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The unsold slaves must have watched them with envy. I watch them with envy. My mother’s enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl; nor did I replace the older brother and sister who died while they were still cuddly. Throughout childhood my younger sister said, “When I grow up, I want to be a slave,” and my parents laughed, encouraging her. At department stores I angered my mother when I could not bargain without shame, poor people’s shame. She stood in back of me and prodded and pinched, forcing me to translate her bargaining, word for word.

On that same day she bought at the dog dealer’s a white puppy to train as her bodyguard when she made night calls. She tied pretty red yarn around its tail to neutralize the bad luck. There was no use docking the tail. No matter at what point she cut, the tip would have been white, the mourning color.

The puppy waved its red yarn at the nurse girl, and she picked it up. She followed my mother back to the village, where she always got enough to eat because my mother became a good doctor. She could cure the most spectacular diseases. When a sick person was about to die, my mother could read the fact of it a year ahead of time on the daughters-in-law’s faces. A black veil seemed to hover over their skin. And though they laughed, this blackness rose and fell with their breath. My mother would take one look at the daughter-in-law who answered the door at the sick house and she’d say, “Find another doctor.” She would not touch death; therefore, untainted, she brought only health from house to house. “She must be a Jesus convert,” the people from the far villages said. “All her patients get well.” The bigger the talk, the farther the distances she travelled. She had customers everywhere.

Sometimes she went to her patients by foot. Her nurse-slave carried an umbrella when my mother predicted rain and a parasol when she predicted sun. “My white dog would be standing at the door waiting for me whenever I came home,” she said. When she felt like it, my mother would leave the nurse-slave to watch the office and would take the white dog with her.

“What happened to your dog when you came to America, Mother?”

“I don’t know.”

“What happened to the slave?”

“I found her a husband.”

“How much money did you pay to buy her?”

“One hundred and eighty dollars.”

“How much money did you pay the doctor and the hospital when I was born?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

“Oh.”

“That’s two hundred dollars American money.”

“Was the one hundred and eighty dollars American money?”

“No.”

“How much was it American money?”

“Fifty dollars. That’s because she was sixteen years old. Eight-year-olds were about twenty dollars. Five-year-olds were ten dollars and up. Two-year-olds were about five dollars. Babies were free. During the war, though, when you were born, many people gave older girls away for free. And here I was in the United States paying two hundred dollars for you.”

When my mother went doctoring in the villages, the ghosts, the were-people, the apes dropped out of trees. They rose out of bridge water. My mother saw them come out of cervixes. Medical science does not seal the earth, whose nether creatures seep out, hair by hair, disguised like the smoke that dispels them. She had apparently won against the one ghost, but ghost forms are various and many. Some can occupy the same space at the same moment. They permeate the grain in wood, metal, and stone. Animalcules somersault about our faces when we breathe. We have to build horns on our roofs so that the nagging once-people can slide up them and perhaps ascend to the stars, the source of pardon and love.

On a fine spring day the villagers at a place my mother had never visited before would wave peach branches and fans, which are emblems of Chung-li Ch’uan, the chief of the Eight Sages and keeper of the elixir of life. The pink petals would fall on my mother’s black hair and gown. The villagers would set off firecrackers as on New Year’s Day. If it had really been New Year’s, she would have had to shut herself up in her own house.