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picked up what had been dropped, cleaned what had been dirtied, wiped up whatever had spilled. They never saw nakedness or indisposition. Nameless, ageless. Cook Boy, Rickshaw Boy. Boy Number Six. Number Seven. Eight. Old men with gray hair, eyes blue with cataracts: Boy .
    Litovsky asked Alice what it was like, China, and she rehearsed a few of these emblematic encounters with the East, but when she opened her mouth what she said was “Did you know that the Chinese are expert torturers? One of the things they do is slice open missionaries’ wives from here to here.” She pointed to her breastbone, then her lap. “They grab one end of a woman’s intestines and thread it on a spool, turn a crank and wind up her insides like a garden hose. If she’s brave and doesn’t faint, she gets to watch it happen. I once saw a girl cut in half, but she wasn’t a missionary.”
    “Who has allowed you to know of such shocking things!” the captain spluttered.
    “Why, my aunt,” Alice said. “Her father—he cranked the spool. And the cut-up girl was in the Old City. We went to see her ourselves.”
    “I T’S A PLAN with that one,” Miss Waters had reported darkly, after she caught Alice and May coming home. “A campaign.”
    “What sort of plan?” Dolly asked.
    The governess narrowed her eyes, she looked past Alice’s mother as if seeing into the future. “ Indoctrination. ”
    “Into what?”
    “The woman undermines me! Tries to teach her just what life isn’t!”
    And Miss Waters hadn’t even known about the trip to the Old City. Her objection was to the book of Russian folktales May had bought Alice at Kelley and Walsh. Stories about Baba Yaga in her hut that walked about on the legs of a chicken, tall and yellow and scaly, with knees that bent backwards. In one night, the hut could travel great distances. Baba Yaga had sharp teeth and ate children. Jewish children especially. After reading about Baba Yaga, Alice looked warily at the chickens they kept at home in Shanghai. White Orpingtons, shipped across the Pacific on the SS Tacoma . Their eyes were gold and cruel, the color of poison. Their beaks looked dipped in blood.
    It was a sparkling day; as they left the bookstore the sky seemed unusually clear and high, and Alice imagined she could see all the way to the Yangtze. “Please please,” she begged. “Let’s go to the Old City.” She expected a refusal—she knew how her aunt hated the Chinese Quarter—but May indulged Alice. The fine weather, perhaps, or her awareness of their imminent separation. She asked the rickshaw man to take them to the North Gate.
    Once inside the wall that divided old from new, Chinese from European, the wide street splintered into alleys overhung with signboards and banners, dark, squalid passages that Alice found mysterious, even romantic. Every so often a finger of light revealed freshly bleached binding cloths trailing from a washpole and stirring in the faint breeze.
    May poured perfume on a handkerchief and held it to her face as the rickshaw man pulled them through the markets, but Alice drew the air deep into her nose, trying to sort out smells. The rickshaw threaded through alley after alley clotted with pedestrians until it came to a standstill by the Yu Yuan Garden wall. “No farther,” the rickshaw man said to May, who translated. Alice stood up to see what was blocking their passage. Ahead, in the courtyard of the Temple of the City God, a throng had gathered around a platform in the center of which was something that looked like a flagpole.
    “Is it a holiday?” Alice asked May, who rose to her feet, slowly. The rickshaw man sat, his narrow buttocks balanced on one of the shafts between which he spent his days running, his feet on the other. Few things could induce him to waste an opportunity for rest.
    “No.” May’s voice was strangely flat, uninflected. She spread her arms wide. “Not a holiday. Just an ordinary one. You said you wanted to see the Old