The Black Isle by Sandi Tan Page B

if the situation looked steady in the longer term, he could send for us, as many of our compatriots had done with their families. A few had even been known to thrive in the heat and dust.
    Father mulled this over and emerged with a counterproposal: “I will take Li with me. No boy should be without his father.”
    Rather than argue, Mother conceded instantly—here Li probably got his answer about whether Mother loved him—but under one condition: “Ling. Take Ling, too.”
    “Twins should never be separated,” she said. “They’re two halves, yin and yang. They can never be a whole person unless they remain together.”
    Imagine Mother, chief debunker of ghost stories and myths, coming up with a theory like that!
    Inwardly I was scared but thrilled; outwardly I pulled long faces. Li, too, bemoaned his impending exile. But for the first time since our day in Paradis , I saw some of the old spring in his step. I caught him whispering to himself, half excited, half fearful: “I’m going to be an Overseas Chinese.”
    Overseas Chinese. As in “Mr. So-and-So is an Overseas Chinese, which accounts for his poor taste in suits” or “Mrs. So-and-So is an Overseas Chinese, so you can’t expect her to know how to fry eels.” I’d been raised to think of the Overseas Chinese as a separate race, an underclass of lost souls deprived of basic things—sometimes an eye, sometimes an ear, but mostly proper manners and the ability to speak Mandarin like they meant it. They were the banished tribe, the wanderers, the deserters, the outcasts. Different, set apart, marked for life.
    I had to put away my biases. For I, too, was about to become one of them.
     
    The night before we set sail, there was a mournful air about the house, a feeling of missed opportunity too late to be salvaged. We played gramophone records by Shanghainese divas warbling about lost love in a minor key while the amahs stuffed clothes into two crowded trunks reeking of mothballs.
    Mother sat on the couch with Li lying across her lap, both completely lax, almost comatose, both sets of hooded eyes staring into the distance while she massaged his little hands. Nobody spoke. The twins must have intuited our impending separation because they chased me around the downstairs, clinging to my sides like barnacles. Each time I pulled free, I got no more than three steps before having to surrender again. I lay flat on my back on the rug with both of them sinking their warm, heavy heads into my armpits, feigning sleep. I didn’t want to look at them. I couldn’t bear it. I let their heads fall to the floor and then crept away, only to have them catch me once more.
    Through the door, I could see Father slumped at his desk, drunk on plum wine. The family photographs stared back at him. He picked up the frames in turn and whispered the name of each child as he encountered their image. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he’d mistaken Xiaowen for Bao-Bao. He didn’t touch the one of Mother seated alone; perhaps he had forgotten how much wheedling and how many vials of tranquilizers it had taken him to get her out of the house and into the studio. Or perhaps he did remember but was now suddenly sentimental about it. I wriggled out of the twins’ embrace and went to him.
    “Why don’t we take these pictures with us?” I said.
    “We can’t.” He rubbed his thumbs over the one group portrait, all of us standing, somewhat stunned, before a painted sunset. “These are the only pictures your mother has of us. It would be like robbing her of her memory.”
    But by not taking them, I wanted to say, we would be robbed of ours.
    Then I realized. Better to forget.

 
    I HEAR HER VOICE IN MY HEAD as I make myself a pot of pu-erh tea. I hear his , too, of course—but his I’ve been hosting in my conscience for years, as constant as the beating of my own heart.
    I want your story, she said. I need it.
    The dense black leaves unfurl with the help of a spoon, but,