Her name was Chen Xiulan. She was seventy-one years old. She had been widowed young and had raised four sons alone, and all four had grown up and moved away, to Guangzhou and Shanghai and Beijing and, in one case, which she never forgave, Canada. She lived alone in two rooms behind the noodle shop, with a television, a cat named Fatty, and a mahjong set she was widely believed to cheat at. She had run the shop for twenty-three years. It had six tables and a green canvas awning and a hand-painted sign with her family name on it, and every person on Hongli Road was a little afraid of her.
She took Amara across the street and sat her down at a table and gave her a bowl of beef noodles.
Amara came back the next day. And the day after. When her mother came looking for her after school that first week, frantic, in her work boots and hard hat, Chen Popo sat her down too, and gave her a bowl of beef noodles, and that was that.
For eleven years, Amara spent every afternoon at the noodle shop.
Chen Popo taught her Mandarin by making her read the menu out loud to customers, every character, until she could do it without stumbling, and then by making her take their orders. She taught her to write characters with a brush on old newspaper at the back table, in the slow hour after lunch. When Amara was nine she started teaching her Cantonese, which was Chen Popo's own first language, from a village in the Pearl River Delta. Mandarin is for talking to officials, she said. Cantonese is for doing business. She taught her mahjong, including how to cheat and, more importantly, how to tell when someone else was cheating. She taught her to choose fish by their eyes.
And whenever a customer said something about Amara, about her skin or her hair or what she was doing there, which in the early years happened every day and sometimes several times a day, Chen Popo would put down whatever she was holding and turn around and say, very loudly, so the whole shop could hear: You can't judge a person by their face. You can't measure the sea with a bucket.
She said it so often that after a year or so the regulars started saying it with her. Somebody would make a remark, and before Chen Popo could even turn around, half the shop would chant it in chorus, You can't judge a person by their face, and then everyone would laugh, including, usually, the person who had made the remark.
Amara did not really understand what the words meant until she was about ten. By then she had heard them perhaps two thousand times.
* * *
Lin had not moved. He stood by the fountain with his hands behind his back, looking at the water.
"Is she still alive?" he asked.
"She's ninety-two," said Amara. "She's in Guangzhou. Her youngest son moved her there in 2019, when her legs got too bad for the stairs. She closed the shop. She hates Guangzhou. She calls me on WeChat once a month to tell me I'm too thin and that I should come home."
"Have you been back?"
"Not in seven years." Amara looked at the heron. "We came to America when I was seventeen. My mother got sick. Pancreatic cancer. The best treatment was here, at UCSF, so we came. She lived five more years. Longer than they said." She paused. "The insurance didn't cover all of it. I'm still paying off the last of the hospital. That's why I work here. I'm almost done."
Lin did not say anything for a long time. The water ran from the bronze spout into the bowl and over the edge. The busser's rake scraped softly on the far side of the clearing.
"In 1986," Lin said finally, "I was a graduate student at Stanford. The first person from my village who had ever studied abroad. I had one suit. My mother bought it for me at the market, from a man who sold suits next to the eel tank. It was much too big. I had learned English from books, and my accent was very heavy." He was still looking at the water. "In my first week I went to find the laboratory I had been assigned to. I had a letter of introduction from my professor, in an envelope. I knocked on the door. A graduate student opened it. Tall, American, blond hair. He looked at me in my big suit, and he did not look at the envelope in my hand. He said, The cafeteria's in the other building. He thought I was delivering food. He pointed down the hall. And he closed the door."
Amara said nothing.
"My professor found me twenty minutes later sitting on the stairs," Lin said. "He was very embarrassed. He took me back and made the young man apologize. In the hallway. The young man said he was sorry, and shook my hand, and we never spoke of it again." He paused. "He is now the chief technology officer of one of the largest semiconductor companies in America. I've met him perhaps six times since then. At conferences. In Davos once. He is always very warm. Chairman Lin! Wonderful to see you. He doesn't remember. He has no idea."
"Have you ever told him?"
"No." Lin shook his head slowly. "What would it change? For him, nothing. A moment of embarrassment. For me, I would have to carry it into the room every time I saw him, instead of leaving it on those stairs. I prefer to leave it on the stairs." He turned from the fountain at last and looked at her. "But I know what it is, to carry a moment like that. I can see it in people. I saw it in you this afternoon, when that man said not you. And then I watched what you did with it." He was quiet for a moment. "In 1986 I sat down on the stairs. Today, standing in that doorway, I watched you do what I wish I had done."
Amara found she could not speak. She looked at the water and waited for her throat to open.