in the flock causes a rejoicing up in heaven."

Li-Chun blinks rapidly. All this while, she's believed Dr. Martin to be an ignoramus about the Bible. The paltriness of her perception, her erroneous assumption about Dr. Martin now strikes a parallel dynamic, a rising epiphany about certain presumptions she's made before her husband died. A distant memory assails like backwash, and she is overwhelmed by vertigo as she leaves Dr. Martin's building. She barely steadies herself, only finding herself after she's landed in the wrong car park, trying to insert her car-keys in a lemon color Volvo that looks nothing like her own car.

Many things are not what they seem. In the sweeping tide of her anger, she's brushed aside a confusing uncertainty without realizing its import. Replaying in her mind now is the conversation she had with Ta-Ting before he set fire to the bush. What had her child said? That his father thought Pastor Chen was a hypocrite. That he'd told him so in the hospital.

On the phone with Pen-Ma later, Li-Chun gasps out, "Do you realize what this means? Zhi-Ming must have known all along." Wind rolls out of her, the sounds bassooning like reedy breaths. "Here I've been burning up thinking I'm unavenged, when all along…" The enormity of her realization makes her wheeze in soundless laughter. "I totally missed it. Son of a gun. I thought he was twisting in his deathbed for time, for life, when in fact, he's just twisting. Twisting because he's been betrayed just as he has betrayed." Li-Chun heaves.

There's deathly silence from Pen-Ma. Then, a cautious, "Did you tape last night's episode of Desperate Housewives?"

Li-Chun realizes there are damp tracks trickling off her chin. She swipes at them. "I'm cracking up. I'm literally fizzing."

Pen-Ma coughs. "Are you sure Zhi-Ming knew? If so, do you think Ta-Ting knows?"

Li-Chun collapses on the floor. "I don't know. I hope not. Oh, I really hope not. Damn Zhi-Ming!"

Over the next few days, a vague feeling of disappointment pursues her. Instead of release, Li-Chun feels deflated. She's unsure of many things. In the light of cold reason, she again becomes confused. Did Zhi-Ming know or not? However, despite the highs and lows of her emotional roller-coaster, one thing she does know. It congeals like dried lard, becoming rock-solid. And it spurs her to action. When next Pastor Chen walks in the door, she makes him a nice cup of Oolong. She sends Ta-Ting off to play at Alex's. Perched on the kitchen stool, she sedately laces her fingers. "You know, Da-Wu, I'm so proud of the progress Ta-Ting has made with the Bible. Just this morning, he's beating his bread with his short ruler."

Pastor Chen frowns.

"He's preparing for Passover. I've never been prouder of my little Moses." Li-Chun measures her next words. "In fact, I'm so proud I think he can carry on now without guidance. More than that, he should proceed on his own, for his own good."

Her full drift now reaches Pastor Chen. He contemplates his Oolong. "Do you really think so, Sister Li-Chun?"

The formality rocks her a little. She hesitates.

He senses his advantage. "It takes a lot of study to become adept at deciphering God's meaning. Years of tutelage under the right master. If you interrupt his progress now, he might be forfeiting a great potential, maybe an ecumenical one."

Li-Chun purses her lips. "I don't think Zhi-Ming would have liked his son to become a priest." She studies her fingernails. "After all, it's not like he was surrounded by flawless examples. And he knew it before he died."

There is a deep silence. When she looks up, his face has turned a mottled red. Li-Chun remains dogged. "I have to think of Ta-Ting now. I'm doing it the best way I know how, going by my gut feelings. I hope you understand."

His hand grasps hers. "I don't think it's a good idea. As your pastor, I earnestly advise against it."

In that moment, a wisp of air escapes her lips. Li-Chun realizes that the hollowness she's been feeling the last few days is the loss of dignity, the realization that all her wisdom has achieved is a pyrrhic victory.

Some of the desolation she's feeling must have seeped through. She looks up to find Pastor Chen puckering his lips like drawstrings, and there's no mistaking the wistfulness in their edges. "I'm not perfect, but I forgive you," he says.

It's the night of Passover. Ta-Ting has barricaded all the doors with strips of newspapers. He's painted the doorway with red x's, incanting a prayer as he does so. He has slaughtered a year-old lamb out in the living room, slashing his toy hatchet at his white pillow. Every action is fraught with significance.

Li-Chun watches from the doorway, biting her lower lip, heart knocking in tandem, as her son foils his pillow with the poker and balances it on top of the fireplace grate. He turns to her, his eyes aglow with mysterious energy, and he says, "We are to eat this meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, with bread made without yeast. We are not to eat it raw or boiled."

She makes him dinner, watches as he eats his fried chicken with his Spiderman cloak tucked into his belt, sandals on his feet, a staff in his hand. She prepares herself. With rawness in her heart, she says, "Ta-Ting, you'll be glad to know Mama has decided no more lessons with Pastor Chen." She steals a glance.

He tears off a large bite of crispy skin, chomps with gusto.

