Read Online Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende - Free Book Online

father, but called him Lucky because he had the best luck of anyone who had ever lived in Chinatown. Their younger child, a girl, born six years after their son, they named Lin in honor of her father's first wife, buried many years before in Hong Kong, but when they filled out her birth certificate they used the English spelling: Lynn. Tao Chi'en's first wife, who bequeathed her name to the girl, had been a fragile creature with tiny bound feet, adored by her husband but crushed by consumption. Eliza Sommers learned to live with the ever-present memory of Lin, and came to think of her as just another member of the family, a kind of invisible protectress who looked out for the well-being of her home. Twenty years earlier, when Eliza had found she was pregnant again, she had asked Lin to help her carry the baby to term; she had already had several miscarriages, and she did not have much hope that her depleted body could sustain the pregnancy. That was how she explained it to Tao Chi'en, who each time before had placed all his resources as a zhong-yi at his wife's disposal, in addition to taking her to the best Western medicine specialists in California.
    "This time we will have a healthy baby," Eliza assured him.
    "How do you know," he asked.
    "Because I asked Lin."
    Eliza always believed that Tao's first wife had been by her side during the pregnancy and given her the strength to give birth to her daughter; then—like a good fairy—she had leaned over the cradle to offer the baby the gift of beauty. "She will be called Lin," the exhausted mother had announced when at last she held her daughter in her arms, but Tao Chi'en was frightened. It was not a good idea, he said, to give the child the name of a woman who had died so young. Finally they changed the spelling to keep from tempting fate. "It's pronounced the same," Eliza concluded. "That's all that counts."
    On her mother's side, Lynn Sommers had English and Chilean blood, and from her father the genes of the tall Chinese of the north. Tao Chi'en's grandfather, a humble healer, had handed down to his male descendents his knowledge of medicinal plants and magic incantations for curing various ills of the body and mind. Tao Chi'en, the last of that line, had enriched the paternal legacy by training to be a zhong-yi with a wise man from Canton, and also through a lifetime of study, not only of traditional Chinese medicine but of everything that fell into his hands concerning Western medical science. He had built a solid reputation in San Francisco, and though he was consulted by American doctors and had patients of several races, he was not allowed to work in their hospitals; his practice was limited to the Chinese quarter, where he had bought a house large enough to install his clinic on the first floor and his residence on the second. His reputation protected him; no one interfered in his activities with the Singsong Girls, as those pathetic sex slaves, all children really, were known in Chinatown. Tao Chi'en had taken on his shoulders the mission of rescuing as many of them as he could from the brothels. The tongs that controlled and sold protection in the Chinese community knew that he was buying the tiny prostitutes to give them a second chance far away from California. He had been threatened a couple of times, but nothing drastic had happened to him because sooner or later some member of a tong might need the services of the famed zhong-yi. As long as Tao Chi'en didn't go to the American authorities, acted discreetly, and rescued the girls one by one with antlike patience, he was tolerated because his actions did not make a dent in the enormous profits of the enterprise. The one person who looked on Tao Chi'en as a public menace was Ah Toy, the most successful madam in San Francisco and the owner of several houses that specialized in adolescent Asian girls. She alone imported hundreds of young victims every year, right past the American customs officers, who, duly