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it. Take care of your daughter.
And then he hobbled away slowly. Ma woke up. She knew she was having a girl. And she was in labor.
    A friend once asked me why an old Chinese lady at the park gave her the evil eye while she was walking by her with her newborn. Chinese custom dictates that a child must pass his or her “full moon” before leaving the home, otherwise it’s very bad luck, for both the baby and the mother. After a month of seclusion, there’s a great celebration to mark the baby’s introduction to society. I cried and cried at my first-moon party. Ma said people were whispering that it was abad omen and the gossipy aunties and neighborhood rumormongers suspected that she’d given birth to a curse. The next morning when Ma picked me up out of my crib, she noticed a small red dot on the corner of my right eyelid. Initially she thought it must have been because I was crying so hard the night before. But the red dot continued to grow, week after week. By the time I turned one, it had become a large red mass, with a faint line through the middle. It was the color of a ripe peach and, Ma says, in the shape of one too, although in photographs it looks more like a yin-yang symbol to me.

     
    Specialists from around the world flew in to look at my eye-peach. Every week my parents took me to appointments. The doctors said it was a medical anomaly and, in the end,they told my parents that if they operated, there was a strong possibility there could be nerve damage and I could lose my eyesight. So my parents decided to leave it. It just added to Ma’s resolve. She had the courage and the character to raise a daughter with a freak spot on her face.
    When I was four, my eye-peach started to get smaller. Back we went to the doctors, and again, week after week, they’d measure the gradually shrinking peach and shake their heads, flummoxed by its sudden retreat. This is when Ma remembered Wise Man Shou and her dream. Wise Man Shou was taking back his peach. It/He had protected me through the worst, and now I was ready to go on without his stewardship. By the time I turned six, the eye-peach was barely noticeable, a very faint pink shadow but only if you looked closely.
    And yet, it lives on. Ma believes the eye-peach not only guarded me from spirits, but it also must have blocked illness and disease. I was rarely sick as a child, if at all, because Wise Man Shou’s gift inoculated me against what could have been a deadly infection, or maybe even a devastating accident. Wise Man Shou’s gift, however, was only given as a direct result of Ma’s protective love.
    So it turns out that I’m Harry Potter. Except not. There’s no seven-book series dedicated to my legend because from the very beginning of the story of my life, I have alwaysbeen a supporting character. The Squawking Chicken is the leading lady.
    Most children’s stories mythologize the child—the children are golden, special, chosen. And most parents mythologize their children, making their children the stars of the show, the focus of the attention as they lurk just offstage, eagerly accepting any leftover warmth from the lights that are positioned to shine primarily on the protagonists, their sons and daughters, settling for the small credit that comes occasionally for creating these extraordinary creatures.
    For the Chinese Squawking Chicken,
she
was the extraordinary creature. She mythologized herself. The legend of my eye-peach had nothing to do with me and everything to do with her—her remarkable courage in the face of the ghosts, her profound love. She did for me what her parents didn’t do for her: she was my mother and my hero; she gave me life by saving me from the ghosts. And she taught me to spend the rest of my life paying her back.

     
    These sound like tall tales, I know. Entertaining but improbable, the kind of stories a child outgrows when her world becomes bigger. And yet, I haven’t outgrown the Squawking Chicken’s stories. I hear