"Aren't you happy? No more memorizing the Bible. You never liked him, did you?"

"I don't care. Pastor Chen's your friend."

Li-Chun's throat convulses. "Did Dr. Martin tell you that?"

Ta-Ting shakes his head. Between mouthfuls, he says, "Eat in haste, this is the Lord's Passover."

His seriousness quells her protests. Her alarm simmers long, becomes a gloaming unease. The weather conspires, almost gleefully. Over the course of the evening, the wind has increased to gales, rattling the bay windows, the louvered shutters, circling in the chimney. They try to watch T.V. in the den, but the keening gusts make Li-Chun shiver. Gales are rare in L.A. and Li-Chun flips channels with foreboding in trying to catch the weather report, much to Ta-Ting's annoyance, who wanted to watch Spiderman 2 on one of the cable movie channels.

It's only later that evening, with Ta-Ting having fallen asleep with his head in her lap, that Li-Chun broods. She obsessively flips channels, then almost beside herself, spots the Bible on the table next to her. She grabs it, turns to Exodus, and slowly begins to read. As she reads again the familiar account of the night of Passover, a creeping quiet steals over her. She sucks in her breath, thinking about the six hundred thousand men, women and children on foot, heading out into the desert, unleavened bread in kneading troughs wrapped in their clothing, pushing their livestock ahead of them. With the wind shrieking in the chimney, she imagines God's lethal spirit, shrouding the night in utter darkness, decimating the Egyptian first-borns in an orgiastic killing spree. The clouds rain blood that night. Li-Chun huddles over her son, breathes in his crisp buttery-smelling hairline. In the corner, the torn newspapers lie in a pile. Li-Chun whispers into her son's hair. "Forgive me. Please forgive me."

The next morning, as Ta-Ting grabs strawberry Poptarts on-the-go as the school bus honks outside, Li-Chun's hands flutter over his shoulder, catching him in flight. There's a quickening as she looks her son in the eye and says, "Well done, Moses. Commemorate this day, this day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand."

Ta-Ting grins, his mouth peppered with crumbs. "Hosanna, Mama."

She watches him sprint across the driveway and hop into the waiting bus. Her heart flips even as she waves to him, even as she sees him greet his friends, Passover temporarily forgotten, the crossing of the Red Sea still to come.

Later, when she gathers up the newspapers from the living room, her eyes fall on the date. They were from at least six months ago. As she lifts them up a few pages at a time, she notices that they are all from around the same period of time. A startling discovery docks at the corner of her mind, some rudimentary logic, until swallowing hard, she pushes her fist into her mouth as her eyes become raven on the holes torn out of the mosaic of newspapers. She recognizes the parallel holes now as she never did before, these articles painstakingly clipped out by Zhi-Ming, this burning desire in her son to evoke his father alive. It was Zhi-Ming's favorite pastime, saving worthy articles about all subjects, from climatology to obscure horticulture, odysseys to outer space and landmark architecture. A stack of them still lie on the bed stand, waiting to be cleared out. Li-Chun feels an inner spiraling, a tumult of feeling, and spinning she finally sees the writing in the sand. In the dead of night, God's killing spree has not purged her of her unrequited anger nor of her sin. It has not yet brought forgiveness. But perhaps it will have spared her son. Betrayal by someone she has loved smites like fresh slaughter, all the more painful because of love. With her own actions shaming her, Dr. Martin's words about faces of anger resound in her mind; the underface of her anger is the beloved mirage of her son; everything that she did not miss, that made her churn furiously at her husband is everything her son has lost in a father. The weight of that, she'd have carried it all if she could. If she could.

Li-Chun walks over to her husband's portrait. She stares at it for a long time, until his features become pinpoints of light and color. Then, with swift unerring aim, she punches in his eyes with a two-fingered prong. And it's cathartic.

E.P. Chiew

E.P. Chiew's native language is Cantonese, and she was schooled in Malay with English as a second language. "At about age ten," she writes, "I began to read lots of storybooks in English, mostly Enid Blyton (loved Mr. Pinkwhistle and The Secret Faraway Tree, and still do), probably because at the time children's books written in Malay were sadly lacking. English began to predominate as a communication language for me. It also became the secret language between my sister and I when we didn't want Mom to understand what we were gossiping and colluding about." About her favorite authors, she writes: "I'm a great fan of Annie Proulx (for her subject matter, her ability to write organic, versatile, unassuming prose), Tim Gautreaux (for his storytelling skills), Kazuo Ishiguro (for his ability to delve so deep into character), E.M. Forster (for his clipped irony), Edith Wharton (for her sharp social satire and wit), Anton Chekhov (for his short stories that remain long after you're done reading), Gárcia Márquez (for his love of writing and the wonderment that pervades it), Salman Rushdie (for his irreverence), Henry James (for his particular brand of psychological mystery), Jeffrey Eugenides (for the combination of storytelling skills, historical research, penchant to get details right) and Gina Ochsner (for the ability to touch and the startling phrase that lights up her prose)."

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