Nobody used to mow the lawn until there was a sign. The toaster catching on fire. Or the cat getting stuck under the garage door. My grandmother made our family important in the community by virtue of her age. People bearing dried fruit and cookie tins came all the time as a sign of respect. When I was born, my grandmother said, "Another girl! I didn't come to America to take care of another girl!" But she did, knitting striped sweaters and sewing plaid polyester pants, so we couldn't match even if we tried. She put sugar on our rice so we would finish it. Then her eyes started to go, and I would be called on to thread needles, the tips of string already wet from her tongue. You're old enough now, my parents said, to take care of other people. And suddenly, she was other people. So my sister and I came home early and washed her feet and helped her up the stairs with her clunky walker and made her diabetic lunches.

In our neighborhood, there were Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Koreans, and Chinese. Koreans were sometimes Christians, but the Chinese were always nothing. The Korean kids had good names: Jennifer, Monica, Dan, or Joseph. The Chinese kids had hokey ones, like lunch ladies' or cartoon characters': Evangeline, Sylvia, Elmer, or Hubert. We suspected our parents had no idea what they were doing. The day I found my grandmother dead on the laundry room floor with her tongue stuck out, I thought it was a trick. There were other tricks, too, sometimes at the kitchen table in the middle of a sentence. Then my father would do the screaming in the middle of the night. We would all wake up and pretend we'd heard nothing. After a while, my mother could sleep through it. By the next day, neither of them would ever know anything. I was twelve or thirteen for a long time, so my grandmother would be able to recognize me. At home, my sister and I forgot to speak Chinese, and my father decided to cut the lawn on second Sundays. Then we heard that some of the kids in the community were changing their names. They'd go to court and we'd find out at dinner parties that they were different people.

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