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Suddenly she was laughing so hard she was bent over with her arms wrapped around herself. Then she hugged me and I could feel her body shaking. She was still laughing hours later when my father came home and she was cooking the rice for dinner, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve.
    Now I was confused.
    Some magical stories I was supposed to believe in with all my heart and could never doubt. Others I believed in at a cost to my dignity. I had really wanted to believe in the lady in black.
    The world inside the kindergarten was clear. The teachers had simple answers for everything good and everything bad. Outside the kindergarten, the world was more confusing. Uncle Opium could probably have explained it to me, if I’d ever been able to have a normal conversation with him.
    At his house once I saw a solid gold bar on the table, and next to it a gluey lump that looked like tar. I asked him what it was and he told me it was opium.
    ‘Stick the end of your pencil in and take a bit,’ he said.
    ‘What do I do with it?’
    He gave a breathy, hissing laugh. ‘Eat it, of course.’
    I had a cold at the time and wasn’t feeling too good. The symptoms disappeared within minutes.
    Anju may have been grimy and bleak but the hills surrounding it were beautiful. I enjoyed three idyllic childhood summers there, picnicking in fields of wild flowers. In certain months of the year the air would be buzzing with dragonflies. They hovered and flashed in iridescent blues and greens. We would chase them, running through the long grass. All the kids did this. At the weekend, my father would join in. Some kids bit off the heads and ate them, saying they tasted nutty.
    On one outing we laid out our picnic mat in a copse of tall pine trees. My mother started hitting the trees with a long branch and suddenly it was raining pine cones. I ran around gathering them in a sack. We had never laughed so much together.
    That scene is vivid in my mind as a moment of pure happiness just before a painful personal tragedy for me. We arrived home to find that my little dog had been killed. One of the trucks at the military base had run her over. I cried so much. My father told me there would not be another pet dog. They were too hard to obtain.
    But it wasn’t that event that overshadowed my memories of Anju. There was far worse to come.

Chapter 5
The man beneath the bridge
    On a hot afternoon when I was seven years old, my mother sent me on some errand into town. It was unpleasantly humid. A fetid smell came off the river. There were flies everywhere. I was heading home along the riverbank when I saw the crowd ahead of me. A dense mass of people had gathered on the road beneath the railroad bridge. I had an odd intuition that this was something bad, but I could not resist going to look. I slipped my way into the crowd to see what was going on. The people near the front were looking upward. I followed their gaze, and saw a man hanging by his neck.
    His face was covered with a dirty cloth sack and his hands were tied behind his back. He was wearing the indigo uniform of a factory worker. He wasn’t moving but his body swayed slightly on a rope tied from the iron railing of the bridge. Several soldiers were standing about, stony-faced, with rifles on their backs. The people watching were still and quiet, as if this were some sort of ceremony. The rope creaked. I caught a reek of male sweat. The scene confused me because people were watching but no one was moving and no one was helping the man.
    The most random detail stuck in my mind. I remember how the man standing next to me lit a cigarette and held it down by his side so that the smoke gathered foggily in his fingers. There was no breeze. Suddenly it seemed like there was no air to breathe.
    I had to get out of there. I almost fought my way out.
    When I told my mother what I’d seen she went as pale as a fish. She turned her back to me and pretended to busy herself with something. Then she muttered: