I like to say we left at first light with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car, my father fighting him off with firecrackers, even though Mao was already over a decade dead, & my mother says all my father did during the Cultural Revolution was teach math, which he was not qualified to teach, & swim & sunbathe around Piano Island, a place I never read about in my American textbooks, a place everybody in the family says they took me to, & that I loved. What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved? To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?
