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to time, she’d take the poems out to read, or recopy them with brush and ink, imitating Father’s calligraphy. Although I was deeply moved by these romantic acts, they also made me sad.
    For Father had never written those poems. He had plagiarized them from ancient poets.
    I could never pin down Father’s real feelings for Mother. One time when I’d asked him how he had courted her, he looked surprised. “I didn’t court your mother,” he said, lowering his voice, “it’s she who chased after me.” Then he told me a different version of the gold-store story. There, when they had run into each other, he had not recognized her at all. “How could I?” He frowned and looked surprised. “She was nine years old when we were in Hualian, but when we met again in Taipei she’d grown into a young woman.” “Besides,” Father added, “how could I remember her puppy love when she was nine and me nineteen?” But then when I asked him why he had dumped his fiancée for Mother, he suddenly changed the subject to talk about the weather. Had he actually been after Grandmother’s gold?
    One evening, a few weeks after Father’s death, Mother decided to bind into a book all the poems he had written her. I helped her work on the project at our dining table.
    Although the room was hot, Mother told me not to turn on the fan, for fear the wind would blow off the papers.
    I gathered poems from her different diaries; Mother pasted the dried flowers onto a hard board to be used as the cover of the collection. As we were cutting, pasting, and binding, now and then Mother would hum “One Day When We Were Young,” then recite the poems Father had written her as if he were still hovering somewhere in the house, meanwhile quietly wiping away a tear or two.
    I peeked at her. “Ma, do you understand Baba’s poems?”
    Mother frowned. “Meng Ning, you don’t understand a poem; you feel it.”
    “Then how do you feel?”
    Mother frowned deeper. “If I can tell you how I feel, then your father’s poems aren’t very good. With good poems you never quite know how you feel. Sometimes sad, sometimes happy, sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, sometimes bitter, sometimes generous. Sometimes you feel and sometimes you don’t.” She paused, her eyes losing their focus. “When your heart is like a knocked-over shelf of condiments spilling a hundred different flavors and feelings, then the poem is a very good poem. Your father’s poems can do just that.”
    Suddenly Mother stood up, went to the window, opened it, and pointed outside. “Meng Ning, look at the moon, so bright and beautiful tonight. I wonder what your father is doing over there right now.” Then she sighed. “ Hai! He knew this moment would come when he wrote, ‘A thousand miles apart, the same moon shines over us all.’”
    She meditated awhile on the moon, then came back to sit down by me. “Your father was such a great poet, and he was psychic. He knew that the moon would bring him and me together.”
    I swallowed hard. Didn’t she know this was not Father’s poem, but Su Dongpo’s?
    Mother took a picture on top of the pile of papers and handed it to me, her eyes misted. “Your father when we met again after our eight years’ separation.”
    The brownish, hand-tinted photograph showed a very young and handsome Father. His hair was pomaded and slicked back in the fashion of the forties, while his eyes, large, sparkling, and dreamy, seemed to radiate pleasure and passion. He looked eager to show off, with his generous smile, his sensuous lips, and gleaming white teeth. Mother had told me, repeatedly, he was so handsome that many people had mistaken him for a movie star. A Hollywood, American movie star. “Kar Gay Bo,” she said proudly. Clark Gable. Looking at Father’s picture, I could understand why, despite his dishonesty, Mother could never gather enough strength to resist him.
    Although my parents had lived together for more than twenty years, Mother had