The Joy Luck Club: The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates

“It is in a book, The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates, all the bad things that can happen to you outside the protection of this house."

She sat proudly on the bench, telling my admirers with proper Chinese humility, “Is luck.”

I was still some 429 points away from grand-master status, but I was touted as the Great American Hope, a child prodigy and a girl to boot.

Her black men advanced across the plane, slowly marching to each successive level as a single unit.

The apartment building was three stories high, two apartments per floor. It had a renovated façade, a recent layer of white stucco topped with connected rows of metal fire-escape ladders.

Maybe she had listened through the wall and heard nothing, the stagnant silence of our unhappy house.

Seventeen years ago she was chagrined when I started dating Ted. My older sisters had dated only Chinese boys from church before getting married.

When Ted drove me home that day, I told him I couldn’t see him anymore. When he asked me why, I shrugged. When he pressed me, I told him what his mother had said, verbatim, without comment.

I was always in danger and he was always rescuing me. I would fall and he would lift me up. It was exhilarating and draining.

It had given them the confidence to believe their luck would never run out, that God was on their side, that the house gods had only benevolent things to report and our ancestors were pleased, that lifetime warranties meant our lucky streak would never break, that all the elements were in balance, the right amount of wind and water.

My mother had a superstition, in fact, that children were predisposed to certain dangers on certain days, all depending on their Chinese birthdate.

My father was still standing at the end of the reef, patiently casting out, waiting for nengkan to manifest itself as a fish.

I was like the Christ child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity.

He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so I would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios.

I assumed my talent-show fiasco meant I never had to play the piano again.