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In the stuffy, dim wooden shed she lived in with Mother, Anyu lit the kerosene lamp with a match and then paced, holding her stinging face.

She was furious at herself, at the landlord.

She should have talked back or pushed him; instead, she had run away like a coward.

This was not the first time the man had attacked her.

Whenever Mother was late paying the rent, he would burst into a paroxysm of rage, screaming and striking them with a broomstick.

Mother came home. She looked tired. Her braid was loose, and a tuft of hair fell in her eyes. Her expression was triumphant, though, as she raised a basket. “Look! Dinner!”

Hard-boiled quail eggs tonight. A rare treat.

Mother must have sold more pelts than she had expected.

With winter approaching, the demand for furs had picked up.

Mother was pleased. She had devoted herself to selling and sorting fox pelts and sable skins; when she came home, her hair gave off the strong smell of animal fur.

“Mother,” Anyu said, tearful, in spite of herself. The sting had reduced to a throbbing pain, but her face was swollen, and the mark of her attacker’s fingers was visible.

“What happened?” Mother held Anyu’s chin.

“The landlord.”

“Oh no.” Mother’s expression, as usual, was a helpless look with an apologetic smile. A woman of mild temperament, she seldom got angry. Not even now. The depth of Mother’s mellowness astounded Anyu. “Does it hurt?”

“You ask that. Every time.”

Mother sighed. She turned to a chipped cabinet they’d bargained for at a secondhand store, took out a tin can of Tiger Balm, and smoothed the pungent gel on Anyu’s cheek. “You’ll feel better, I promise.”

“Can we live somewhere else, Mother?” It must have been the hundredth time she had asked that question.

“We can’t afford another apartment right now.”

Anyu pushed away Mother’s hand and walked to her kang . It was cold. The fire hadn’t been lit.

“Maybe you can apologize to the landlord. Try to make peace. Don’t be a troublemaker, all right, daughter?”

That was all Mother would say—don’t be a troublemaker.

Mother was never a troublemaker, never confrontational, not even when the neighbors called her a whore behind her back.

She heard them, but she never said anything.

Mother rarely mentioned her past, but the landlord and neighbors wouldn’t stop talking about it: how Mother, one of those educated women from a good family in Beijing, had been involved in an affair with the powerful warlord Zhang before he seized control of Manchuria during the warring years in China, after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, and effectively defied the Nationalist government’s order.

At twenty, Mother dropped out of college to live with him in a villa in Shenyang.

But the warlord soon grew tired of her and discarded her, and she was warned never to come near him again.

When she found out she was pregnant, her father, a renowned scholar, could not bear the shame of having a promiscuous daughter.

He had her lashed with a bamboo stick, threw her a bag, and ordered her never to enter their home again.

Disowned by her family, Mother took a train to Harbin, the warlord’s domain, and a few months later, gave birth to Anyu, sealing her unfortunate fate for good.

For a single woman saddled with an infant, the prospect of marriage was out of the question, and she was doomed to be an outcast, an unwanted woman.

Everything was a challenge, from renting an apartment and finding a job to even walking around unescorted at night.

With her higher education, Mother had tried to be a governess for wealthy Chinese and Manchu families, but they heard of her scandalous past and dismissed her after a few months.

She had taken sundry jobs over the years, making a few pennies here and there as a domestic servant and a laundrywoman, then selling furs and pelts and working as an interpreter for Russians who conducted business with Chinese merchants.

Mother never saw the warlord again, even though his mansion was within an hour’s walk.

The man was a womanizer with seven wives and didn’t care about Anyu, his illegitimate daughter.

He only left Mother a gold necklace with the pendant of Guandi, the god of war he worshipped.

Mother cherished it, looping the jewelry around Anyu’s neck and instructing her never to part with it.

Anyu felt sorry for Mother. With one mistake, she was cast out by her family, her life ruined, and turned herself, once a jade leaf growing on a gold branch, into a pariah.

Did she have regrets? Had she loved the warlord?

Did she hate the warlord? Anyu never asked, but sometimes she’d be troubled by the wistful look that escaped Mother’s eyes.

