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him with a tael of silver for having stayed up past midnight to whet my ink.
    All the little eunuchs in the palace had to work so very hard, and for what? A sunless living ahead of them all. He would have been better off, much better off, staying a lantern painter in the faraway village. But who am I to chastise him for what he had not chosen himself? It might have very well been his parents’ choice to make him a sacrificial lambto serve the palace so that the rest of the family would live forever in heavenly and material blessings.
    In-In, as I observed, wasn’t really the country bumpkin that he pretended to be. This wasn’t the first time he had let out his secret. Upon rereading my unfinished memoir, I had encountered numerous corrections stealthily brushed in by the boy, making up a dot here, extending a stroke there. Though I marveled over his refined penmanship, I often wondered why he was hiding his literacy, and what else was he hiding from me. No matter, and no hurry, which seemed to be the pace of the palace. No one is without secrets here.
    In-In’s drawing had to have been inspired by a much loved fairytale that I had read during my double-visioned senior year at Yale.
Butterfly Lovers
could have been plagiarized from the Bard’s
Romeo and Juliet
, except for two countering facts: it had been penned long before our bearded Brit had been fathered, and it had a happy ending—the mark of the prodigious Chinese art of melofantasy. Two doomed lovers, who had died separately yet were buried side by side, soar away from the dusty earth as butterflies. Now and again on starry nights, a common eye could spot the lovers blinking in the margins of the Milky Way.
    I dwell on our beloved flyers because this very chapter under my dripping brush could well be named “My Butterflies.” Life, if one sees closely, does take on certain themes.
    For two years following Susan’s death, I ensconced myself in my ill-gotten abode, barricading myself in Mother’s bedroom where I was purported to have been born. I felt a certain umbilical link to that space, which promised the possibility
of a new beginning. Mother was nowhere to be found, though her things, her scents, her motherly something, hung perennially in the air, mixed with the fragrance of gardenias seeping in from the garden down below.
    The barricading was necessitated by my illusion that the entire house, three stories plus a little attic, were flown with little butterflies. Not your normal type but dark and white ones, choking themselves into every nook, vying for anything as a foothold to rest their busy wings. Everywhere I went they surrounded me, landing all over me. Annabelle told me that they were the nimble players of the aforementioned cosmic chess game, the undying spirits of rotten corpses and scattered bones. Without this nesting place, they would forever flutter in windblown graveyards and weedy cemeteries. Worse, at night they were hunted by ghost catchers to clock their time for a journey of finality—good men to heaven, bad fellows to hell.
    In the security of my domain, in the gloomy twilight, we made my birthing room our eternal bridal suite, me and my Annabelle, as I planned our very next step with thumping heart. I penned many a letter to one Mr. Plimpton, the head of the CSVM—a goateed square fellow, a pioneer of foreign missions who had spent his formative years in the Amazon jungles encoding the Indian dialect—begging for him to give me a position in the vicinity of Peking, boldly capitalizing my offer to cover my own expenses for my tenure. My desperate tone must have gravely moved the man, so much so that he was willing to create a new mission for me in the city of Pao Ki, three miles east of Peking, on the condition that I enroll at the New York Theological Seminary as an interim studentto fluff up my sermonic pedigree and that, as an additional condition, I should consider remarrying. A spousal presence was not only pastoral but also a