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.”