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As Mother boiled the quail eggs in a pot, she said that she would work overnight from now on, as she needed to earn money to prepare for the brutal winter.

She had found a job moonlighting as an interpreter at the night market at the back of the cemetery behind the St. Sophia cathedral.

It was a secret market where exiled Russians sold jewelry rumored to have come from the imperial vault in St. Petersburg.

For her interpreting, Mother would be paid a good sum, a financial lifeline for them.

“I want to go with you,” Anyu said, excited. She had never heard of the night market before.

Mother shook her head. “They don’t like to have spectators.”

“I’ll be careful. They won’t know I’m there.”

“I’ll be busy. I won’t have time to look after you.”

“I’ll look after myself.”

Mother hesitated.

“If you don’t take me, I’ll go there myself.”

“Don’t be stubborn, daughter.”

“You’ll let me go?”

She sighed. “If you agree to stay out of sight.”

On market day, two hours past sundown, Anyu arrived at the back of the cathedral with Mother.

After repeatedly promising she’d be invisible, Anyu wove through the cemetery and crouched behind a tall tombstone shaped like a stallion.

From here, she was close enough to see the sellers and hear the conversations but far enough not to be detected.

She blew some warm air into her mittens and pulled her coat around her.

A short distance away, Mother melted into the darkness.

For an hour, there was no light, no movement, no voices, no footsteps. The faint smell of damp earth and musty weeds permeated the cemetery, and a sheet of dark gloom blanketed the cathedral and the area behind it. Then snow began to fall.

Near midnight, pricks of golden light penetrated the darkness, and the lot at the edge of the cemetery was illuminated with kerosene lamps and paper lanterns.

One by one, the jewelry hunters sauntered in the drifting snow, glistening eyes belying the mask of aloofness they wore.

There were young Chinese men with cropped hair accompanied by their bodyguards, former Manchu dignitaries wearing ankle-length brocade skirts trailed by their servants, short Japanese officials carrying samurai swords, and some gray-haired Russian babushkas speaking fluent Chinese.

They leaned over the sellers, twenty-three of them, who sat by a row of tombstones, their arms around their suitcases, their eyes shifting in alert.

The sellers were more of a unified group: the former White Russian guards in red cloaks pinned with medals and epaulets indicating their previous ranks, pale-faced aristocratic men in black ushankas , and copper-bearded Cossacks reeking of vodka.

Mother stood beside the sellers, bowing slightly, her head wrapped with a brown scarf.

She was the only woman among the group, the only Chinese woman the Russians trusted to speak for them, Anyu learned later.

Mother’s honesty, discretion, and refusal to accept bribes had helped her build strong relationships with her clients, and she was often hired through word of mouth—something that mattered greatly to her.

She often made a point of reminding Anyu that a woman’s reputation was like a porcelain vase: once cracked, it could never be fully repaired.

There were murmurs of the purity of a gem’s color and the luster of diamonds and talks of dispersion and fluorescence and the fire and the cat’s eye.

Mother, in her composed manner, spoke softly and patiently, alternating between Chinese and Russian.

Intently, Anyu listened, memorizing every word.

Once or twice, through the flurries of snow, by the stark reflection of lamps in men’s hands, Anyu caught glimpses of the contents of the suitcases: tiaras with button-sized diamonds, necklaces with thick gold links, cane handles in translucent green jadeite, trophy cups of pure gold, ruby bracelets, and sapphire rings.

The sellers claimed the pieces of jewelry were their heirlooms, and they were selling them to buy furs to get through the winter.

There were no Russian eggs.

Winter in Harbin was both a dream and a nightmare but for the most part, a nightmare. The daylight was fleeting, the night endless. Anyu grew restless; her mood swung wildly like the gusts that roiled the waters of the Songhua River.

Some days, Anyu went dogsledding with Mother, her favorite winter activity and a rare moment of joy.

The two, bundled in layers of coats and parkas, sat in Musher Wang’s bamboo carriage pulled by his twelve ferocious Siberian huskies with their enigmatic pale-blue eyes.

