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throat were chapped and burning. I began to have visions. A crowd of ghosts led by a goateed figure marched with torches through the room. I told this to the grownups and they seemed alarmed. Some of the other people staying at the house lit extra kerosene lanterns to soothe me, but I could still see the figures. The leader looked furious, driven, his whole body straining forward toward some unknown mission.
    My father moved with me to a bedroom upstairs and held me in a worn corduroy arm chair, talking softly, telling me stories of what we would do together when it was light. The vagueness I felt in him during the day had disappeared. He was dense, focused, his legs pressed long against the sides of the chair, his arms around me heavy and still. I sat in his lap, leaning into the rise and fall of his chest. In my last rinse of delirium, I closed my eyes and saw his body supporting me like a chair, the long, still bones, and under him the real chair, fabric stretched over wood, and all of this twenty feet above the ground on the upper floor of the house, held up by the beams and foundation, and beyond that the quiet fields, silver under the moon, alive with animals, the punctured cans lying still by the stump. I saw us perched in the center of this, neither safe nor doomed, and in this unbounded space I fell asleep.

Angela Lam
    Strange and Wonderful

    S ometimes in your life someone gives you permission to be exactly who you are. For me, that person was Nina.
    Let me explain: I grew up listening to the Eagles, Air Supply and ABBA and watching The Monkees and The Brady Bunch on TV. I gave my Barbies first and last names and family histories. I learned to count to one hundred before kindergarten and tie my shoes before anyone else in class. I was the only one I knew of with more than one sibling and more than one parent living at home. I had a mixed heritage, half Chinese, half German; I conversed in English and cursed in Cantonese at school and at home. I attended Mass every Sunday and learned to pray the rosary. On birthdays and special occasions, I traveled with my family to San Francisco where we sat in banquet halls with hundreds of five-foot Chinese relatives, aunts and uncles and cousins twice removed who spoke Cantonese, ate fifteen-course meals and toasted with sparkling cider to happiness and good luck.
    Outside of my family, my father said, there was no one you could trust. The world was a dangerous place, my father said. The only safe place was home. Now, nearly twenty years later, I know that sometimes it is dangerous to be safe. Sheltered—that’s how my friends and colleagues put it. My childhood, that is. Fiercely protected by a father I respected and feared as much as I loved, I grew up in the shadow of rules and regulations, of ‘Don’t do this’ and ‘Don’t do that.’ When other children were going to birthday sleepovers, I stayed home. It was dangerous at other people’s houses, my father reasoned. You never knew what was going on, what hurtful games children played, what danger parents either ignored or allowed.
    Afraid of my being molested, my father taught me about sex when I was old enough to understand the word ‘no.’ By the time I was seven, I knew I was conceived by a bodily function, not delivered by a stork. There were other disclosures, too. When other kids believed in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus, I knew neither existed. My father tried to rob me of an imagination. Instead, he created a girl who would conjure up worrisome events that never happened, who would dream of disaster before it occurred, who would lie awake at night with a tummy ache and a headache and her mind in a whirl. Nothing was safe, although much was sacred. The body, especially. And the mind.
    I remember wondering what a normal childhood was all about. I remember trying desperately to make friends. I remember being told to keep secrets, to protect my honor. Even with a lie—although I didn’t lie, not early on.