1.
How did it happen that every person Zhang Fengqi knows in America is in the same place at the same time?
Clustered at one end of the wide, high-ceilinged hallway—known to the building’s residents as the “Gallery” for its large, abstract canvases—there they all stand: Fengqi’s father, newly arrived from China, who only a month ago struggled to fill the meaningless days of his Shanghai widowerhood; Fengqi’s two sons, with their hybrid features, hazel eyes, pale yellow skin and hair that is almost, but not quite, black; his dour, gray-suited mother-in-law, or, more precisely, the mother of his late wife, Maddie, who, Fengqi suspects, also hovers nearby, amused by the chaos she knows makes his knees tremble. And in the background: his pasty, mustachioed neighbors, the two men who live together in the next apartment and might be homosexuals, but, since Fengqi does not know how such men behave and thus has no basis for comparison, he can’t be certain; another neighbor, from the far end of the Gallery, a reclusive painter, the creator of one of the hallway abstracts, with spatters of paint on his jeans and bare feet; the skeletal, wild-haired sculptor from Apartment 3 who always works (or so it seems to Fengqi, who has observed the man work on a few occasions, and invariably it was the same) with a smoldering cigarette clutched between his yellowed teeth, ash raining on his unfathomable creations of twisted timber; the young, blank-eyed couple, constantly hand-holding, or arm-locked, entwined, as if each draws energy from the other’s touch; and the fat Armenian, the developer who resurrected this building, the Nanking Mansion, a 1920’s tenement on the racially-tense edge of D.C.’s Chinatown, converted into over-priced artists’ lofts in which Fengqi and his family had somehow (Fengqi no longer remembers how or why except that it was his wife’s idea for them to mingle with artsy people, as if their own lives of mathematics and public policy were too uncreative an environment in which to raise their sons) come to live amidst a flock of flamboyant painters and sculptors and writers. Even Fengqi’s boss is there, a Labor Department bureaucrat who has stopped by with work for Fengqi, an accordion file with “Frank” boldly scrawled on the side (Fengqi’s co-workers in the Bureau of Statistics call him “Frank,” uniformly unable or unwilling to bend their throats around the unfamiliar vowel and consonant combinations and vaguely uncertain, even after all the time he’s toiled among them, whether “Zhang” or “Fengqi” is his given name, knowing, or thinking they know, that Chinese names are the inverse of American names), containing a statistical comparison of unemployment in four urban markets, which the Secretary needs immediately, before Monday if possible, even though Fengqi has taken these few days of his annual leave to help his father get better settled after an initially rocky start to his life in America.
No, not quite everyone he knows. Jessica Lee—the Chinese woman from Olsson’s Books on 5th Street who, even before Maddie’s accident, had caught his eye, not in any illicit or unsavory way, but by virtue of her being Chinese, that’s all it had been at first—Jessica Lee isn’t there. She is, though, due any minute. Fengqi looks at his watch.

2.
When Fengqi’s wife died there weren’t many options for the household. He could juggle his job with the cooking and cleaning, barely. The three-level condo—his wife’s choice, the last unit she inspected after viewing dozens of candidates when they decided the time had arrived to become homeowners—was expansive, but spare and easy to maintain, with minimal furniture since it was so much larger than the two-bedroom flat they’d been renting in Cleveland Park. But someone had to take care of his sons. Simon had just started kindergarten, Wesley wasn’t yet old enough for the D.C. Chinatown Community Center’s pre-school, and both—especially since the accident, and the jolt of being told by a neighbor, while Fengqi was still at the hospital dealing with his own sudden grief, that their mother would not be coming home—needed considerable supervision and attention. Fengqi had tried everything: a babysitter, employed from the stratified bulletin board in the cafeteria at work, who demanded cab fare from Georgetown and back on top of her lofty hourly fee because she felt unsafe in the Zhangs’ not-quite-gentrified neighborhood and who, more problematically, resembled, to the boys’ horror, a child-eating fairytale witch; old Mrs. Wong from the retirement home at 4th and H, who had trouble remembering the boys’ names and chain-smoked Camel cigarettes, one afternoon falling asleep on the couch and waking, miraculously, in time to extinguish a smoldering cushion; an acquaintance’s teenage daughter, hired despite multiple tattoos and facial piercings, until she arrived at the condo one morning noticeably stoned. He even asked the beanpole sculptor to watch the boys—although Simon was afraid of the man because, the boy said, he looked like a snake standing up on his tail—until Fengqi walked into the artist’s studio one day to find tiny, three-year-old Wesley attacking a mound of clay with a knife in one hand and what looked to Fengqi like a screwdriver in the other.
