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“No,” I quacked. “No, I don’t.”

“Don’t talk back,” my mother scolded. Maybe this lady was powerful enough to send us back.

I went to the front of the laundry and worked so hard that I impolitely did not take notice of her leaving.

“Improve that voice,” she had instructed my mother, “or else you’ll never marry her off. Even the fool half ghosts won’t have her.” So I discovered the next plan to get rid of us: marry us off here without waiting until China. The villagers’ peasant minds converged on marriage. Late at night when we walked home from the laundry, they should have been sleeping behind locked doors, not overflowing into the streets in front of the benevolent associations, all alit. We stood on tiptoes and on one another’s shoulders, and through the door we saw spotlights open on tall singers afire with sequins. An opera from San Francisco! An opera from Hong Kong! Usually I did not understand the words in operas, whether because of our obscure dialect or theirs I didn’t know, but I heard one line sung out into the night air in a woman’s voice high and clear as ice. She was standing on a chair, and she sang, “Beat me, then, beat me.” The crowd laughed until the tears rolled down their cheeks while the cymbals clashed—the dragon’s copper laugh—and the drums banged like firecrackers. “She is playing the part of a new daughter-in-law,” my mother explained. “Beat me, then, beat me,” she sang again and again. It must have been a refrain; each time she sang it, the audience broke up laughing. Men laughed; women laughed. They were having a great time.

“Chinese smeared bad daughters-in-law with honey and tied them naked on top of ant nests,” my father said. “A husband may kill a wife who disobeys him. Confucius said that.” Confucius, the rational man.

The singer, I thought, sounded like me talking, yet everyone said, “Oh, beautiful. Beautiful,” when she sang high.

Walking home, the noisy women shook their old heads and sang a folk song that made them laugh uproariously:

Marry a rooster, follow a rooster.

Marry a dog, follow a dog.

Married to a cudgel, married to a pestle,

Be faithful to it. Follow it.

I learned that young men were placing ads in the Gold Mountain News to find wives when my mother and father started answering them. Suddenly a series of new workers showed up at the laundry; they each worked for a week before they disappeared. They ate with us. They talked Chinese with my parents. They did not talk to us. We were to call them “Elder Brother,” although they were not related to us. They were all funny-looking FOB’s, Fresh-off-the-Boat’s, as the Chinese-American kids at school called the young immigrants. FOB’s wear high-riding gray slacks and white shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Their eyes do not focus correctly—shifty-eyed—and they hold their mouths slack, not tight-jawed masculine. They shave off their sideburns. The girls said they’d never date an FOB. My mother took one home from the laundry, and I saw him looking over our photographs. “This one,” he said, picking up my sister’s picture.

“No. No,” said my mother. “This one,” my picture. “The oldest first,” she said. Good. I was an obstacle. I would protect my sister and myself at the same time. As my parents and the FOB sat talking at the kitchen table, I dropped two dishes. I found my walking stick and limped across the floor. I twisted my mouth and caught my hand in the knots of my hair. I spilled soup on the FOB when I handed him his bowl. “She can sew, though,” I heard my mother say, “and sweep.” I raised dust swirls sweeping around and under the FOB’s chair—very bad luck because spirits live inside the broom. I put on my shoes with the open flaps and flapped about like a Wino Ghost. From then on, I wore those shoes to parties, whenever the mothers gathered to talk about marriages. The FOB and my parents paid me no attention, half ghosts half invisible, but when he left, my mother yelled at me about the dried-duck voice, the bad temper, the laziness, the clumsiness, the stupidity