“Are you listening, daughter?”

Anyu opened the firebox beneath the kang and lit the coal with a match. “We need more coal.”

“Will you apologize to the landlord?”

“Why?”

“He’s not a good man, I know, but he’s our landlord. I just want us to be on good terms.”

Anyu stabbed at the coal with a pair of iron tongs.

“Don’t be so headstrong, daughter. If you apologize—”

“Never.” Anyu shut the firebox door with a bang.

This was all Mother’s fault—the landlord, this miserable existence by the train station.

All of it a cruel punishment. For her entire life, Anyu had been lonely, growing up by the station with her mother in this hovel, with no one else to talk to, no siblings, no cousins, no relatives, no friends.

For her entire life, she’d been treated poorly by the decent families who disparaged her for not having bound feet, berated by the mean-spirited neighbors who mocked her for her looks.

They warned that she had peach blossom–shaped eyes and she would grow up to be a pestilence to men and women, a disaster to families, and a seducer like Mother.

This confused Anyu and made her ashamed of her appearance, but she was helpless—she didn’t know what to say to defend her own, or Mother’s, reputation.

She had wanted to go to school but couldn’t, because that privilege was reserved for children from wealthy families, and Mother couldn’t afford to hire tutors.

In the end, Anyu stayed at home and learned everything from Mother: mathematics, Russian literature, English, and how to draw snowflakes, gray herons, black-headed gulls, and white fish from the Songhua River.

Unable to afford paper and pencils much of the time, she had sketched those images with a stick on the muddy shore.

Anyu wondered whether she’d spend her whole life like this.

She was fifteen years old. Old enough to marry, as Mother had said.

Ironically, she still wanted a marriage for Anyu, even though she had raised her out of wedlock, without binding her feet, without a family.

But to Anyu, marriage felt like another trap.

What if she met the wrong man, like Mother had?

She’d rather do something—be a painter or a teacher. But a painter would be better.

Mother sighed, scuffing toward the coal stove with the basket. “So tell me, why did he hit you this time?”

“I found a bag. The landlord wanted it. But I returned it to the owner instead.” Anyu climbed on the kang and emptied her pocket onto the small four-legged table on the platform. Pencils. Papers. And the handkerchief.

“You did the right thing. Don’t worry. I’ll deal with him. That’s a fine-quality handkerchief. Where did you get it?” Mother came over.

“The jeweler gave it to me.”

“The jeweler?”

“The man who lost the bag.” Anyu told Mother about the Russian man from St. Petersburg and the egg he had lost.

“A Russian egg,” Mother muttered, fingering the fine embroidered letters on the handkerchief, a spark of wonder in her eyes. “I’ve never seen one.”

“He’s gone now. You can throw the handkerchief away.”

“But it’s made of silk. It looks expensive.” Mother folded it and handed it to her.

Anyu tucked it in her pocket, picked up her pencil, and began to draw.

But she couldn’t concentrate. The air was acrid, stifling without a window; the inky streaks of kerosene fumes hung low under the ceiling; there was no sound of the train coming from outside; silence, a ghostly shape, swelled.

Suddenly, she was irritated at Mother—the way she stood, the way she talked, and even the mere presence of her in the room.

Anyu couldn’t understand why she felt this way, didn’t know what was happening to her.

When she was a child, she was afraid of silence and had held Mother’s legs and begged her to stay whenever she needed to leave, fearful that she would never come back; when she awoke in the morning, she would feel Mother by her side and watch her sleep, comforted by their togetherness.

Now that Anyu was older, she no longer fretted that Mother would disappear, and she had grown accustomed to the silence of a room without her.

Sometimes Anyu was even startled to discover that she wanted to be away from her, to leave her.

Like the train. Gone. Such wild thoughts bubbled in her head, bewildering her, yet she didn’t know how to quench them.

She would never tell Mother that, and she would never leave her, not now, not ever.

She loved her mother. They would be each other’s companion in this room for another year, another ten years, and it would be just them, the two of them, as it had always been, as it would always be.

Which, Anyu tried to convince herself, was all that she wanted.