Chapter One — The Colored Sky
They had been in the country eight months.
The house was rented, on a street that faced east, a street whose name he would not learn to say for a long time. The family before them had left things behind: a stretch of half-built fence, a sack of cement gone hard as stone, a tree that lost all its leaves the first cold week of fall. His father said they would pull the fence down once they were settled. His mother said she would plant something once they were settled. *Once they were settled* — he had been hearing those words for eight months. They were a spell with no expiration.
His name was Lin Yuanzheng.
His grandfather had chosen it, over the telephone, from the other side of the Pacific — in one of those long-distance calls you waited three days to place. *Yuanzheng.* The far expedition. The long march. *Our family finally has someone over there,* the grandfather had said, his voice thinned by ten thousand miles of ocean. *The name has to carry. It has to stand. Over there, make them remember it.*
His father had written the name in careful strokes on the back of the boy’s birth certificate, and again on his first schoolbag, and he said it aloud, with a small and helpless pride, every time anyone asked.
But it was a Chinese name.
Here, it became a sound no one could make. On the first day, the teacher had stopped a long time over the roll, and what she finally produced was not *Yuanzheng* but something else — a sound with all its corners filed off, flattened under an American tongue. The other children laughed. He did not know what was funny, but he knew the laughed-at sound was him.
After that he stopped answering to it right away. When the teacher reached that mangled sound on the roll, he would wait a second, two seconds, until it was certain no other child would rise to claim it, and only then raise his hand. In those two seconds he always felt he was claiming something that did not quite belong to him.
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That afternoon his mother was in the kitchen and his father was not yet home.
He was alone in the back yard.
He crouched by the unfinished fence with nothing to do. The children here all had somewhere to be after school — a ball game, another kid’s house, a garage with its door rolled up and the light on and laughter coming out of it. He had nowhere. The language was a wall, and he was still on this side of it, with his face to the gap, looking through.
Something in the dirt caught the light.
He worked it loose from the dry soil with his fingers. A small piece of glass, the edges worn round and harmless — a marble that had cracked, maybe, or the lip of some old bottle, buried long enough for the rain and the dirt to take the sharpness off it. It was small, not much bigger than his thumbnail.
It was blue-green.
Not sky-blue, not grass-green, but something between the two, deep, like deep water. He wiped it on his trousers and the color came up brighter.
He raised it.
He had no reason. He only lifted it to his eye and held it against the sky.
And the sky changed.
The sky over that yard — the sky that for eight months had been pale and empty and strange to him — all at once had color. The blue-green washed up into it and turned the clouds to something seen from the floor of the ocean, and strained the light down soft, a light he had never seen, the kind that might reach you through deep water from very far away. The bare tree, stripped of its leaves, became a set of black and quiet lines inside that color. Everything was where it had been. Everything was changed.
He held his breath.
He moved his fingers and the colored sky swung with them. Tilt to the left, the clouds ran left; tilt to the right, the light came down at a different angle. The whole sky, gathered now into this chip of blue-green between his fingers, was his to turn. He had never had a thing like this — a thing entirely his own, that asked him to speak no language, to understand no one, to wait for no second before raising his hand. Behind this glass he was not the boy who could not say his own name. He was nothing at all. He was only a pair of eyes, looking.
The wind came and the bare tree ticked, once. He could almost hear the blue-green sky tick with it.
He stayed inside that color a long time. Long enough that his mother glanced at him once through the kitchen window and went back to her pot. Long enough that the fence threw its shadow halfway across the yard. Long enough that he forgot who he was, and what he was called, and whether or not, in eight months, they had settled.
He knew only one thing.
This was beautiful.
This was so beautiful.
Too beautiful to keep to himself.
He lowered the glass and blinked and let the ordinary pale sky fall back into place. Then he closed his hand around the chip of blue-green, and stood, and turned toward the house —
toward the grown woman coming out of the kitchen now, wiping her hands on her apron —
and he opened his fingers, and lifted up the colored sky he had just found, to show her.
