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dangling over the Chinese side of the wall.
    â€œI happen to like the name Marjorie,” I said stiffly. “I guess I can be Queen-anything-I-want-to-be. What’s your name?”
    Andrea was sitting down too. “Queen Zobeide.”
    I didn’t have the chance to tell her what I thought of her name. Actually both of us forgot all about being queens because at that moment an old woman stepped out of a hut and started shrieking and cursing at a man in the next farmyard. She shook her fists. “Egg of a turtle!” she screamed. “May all your children fall sick! May you outlive every one of them! May the gods heap misfortune on your head!” On and on.
    At night lying on the sleeping porch, Andrea and I had often heard women carrying on like this. Now we were trying so hard to catch all the language, not to miss a word, that we were surprised when at the height of her rage the woman stopped short. There was a moment of complete silence. The woman had caught sight of us, sitting on our wall, staring. She put her hands on her hips, threw back her head, and called on all the gods and neighbors to come and witness the dog-things in their midst. It was as if now, now she had at last found someone worthy of her anger. She could forget the poor pig of a man who lived next door. For us she found new words so bad we couldn’t translate them, although our Chinese was as good as our English. As her voice grew more shrill, her neighbors did come to listen and look. Occasionally a man would laugh and add an insult. Young boys began picking up stones and hurling them at the wall. “Foreign devils,” they shouted. “Foreign devils.”
    Andrea and I were used to being called “foreign devil.” We were used to insults. Coolies often spat directly in our path, but we had been taught to act as if we didn’t see, as if nothing had happened. But today it was different. More people angry all together, angrier than before. We knew the stones wouldn’t reach us; still, we couldn’t get down from that wall fast enough.
    As soon as we were off the ladder, we slid to the ground, out of breath. “I guess it will get worse,” Andrea said. “It’s the Communists who are doing this. They’re the ones who are making the Chinese so mad.”
    Of course I knew about the Communists who wanted to make a revolution in China like the one in Russia that had driven Vera Sebastian out. Still, I hadn’t paid much attention. All my life there had been fighting somewhere in China—warlord against warlord. Grown-ups were constantly talking about these warlords, hoping that one of them would finally bring the country together in peace. When a warlord was a Christian (and one or two were), my father really got his hopes up. But I just thought of the Communists as another group of Chinese. Fighting as always.
    But it wasn’t like that, Andrea said. If the Communists got the chance, there would be a new kind of war. Farmers against their landlords. Factory workers against factory owners. The poor against the rich. Chinese against foreigners. “The Communists want to get us out,” she said. “My father says that one day we may be glad to have those gunboats in the river to protect us.”
    It all sounded so complicated, I thought of my father when he was discouraged. Sometimes he’d put out his hands in a kind of helpless gesture. “But China’s so big,” he’d say, as if he were apologizing for having come so far and doing so little. That’s the way I felt now. China was too big for me to even imagine all the things that might happen. At the moment all I hoped was that the Communists wouldn’t spoil Christmas.
    But after the weekend when I got home, I was glad to see that Christmas seemed to be coming on in the usual way. We had mailed our packages to America months ago. (I had sent my grandmother a doily filled with nothing but French