"I know Fuhua Road," Amara said. "I used to go to that market every Saturday. With Chen Popo. She taught me how to choose a fish." She looked down at the heron. "You look at the eyes. If they're clear and they bulge a little, it's fresh. If they're cloudy or sunken, you put it back and you give the fishmonger a look."
"What kind of look?"
Amara made the look. It was Chen Popo's, exactly: a slow, withering, sidelong appraisal, chin down, one eyebrow lifted, lips pressed together.
Lin laughed again, the short dry laugh.
"That's the look," he said. "That's exactly the look. My mother had it. Every woman in that market had it. I think they taught it to each other." He was quiet for a moment. "You told Dr. Fang something at lunch. Over the soup. When she asked how you came to Shenzhen. You said something about a schoolyard. When you were seven. And an old woman with a cane." He did not look at her. "You stopped in the middle. You changed the subject to the eyebrows."
Amara said nothing.
"You don't have to tell me," Lin said. "I'm a stranger. And I've already taken up a great deal of your afternoon."
Amara looked at the water. She had never told the whole story to anyone. Not to her professors, not to Teddy, not to Mei in the walk-in. Not even, in all the years since, to her mother, who had known some of it but not all, because Amara had decided at seven that her mother had enough to carry. She had told pieces. A line here and there. An old lady helped me. She ran a noodle shop. Never all of it.
She did not know why she decided to tell it now, to a billionaire she had met two and a half hours ago, standing by a stone fountain in a glass building in San Francisco. Perhaps because he had come from the same market. Perhaps because he had asked in Mandarin, and some things she had only ever thought about in Mandarin. Perhaps simply because he had noticed where she stopped.
She told him.
* * *
Her father had died when she was four. A car accident in London, on the way home from a night shift at the hospital where he was a porter. She had very few memories of him and most of them were of his hands.
Two years later, in 2005, her mother, Funmilayo Adeyemi, a civil engineer who had trained in Lagos and then in London and who specialized in deep foundations, the part of a building nobody ever sees, took a five-year contract with a British engineering firm that was building station foundations for the new Shenzhen Metro under Futian District. The pay was three times what she could earn in London. And Shenzhen, she had told Amara at the kitchen table in their flat in Peckham, was a city made entirely of people who had come from somewhere else. Ten million migrants. A city of strangers. Surely, she had said, in a city where nobody is from there, nobody will mind where we're from.
They lived on the twenty-third floor of a tower block on Hongli Road. Her mother worked fourteen-hour days underground, in a hard hat, in tunnels, and came home smelling of wet concrete. Amara spoke English and Yoruba, and no Chinese at all. The international school cost more each month than her mother earned, so she went to the local public primary school on Hongli Road, across from a noodle shop with a green awning.
She was the only Black child in the school. She was, as far as she ever knew, the only Black child in the whole of Futian District.
The first year was very hard.
The classes had fifty children in them. She could not understand anything anyone said. The other children stared at her all day, openly, the way children stare. They touched her hair. Some of them licked their fingers and rubbed her arms to see if the color came off, and looked at their fingers afterward, puzzled, and tried again. The teachers did not know where to seat her and moved her four times in the first month. Parents at the gate pulled their children closer when she walked past.
And one afternoon in October, when she was seven, a group of older boys from the fifth grade caught her in the corner of the schoolyard by the bicycle shed after the last bell. There were six of them. They made a ring around her. They started chanting a word at her, over and over, a word she did not yet know but understood perfectly from their faces. And they began to shove her, from one side of the ring to the other, back and forth, laughing.
Her mother had told her, on the plane, holding her hand: People may be unkind to you there, my love. If they are, don't cry in front of them. Cry later, at home, with me. Never in front of them.
So she did not cry. She stood in the middle of the ring, holding her backpack with the cartoon giraffe on it in both arms against her chest, being shoved back and forth, with her jaw clenched so hard it ached for two days afterward, and she did not cry.
* * *
Then the old woman came.
Amara heard her before she saw her. A voice from across the street, from the noodle shop with the green awning, a voice like a rusty hinge, high and furious, shouting in a language Amara did not yet know was Cantonese. And then the woman herself, coming through the school gate, small and bent and fast, in a gray cotton jacket and black cloth shoes, swinging a wooden cane.
She did not hit any of the boys. She did not need to. She swung the cane in a wide flat arc at knee height, shouting the whole time, and the ring broke apart like a flock of pigeons. The boys ran. One of them fell over and scrambled up and kept running. In about four seconds the corner of the schoolyard was empty, except for Amara, and the old woman, breathing hard, leaning on her cane.
The old woman looked at her for a moment. Then she held out her hand.