Outrun the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

hard to see the shape of his thoughts.
    After my graduation from the Oriental Public School, he slipped me a red envelope with a quarter in it and said, “You may no longer be in school, but you must never stop learning. We need to be as smart as the white ghosts.”
    I started work right after graduation—first sweeping graves, and then, when that ended, helping Ba at the laundry during the hours his assistant wasn’t there. While I worked, I schemed for ways to break Jack free from the cycles of rinse, wash, and repeat. Hard work wasn’t enough to get rich, or else we’d already be living in a mansion on Nob Hill with cut-glass windows like those of Leland Stanford or Mark Hopkins. No, the key to wealth was opportunity. And if opportunity didn’t come knocking, then Mrs. Lowry says you must build your own door.
    â€œHow will we get the money for this fancy school?”
    â€œI am going to propose they offer me a scholarship.”
    â€œI don’t want
their
money. I just want the white ghosts to stop taking
our
money. Every day they find something new to tax. Tax the clothespins, tax the socks, tax the holes in the socks.” Ba glares at his cracked red hands.
    Jack sits very still, glancing between us. Ma stirs her bowl of fortune-telling beans with her finger, taking in everything with a look of serenity.
    I stifle my annoyance, which jabs like a bone in my craw. “You told me to keep learning.”
    â€œYes, keep learning, but not at the white ghosts’ school.”
    â€œThere are no high schools in Chinatown.”
    The two grooves between his nose and mouth flatten.
    â€œDo you want us to be stuck here all our lives?” I press. “Thebrochure says St. Clare’s is on par with the Men’s Wilkes College. Think of the things I’ll learn—”
    â€œIf you get in.”
    â€œWhen I graduate—”
    â€œ
If
you graduate  . . .” His hand curls up on the table, like a crouching spider.
    â€œI
will
graduate. And then I will start a fine company.”
    Unlike some of my other ideas, Tom thinks my plan to bring Chinese herbs to the American market is sound. With his herbal expertise, I want to develop a line of American-friendly herbal teas with catchy names like “Strong as an Elephant Heart” and “Float Away like Dandelion Puff.” For all their disdain of Chinese people, Americans certainly like our goods—silks, teas, porcelain—and Ah-Suk gets a fair share of tourists poking around his store for alternatives to the laudanum that Western doctors prescribe for everything. “Once my business takes off, you and Ma can buy a house on Nob Hill.”
    He laughs. “What makes you think they’d let us move to Nob Hill?”
    â€œThe shrimp peeler did it.” One of Ma’s old clients found a gold nugget the size of a baby’s foot after she told him to expect metal in his future. It was enough to pry a three-story house off a Dutchman.
    Ba snorts. “The shrimp peeler died before he signed the papers and saved himself much heartache.” He looks pointedly at Ma, who hadn’t predicted that part of his fortune. She shrugs.
    â€œWhy?” squeaks Jack, wispy eyebrows shaped into question marks. “Why can’t we move to Nob Hill?”
    Ma places our empty dishes into a wooden bucket. “To bed,
dai-dai
.”
    Jack hesitates. But after one look at our parents, with their lips clamped tight as crab pincers, he scampers into the room where he sleeps with Ma. Because of his irregular schedule, Ba sleeps there only after Jack has awoken, while I always sleep on a bedroll by the stove.
    After the door closes, Ba says, “Why can’t you start your
fine
company without that school?”
    â€œIf I graduate from one of the white ghosts’ best schools, doors will open. It will give me credibility. Also, I’d make connections, and Mrs. Lowry says