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trip of the spotted cow, filled with trials and tribulations.
    When I was nine years old and newly arrived in the United States, I had to wear that hated eye patch and the American kids had laughed at me; for that and for my accent and my crooked front tooth. I could speak only a few words of English then. Even after I learned the language, I kept the accent that, for many years, they thought was Chinese— chink, go home to China, you can’t even talk right, stupid Buddhahead —but was actually Dutch. And I had watched as those syrup lickers fawned over the girl with French parents because her accent was so European. Only Amy would dance with joy when she saw me each day. Amy, who slipped her tender hand in mine, wrapping it around my icy heart.
    Where I was cold and false—a beast of artifice like the bejeweled mechanical nightingale the Chinese emperor bought to replace the one of flesh and blood—Amy was genuine, a sweet little piece of licorice, always true to herself. She had a habit of pushing up her glasses with her middle finger, as if she were giving everyone the bird, and I found it incredibly endearing that she had no idea she was doing it. She was a giver while I was a consumer, burning up everything and everyone I touched. Naturally, I had been jealous of Amy ever since she was born. Amy, the wanted child, and the only reason my parents brought me back to the United States, so I could babysit her. Ma cared nothing for what I did. I could go to bed past midnight and she would not even mark it. I often left the apartment without eating breakfast because I wanted, just once, to hear Ma’s soft voice say, “Sylvie, come back,” but she never did. Meanwhile, Amy had to button her coat. Amy could not leave without a warm little bite in her stomach. Amy had help in everything.
    When I had nightmares, Amy would bounce me awake in that little bedroom we shared and say, “You’re speaking monster language in your sleep again.” No matter how many years I lived in America, I always dreamed in Dutch. Dutch was something that belonged to me, or so it seemed when I left the only country I had ever known. It was a complex language, filled with challenging sounds and a wrapped-up word order. Despite its intricacy, it was the language of my soul. Nowadays, we all lived in a time boundary when emotion defeated logic, an era when gut feeling reigned over rationality. There was no patience for the difficult, the indecipherable, yet what else was the human heart but that?
    While at Princeton, I joined the Dutch language table for our weekly meal to converse among others who spoke it. Their surprise, when they first saw me, turned to shock when I started to speak Dutch, at first with some hesitation, then ever more fluently. They delighted in teaching me everything I had missed, from sexual organs to curses that often embarrassed them but not me: cancer, typhoid sufferer, raisin snob, poop catcher, lamb balls . I had to hold myself in so I did not laugh out loud. From this, I learned that curses were impotent unless powered by shame and the appeal of the forbidden.
    And naturally, Lukas wrote to me in Dutch, but our correspondence tapered off as we grew older and were drawn further into our separate lives. When we were little, we would go to the library in our village and Lukas would pore over the art and photography books, inhaling the scent of each page as if he wanted to absorb every image into himself. Off and on through the years, I would receive a letter from him in his beautiful slanted handwriting about yet another new girlfriend (“you would like her, Sylvie, she is as brilliant as you”), his study by the famous Rietveld Academie (“the world has cracked open its lens for me”)—and then, as he was struggling to establish himself as a photojournalist, a view-card only once in a while from places like Bolivia (“freezing my butt off in the Andes Mountains”), Turkey (“stray kitten here has been waiting for