The Night Tiger

We were a chocolate-box family, I thought. Brightly wrapped on the outside and oozing sticky darkness within.

One of the appalling yet convenient things about being family is that you can trade accusations at night, then pretend next morning that nothing has happened.

In Cantonese, two was a good number because it made a pair. Three was also good because it was a homophone for sang, or life. Four, of course, was bad because it sounded like death. Five was good again because it made a complete set, not just of the Confucian Virtues, but also for the elements of wood, fire, water, metal, and earth.

No, the dream-eater is a ghost animal. If you have nightmares, you can call it three times to eat the bad dreams. But you have to be careful. If you call it too often it will also gobble up your hopes and ambitions.

Most of all, though, I wanted my mother to forgive me, and bless me, and tell me everything would be all right, just as she had when I was little, and there were only the two of us in the whole wide world. But perhaps that was part of not being a child anymore.

Chinese say that good things come in pairs, such as the character for double happiness, cut out of red paper and pasted on doors for weddings, and the two stone lions that guard temples.

The Ji in my name wasn’t commonly used for girls. It was the character for zhi, or knowledge, one of the five Confucian Virtues. The others were benevolence, righteousness, order, and integrity

In the airy bungalow, where the sunlit leaves outside dapple the whitewashed rooms a pale and luminous green,

That's where the were tigers live, the harriman radian who change their shapes. Some people say that they're beasts possessed by the souls of dead people.

A keramat animal is a sacred beast, a creature with the ability to come and go like a phantom, trampling sugarcane or raiding livestock with impunity. It’s always distinguished by some peculiarity, such as a missing tusk or a rare albino color. But the most common indicator is a withered or maimed foot.

Going to the wet market had always been one of my favorite errands. You could buy almost anything there: piles of red and green chilies, live chicks and quail, green lotus seed pods that resembled shower sprinklers. There were fresh sides of pork, salted duck eggs, and baskets of glossy river fish. You could eat breakfast, too, at little stalls serving steaming bowls of noodles and crispy fritters.

There’s no way to explain it, just a tingling twitch of cat whiskers. When Yi was alive, he often felt this sixth sense. People said it was magic, but Ren knows it’s because they were a matched pair. Chinese say that good things come in pairs, such as the character for double happiness, cut out of red paper and pasted on doors for weddings, and the two stone lions that guard temples. As children, Ren and Yi were perfect doubles of one another. Seeing them, people would break into smiles of delight. Twins, and boys—how fortunate! But all this came to an end when Yi died. If a chopstick breaks, the other is discarded. After all, half of a broken pair is one: the unlucky number of loneliness.

The earth on the grave was red clay from the tin ore that had made this region’s name.

I've been hateful and envious about you going to medical school. And for being a boy. And getting to choose what you want

Whenever I felt bad, I thought about numbers.

A dream-eater is a ghost animal. If you have nightmares, you can call it three times to eat the bad dreams. But you have to be careful. If you call it too often it will also gobble up your hopes and ambitions.

Chinese are particularly fond of matched sets and the Five Virtues were the sum of qualities that made up a perfect man. So it was a bit odd that a girl like me should be named for knowledge. If I'd been named something feminine and delicate like "Precious Jade" or "Fragrant Lily" things might have turned out differently.

The long side buffet in the dining room is laden with tureens of rendang and fragrant, steaming rice. Sour green mangoes are shredded in a kerabu: a salad tossed with mint, shallots, and dried shrimp drizzled with lime and spicy sambal sauce.

believed they covered up a multitude of sins, including the unladylike ability to calculate interest rates on the fly.

food, he’s just as stingy about his own rations. At the old doctor’s house, they ate thick slices of Hainanese white bread, toasted over charcoal and spread with butter and kaya, a caramelized custard made from eggs, sugar, and coconut milk.

White flowers, the color of Chinese funerals and death.

As if fate changes to suit you?