The Distant Land of My Father by Bo Caldwell

finished the tea, I lay down again and stared at the few soft stripes of afternoon light that managed to make their way through the wooden blinds. Chu Shih was back at his burner, fooling with the teapot and putting things away, but I knew he was only trying to look busy while I was, he hoped, falling asleep.
    “My mother,” I started, but Chu Shih shook his head.
    “She will come,” he said. “Later.”
    I reached into my pocket and found the small cardboard box, my purchase from the afternoon, which seemed like at least a day ago. I opened it and took out the elephant, and held him up to the light. He looked brave, I thought. There was no telling what a beast as brave as he could do. I touched his trunk and put him on the table so that I would not harm him by holding him too tight. And then I fell asleep.

    When I woke, the strips of light were gone, and the room had the dimness of the last minutes of day. Though I didn’t feel hot, I was damp from sweat and my chest felt tight, as though something were binding me. I started to sit up and saw, on the blackwood table next to Chu Shih’s bed, the teacup, filled again. I picked it up carefully, my hands shaking, and drank the lukewarm tea.
    I heard Chu Shih sounds in the kitchen, the soft scraping and padding of his cotton shoes on the quarry tile floor, the sound of a wooden spoon on a ceramic bowl, the sharp sound of slicing on the butcher block, and I got up from the bed and went to find him.
    The kitchen smelled of ginger and scallions and garlic. Chu Shih stood at the sink. When I came in and stood next to him, he set a piece of sesame bread in front of me, and I realized I was starved.
    He was making chiaotzû, steamed dumplings. I watched as he dropped minced ginger into a metal bowl and combined it with what would be the filling for the dumplings: ground pork, shredded cabbage, green onions, eggs to hold everything together. He shook in soy sauce and sesame oil, salt and pepper, half a cup of oolong tea that he’d steeped hard and strong, especially for this, and the smell got better and stronger, so that all I wanted was to eat one now. Last was a dash of sherry, which he added to most of what he cooked, a trick my mother had taught him, like adding coffee to chocolate to make the taste stronger.
    “I can help?” I asked.
    He nodded toward the huge maple worktable in the middle of the room. “Tso,” sit, he said, and though he was stern, I understood that he wanted me to stay.
    I sat down on one of the worn stools and Chu Shih dropped a handful of flour onto the table in front of me, where it made a small poof!, then settled. I smoothed it into a circle, the table cool and hard and solid against my palm, then I rubbed flour between my hands as though it were talc. Chu Shih sat down next to me and floured more of the table, then took a ball of dough from a ceramic bowl and began to flatten it, first with his huge hands, then with the rolling pin, back and forth, back and forth, his motions even and controlled. When the dough was rolled almost as thin as paper, he turned a teacup upside down and began cutting out circles with the rim, his wrist making quick, sharp turns. Then he slid the circles—the skins, we called them—toward me, one by one. I picked each one up and held it carefully in my palm while I put a forkful of the filling in the middle. Then—this was the hard part—I folded the circle into a half circle, and pinched the edges together hard, the way you would the edge of a pie crust, turning the half circle into a crescent as I worked. When I finished, I set the fat moon-shaped dumpling on a metal tray in the middle of the table and started another.
    We worked that way in silence. A few times I thought I heard steps in the rest of the house and I looked at the door, waiting for someone to enter, but no one did, and each time Chu Shih nodded sharply at the chiaotzû I was making, telling me to pay attention to what I was doing.
    I understood