eeceeoos, ALEX KUO — EGGS hen they were children, both my grandmothers had their feet bound: thereafter they had to learn to balance their feelings very carefully. The pain, too, will pass, Renoir said in 1903. Renoir was to become a friend of my mother, Katherine, who was not yet bom at the time he first said these words; but he repeated every ‘word in 1910 when she was two and they became friends. This time hhe was, however, not referring to the pain which accompanied Ks crine’s mother's bound feet when she was a child, but instead an pated the alienation that Katherine was to feel later from the Tai ‘Chung community for not binding her feet. Strangers sitting on the stoops of their houses and shops all over the city would point to her outsized feet and untethered walk and whisper comments along un- der their breath. > At five Katherine said to Renoir, I will never drop an egg from the high beam. > Later she went to school abroad and met her husband shortly | after he had publicly cut his cue in a Berkeley demonstration > ‘Then the magical happened in 1944 in Chungking: overnight Katherine disappeared from our lives, followed by absolute silence. In the first forty-three years after her disappearance, not a whisper ‘was said in the family about Katherine or her disappearance, at least not within my listening | _— git om the hildren andthe other eiren are begin issent, First there was the memory that would not go away. Then there was the garrulous word Reno, eventualy hatching question ‘Then the whispers ripped the shaded heart. Soon the nights were humming with telephone conversations. We made contact with the secretary of immigration, the archivist of birth records, the alumni minister; we pored over maps and old driving records; we interviewed postal carries, tricksters, insurance chancellors, and even tried to get into the Mormon Redemption Center. We looked up every taxonomy and geography, and collected everything tangible from both sides of the Pacific > We are here for the duration, carefully balanced between address and rumor, carefully watching those who are siphoning from our pain, allowing us to go on. In the early morning our children will thrust from our thighs and float away from us, like chilled star.