“I’VE NEVER CARED that much about looks, but I was told my whole life that I was pretty. I had ideas, too, about what I wanted for my life. You have to understand what those times were like. Everyone we knew was being carted off. Relative against relative. Neighbors turning into spies. The Wus—they were a corrupt family. They bribed officials in Beijing to keep their qipao business afloat. Anming thought that made him immune to the dangers of his background. He went around talking about his money as if it were a bulletproof suit. I was young. I was taken in by his promises of a future where I would be the taitai of his family, living an easy life. Oh, I fell in love with him all right, at least the version he presented of himself.

“One night after the school festival, we were alone in the changing room, he threw himself on top of me. I tried to fight him off, but he was strong and convincing. I told myself it was all right, he loved me, he would do right by me. I was so dumb it seemed inconceivable that this was anything other than the first step to a marriage proposal.

“After that incident, I waited for his words of love and promise. I waited for months. Then one day, I was walking back from the factory and I saw him behind a tree with another girl from school. His hand was up her shirt. I saw him clearly for the first time. I realized I had been used. He never had any inclination to marry me—why would he? My parents were poor farmers, without money or connections, supporting four daughters. I had nothing to offer his family.

“I was scared out of my mind. Another woman in the village had been driven away for getting caught with a boy in the rice paddies. Her shame was known in three counties. Her father—the village butcher—lost all his customers; her mother committed suicide. I was terrified this would happen to me, and then not only would my prospects be ruined but my sisters’ as well. Also, Anming had a big mouth—look how much he bragged about his family’s secrets, their money, their government connections. I had to get him far away from me. I thought about how to do this for days, and finally came up with the solution.

“There was a staunch Communist who lived in the outskirts named Mu Xiao. She was a fanatic Mao follower desperate to prove herself to rise in rank. In an anonymous letter, I wrote down everything Anming had told me about his family’s corrupt ways—which officials they had bribed, how much money they had hiding underneath their floorboards, his family’s right-wing political sympathies, all of it. She used the letter to orchestrate his family’s arrest to get herself promoted to section leader. The Wus were sent to prison—the government officials they had dealings with were executed—and all the children, including Anming, were sent to the countryside. You could say that I singlehandedly ruined the Wus. Who knows? If not for my letter, maybe their protection would have lasted past the revolution. I was sorry when I heard he died. I cried bitterly and prayed for my soul for months afterward. But I would do it again if I had to.

“Around this time, I became aware of a boy in my aunt’s town who I knew had been pining for me. He wasn’t the best-looking man but he was smart, from a long line of scholars. His mother was a nurse; his father was the chairman of a hospital. I liked Shen Lin immediately. He didn’t speak much but he was reliable. He came to the factory every day and gave me a hard-boiled egg. I cursed him for it at first. I told him if I ate too much, I got hungrier, and he said that was all right because he would give me all the eggs I could eat, as much as I wanted. I told him I wanted twenty eggs. The next day, he came with a bag of twenty eggs. I told my mother I found the bag on the side of the road.

“Many girls liked Shen, or they liked his family’s circumstances, but he didn’t look twice at them. He had heard the rumors that I was in love with a dead man, but curiously, it made him want me more.

“After asking around, I found out that the Lins were known for two things: their hard work ethic, and their weakness for gambling. They would work themselves to death to attain something, only to bet it all away on a whim. Shen was on track to become a doctor in the local hospital, and I was sick of Xing Chang, sick of taking care of an ailing father, sick of my sisters, and most of all, sick of my mother, who had worshipped the Wus all her life, licking their boots and fawning over their children. I wanted to get away from her most of all.

“One day, when Shen passed me on the street, I made sure he heard me telling my friend how badly I wanted to leave China to go to America. That I wished there was a man who had ambitions of living abroad. I heard rumors shortly afterward that Shen told his father he wasn’t going to become a doctor, he was going to take the TOEFL exam. After he passed, he came around my house and proposed. I made a bit of a fuss about it, then accepted.

“You used to ask how your father and I got married. That’s how. It was because I willed it. If I had been a stupider girl, your father never would have looked at me. But I saw my chance and made a story for myself—even if it was a false story. You have to give a man something to fight for. That’s the secret to a lasting marriage.”

* * *

WHEN NAN STOPPED speaking, Ivy could only stare. She dug the pen deep into her palm.

Meifeng once told her a bedtime story about the frog who lived in an old well. The frog was born in the cold and dark well; all it knew of the outside world was the faint light far above it, which it took to be the sun. One day, a bird flew down into the well and said to the frog, “Come up to the outside world where it is bright and warm.” The frog laughed at the bird, thinking that the well was, in fact, the entire world. Ivy could see that she’d been the frog, thinking her suffering unique, specific to her Chinese family, her particular circumstances. But she was just another desperate girl who’d dreamed of beautiful things, dreams Nan must’ve also had at her age. Nan, who, like Ivy, had fought to escape. Not only to escape but to thrive, she’d fought with everything she had to get what she wanted.

“I admit—I was disapproving at first when I heard you weren’t marrying a Chinese man,” said Nan. “But you’ve always known your own mind. So don’t worry—your family won’t disappoint you. We won’t get in your way.” Nan’s voice cracked. Ivy realized that her mother assumed the Lins were the reason Gideon was calling off the wedding.

“Stop that!” Nan snatched the pen from where Ivy had been digging it into her palm. She took Ivy’s hand and ran the tips of her fingers down the web of grooves.

“Don’t ruin your hands. You’ve always had beautiful hands. Look at this. A long life line.” She traced the bottommost line. “A fractured love line. A precarious wealth line. That’s the luck you were born with.” She closed Ivy’s fingers into a fist. “You know how we picked out your name? In Chinese, Jiyuan means ‘to chance one’s luck.’ Now is no time to turn lazy. Pull yourself together. Now—what are you going to do about your wedding?”

* * *

IT WAS HALF past two in the morning when Ivy stepped foot in her old bedroom in Clarksville. Everything was the same as she’d left it when she’d gone off to college, vowing never to return. Her old clothes were folded neatly in the drawers, the boxy T-shirts with yellowing collars, shiny theater costumes from Drama Club, rubber flip-flops and canvas shoes flattened in a cardboard box. In the bottommost drawer of her desk was her old Baby-Sitters scrapbook where she’d glued cutouts of skinny white girls with braces, pretending they were her friends.

She ran a finger over the photo frame on the nightstand—she and Austin standing at the bus stop in their oversized winter parkas—and her finger brought up no dust. There was no dust, either, on the plastic clock or the little glass dog figurine on her desk. Meifeng had given her the figurine when she went to college. Nineteen eighty-two was the year of the water dog, Ivy’s Chinese zodiac sign combined with her elemental astrology. Water dogs were supposed to be brave, self-centered, selfish. “You’re brave, self-centered, and selfish,” Meifeng always told her.

Ever since Meifeng’s knee troubles caused by her days as an ayi, Nan had taken over the Lins’ housekeeping. Ivy pictured her mother wiping down the furniture, the clock, the glass dog, with the striped dish towel she always used, rinsing out the towel in the plastic basin Ivy had once used to destroy her diary. She felt anger. She blamed Nan. Only stupid people would work so diligently to clean a room no one occupied. Just what was it that her mother had tried so hard to slap into her growing up? Ivy suspected even Nan didn’t remember.