Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos by Emily Wu, Larry Engelmann

darkness of the kitchen or against the wall in the hallway while he returned with Mama to his room and I found my way to my bed in the dark.
    Papa also told us tales from
David Copperfield
and
Oliver Twist
, which enchanted us. But my favorite, by far, was
Huckleberry Finn
. I loved the story more than any other because it was about a black man and his family. We were a black family. We were mistreated and distrusted and watched, and when anything went amiss, we were blamed. I did not understand, but there was no need to understand any more than there was a need to understand hunger or disease or death. They just were.
    The stories we heard in school were about red families and heroes. But at home, Papa told us about a heroic black man and his black family. I was so delighted by this that I repeated the stories about Huckleberry Finn and Black Jim to Xiaolan, who was inspired by them, too.
    Papa described Huckleberry and Black Jim floating on a raft down the Mississippi River in America. We loved words like Huckleberry, Polly, Jim, and, of course, that most magical and musical of all words, Mississippi. My brothers asked Papa to say every unfamiliar word again and again, and each time he did, they’d laugh. I smothered my own giggles until tears ran down my cheeks.
    When Papa described the boy and the black man on a raft on the river, I imagined it was the story of a boy with a father who was very much like Papa, escaping from somewhere bad to somewhere good, and I delighted in that familiar theme. I wanted the story to go on forever. One night Papa said the raft finally carried Huckleberry and Jimall the way to Chicago, where they went ashore and enrolled in the University of Chicago.
    That thrilled me. I loved the way Papa translated the word “Chicago.” He pronounced it
zhi jia ge
, which in Mandarin literally means “Big Brother.” The words warmed me and made that distant city sound like a nice person. My big brother, Yiding, and I were developing a special bond. He accompanied me around the campus, played with me in the sandpit and on the playground. So it comforted me to learn that Huckleberry found a big brother at that university as well. The selection of Chicago was not mere whimsy. Papa had lived there for three years while he worked on his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. He sometimes talked about the city with affection and pride.
    Papa went on and on, often losing himself in his words. There were nights after my brothers had fallen asleep when he’d continue his recitation as if he knew I was under the crib listening. At other times Papa sat quietly and didn’t say anything for a long time. On those nights I lay on the floor unseen, hearing my younger brother breathing above me. After a while, Papa would move his chair away from the crib. I’d hear the paper crinkle as he fished a cigarette from a pack, and I’d hear him remove a wooden match from a small box and strike it. After lighting his cigarette, Papa would pour himself a cup of wine and sit smoking and drinking.
    From my hiding place I followed the glow of the cigarette dancing in the dark like a lazy firefly. Papa would smoke one cigarette after another and rock back and forth in his chair. After drinking several glasses of wine he’d hum or sing softly, slurring his words. When he tired of this, he’d sit quietly. Then the silence would be broken by sudden sobbing. Sometimes he recited the names of men he knew during his years in the concentration camp. I knew the names because I’d heard him telling Mama about the men. “I helped bury them,” he told her. “I can never forget them. I put each of them in the frozen earth in the dead of winter.”
    He told Mama they came back to him in his dreams. They called tohim, and he could hear their voices and see their frozen tears when they spoke of their families far away. “They were younger and stronger than me,” he moaned. “But they died and I lived … Why? So much of life makes no