Then the joy of the treacherous ride began: flying and bouncing through tunnels of snow, sailing over the vast frozen Songhua River, soaring through squalls of freezing air sizzling with her frantic screams and the huskies’ fierce barks, her heart suspended in awe of the speed, her mind penetrated by the fear of flying high, the fear of dying, of being dead.

But then there were days when the temperature plunged to ?35°C, when ice palaces were haunts of nothing but blizzards, and songs and festivals were merely husks of memories.

Then the land blended into a bewitching fable of frost and snow, and two minutes of breathing in the arctic air threatened to hurt Anyu’s lungs and freeze her naked eyeballs.

For months, the icy spells of winter gripped the entire city.

Like two hibernating animals, Anyu and Mother holed up in their room.

In her mellow voice, Mother told Anyu the stories of animals on this land—the loyal phoenix, the black tortoise warrior, the azure dragon god, the white Siberian tiger called Nian, who terrorized an ancient village, and the noble heron cursed to search for a home in an eternal marshland.

All animals had characters, like us, she’d say.

Anyu would nod, feeding on the revelries of folklore and fantasies, nursing her toes and knuckles swollen from frostbite.

Then she drew the bamboo, the tiger, the heron, and always now, ornamental eggs.

Spring, a belated guest, finally arrived.

The sky shimmered like a polished silver dome; the sunlight spun gold strands on the barren field near the train station.

One day, Mother returned home with a basket of shriveled carrots and yellowed chives, looking distraught.

The market had been disrupted by a skirmish between some Japanese soldiers and the warlord Zhang’s men, and two men were killed, she told Anyu.

Mother had a deep mistrust of the Japanese, who had crushed the Russians in a naval battle, announced to the world their superior power, and then vanquished the armies in Korea and colonized the peninsula.

She believed the ambitious Japanese militants were making excuses to provoke the warlord, intending to seize his territory and conquer Manchuria.

“But Warlord Zhang commands hundreds and thousands of troops. His men know how to resolve conflicts,” Mother said.

For a split second, Anyu thought that despite being abandoned, despite all Mother’s suffering and humiliation caused by her relationship with Zhang, she was still in love with the warlord.

But Mother proved to be overly optimistic, for the tension between the two groups kept escalating for the next few days.

There was another loud brawl erupting in the streets, and then the Japanese soldiers ran into the warlord’s men in a restaurant, and a bloody fight ensued.

The train station was shut down, and the square was blockaded.

Rumors said a large-scale conflict was imminent.

“We’re running out of food. Let me see if I can find some quail eggs at the market. I’ll be right back,” Mother said one day and told Anyu to lock the door.

Anyu didn’t give it much thought and went back to her painting, a white iridescent egg. Many years later, she would wish she had stopped Mother. She would wish she had told her not to go.

When it happened, it was sudden—a torrent of heat burst through the seams of the apartment door, the air seemed to crackle, a thunderous thud echoed in the distance, and the walls of the room shuddered. Confused, Anyu put down her ink brush.

The kang grew cold; the room darkened.

Mother never came back.

Anyu went out looking for her. She passed the wailing women and groaning men, passed the fallen walls and collapsed platform and blazing carts, passed the carcasses of Mongolian ponies and a pyre of metal and flesh.

In the chilly night pierced by blades of lights and heartrending howls, she stumbled through the crowd, spinning around, around, choked by the pungent smell of oil and scorched fur.

Near a pile of scattered coal, red like blisters, she caught sight of a shape and dropped to her knees.

Someone asked if she was looking for her mother; someone else asked if she was sure this was Mother.

After Mother’s burial, Anyu, feeling catatonic, sat on the cold kang without coal.

She was freezing, her teeth chattering, as if she were gliding on a block of ice on the Songhua River, drifting and drifting.

They said the Japanese had dropped bombs on the barracks near the train station, killing legions of the warlord’s men and innocent people in their wake.

But she refused to believe it, her gaze on the door.

Mother was still alive; she’d come in very soon, holding a basket of quail eggs.