The Overstory

by Richard Powers

HISTORY GIVES SIH HSUIN a rash, the random ebb and flow. He’ll travel to the States in four days, one of a handful of Chinese students in all of 1948 to be granted visas. For weeks he has studied the maps, gone over the letters of acceptance, practiced all the inscrutable names: USS General Meigs. Greyhound Supercoach. Carnegie Institute of Technology. For a year and a half, he’s attended matinees of movies with Gable Clark and Astaire Fred, practicing his new tongue. He plows on in English, out of pride. “If you want, I stay here.” “Want you to stay? You have no idea what I’m saying.” His father’s stare is like a poem: Why do you linger at this fork in the road rubbing your eyes? You don’t get me, do you, boy? Shouying pushes up from the chair and crosses to the window. He looks down the Nanjing Road, a place as eager as ever to profit from that bedlam, the future. “You’re this family’s salvation. The Communists will be here in six months. Then all of us . . . Son, face facts. You’re not cut out for business. You should go to engineer’s school forever. But your sisters and brothers? Your cousins and aunts and uncles? Hui traders with lots of money. We won’t last three weeks, once the end comes.” “But the Americans. They promise.” Ma Shouying crosses back to the desk and takes his boy’s chin in his fingers. “My son. My naïve son with his pet crickets and homing pigeons and shortwave radio. The Gold Mountain is going to eat you alive.”

He and a friend map the school, the supermarket, the branch bank. They plan what kind of hardware they’d need to make a heist. The plans get elaborate. They price weapons, just for grins. It’s a game for Adam: logistics, planning, resource management. For his friend, it’s one step away from religion. Adam watches the precarious boy, fascinated. A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel—root and stem—in great U-turns until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

Her father is her water, air, earth, and sun. He teaches her how to see a tree, the living sheath of cells underneath every square inch of bark doing things no man has yet figured out. He drives them to a copse of spared hardwoods in the bottoms of a slow stream. “Here! Look at this. Look at this!” A patch of narrow stalks, each with big, drooping leaves. A sheepdog of trees. He makes her sniff the giant spoonlike foliage, crushed. It smells acrid, like blacktop. He picks up a thick yellow pickle from the ground and holds it to her. She has rarely seen him so excited. He takes his army knife and cuts the fruit in half, exposing the buttery pulp and shiny black seeds. The flesh makes her want to scream with pleasure. But her mouth is full of butterscotch pudding. “Pawpaw! The only tropical fruit ever to escape the tropics. Biggest, best, weirdest, wildest native fruit this continent ever made. Growing native, right here in Ohio. And nobody knows!” They know. The girl and her father. She’ll never tell anyone the location of this patch. It will be theirs alone, fall after prairie-banana fall.

Fond lovers, cruel as their flame, cut in these trees their mistress’ name. Little, alas, they know or heed how far these beauties hers exceed!” He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book,