In desperation, Fengqi called his mother-in-law.

3.
As a graduate student at Berkeley (where in the bowels of the library, in a dim corner in which they both regularly sought attention-focusing quiet, he’d first summoned the courage to speak to Maddie, a statuesque blond political science major with plans to work on Capitol Hill after graduation or, failing that, land a career-deferring place in law school) it never occurred to him that he would one day marry an American girl. His parents didn’t necessarily want him to come home to Shanghai to wed. After all, it was their dream that had pushed him to learn English and apply for the scholarship that brought him to the States. But they did expect him to meet a nice Chinese girl in California, to get a green card, to find his footing in America, while remaining at all times Chinese. That way he would have the best of both worlds and if China returned to chaos, if the Red Guard rose again, at least their family would still have a future. If not, then, with its palpable, throbbing energy and endless social and economic opportunities for a handsome, American-educated Chinese boy, Shanghai beckoned.
After the Tiananmen Square massacre, though, everything changed. Fengqi couldn’t go home, even if he wanted to. He’d signed petitions. He’d marched in Berkeley campus protests against the brutal repression in his country. He’d even made speeches denouncing the regime, climbing atop a makeshift platform of milk crates, shouting his democracy demands in Chinese and then self-translating, with as much embellishment as his English could accommodate, for the mostly American, mostly accidental and ambivalent audience. He no longer felt as connected to China, despite his beloved parents and his native tongue, and the next time he met Maddie in the library stacks he looked at her with new appreciation. They progressed from talking about school and the balmy weather to more intimate exchanges: his fear of assassination by the Chinese secret police because of his unwise but sincere political activities; her parents’ divorce when she was in high school, that had sent her into a year-long depression and one half-hearted wrist slashing; Fengqi’s belief that his mother, under pressure of China’s one-child policy and his family’s tenuous finances, had abandoned a second, unauthorized baby; Maddie’s recent loss of her father to a fast-moving cancer that had devoured his kidneys and spread into his brain.
When Fengqi wrote home about their engagement, in a rambling letter that was more difficult to compose than his thesis had been, it was weeks before he received a reply. Terse and marginally congratulatory, the note from his mother carried with it, as surely as if photographs had been enclosed in the envelope, images of what he knew had preceded its writing: his parents’ cold, two-room flat, filled with boisterous grief; pots banging in the kitchen, like bells of mourning; bitter tea sloshed disbelievingly into chipped cups; and, finally, grudging, muttered acquiescence.
He and Maddie had told her mother about the engagement together, face-to-face, over brunch during one of Mrs. Martin’s frequent visits from the East Coast, usually involving a swing through the wine country, and were met not just with silence—he could have understood silence, or shrieking, or arguments—but with denial. She ignored them. She resumed talking about the garden show she’d just attended, the aphids on her roses, the azaleas she wanted to plant, her neighbors’ gaudy hydrangeas, about the spicy Pinot Noir she’d discovered in Sonoma, as if she hadn’t just heard that her only daughter, her high-cheekboned, naturally blond, Phi Beta Kappa, headed-for-great-things daughter was marrying a Chinese immigrant. It was unthinkable, out of the question, impossible—and therefore she couldn’t possibly have heard it; they couldn’t have said it.  
Even after they moved East and the boys were born, Simon within a year of the wedding and Wesley two years later, Maddie’s mother never accepted Fengqi. Maddie and Fengqi loved living in D.C. and took advantage of all it had to offer, the museums, the parks; on Sundays, after services at the Episcopal church Maddie had joined and Fengqi visited out of curiosity, they enjoyed strapping the boys into strollers and circling the flag-waving monuments on the Mall along with the tourists. They frequently invited Maddie’s mother to visit and join them on these outings. She never did. And when Maddie lost control of her Honda on the Beltway—she’d been headed out to Rockville to visit her prep-school friend Kate, and Fengqi thanked the gods every day that the boys had at the last minute refused to go with their mother—Mrs. Martin blamed him that her only child, the light of her life, was gone and she was alone in the world. Never mind that his soul had been wrenched from him, that he felt the wind pass through his body as if he had been split open, that his innocent boys were motherless. She blamed him for everything. Not that she said so, because they never actually had a conversation, about that or anything else, but there’d been her chilling glower when she came down from New York for the funeral, a shake of the head, narrowed, sharp eyes, and not a word spoken.