Passage I

Dragon and Snow

Yueming zipped up her warmest coat for the walk home from school and pushed through the double doors. No new snow had fallen since the weekend, when back-to-back snowy blizzards had turned Philadelphia into a place she did not recognize, the view out her apartment window at the time more amazing with each passing hour. The New Year’s festivities, fifteen days of it, were half over and still her family had not arrived from China, delayed by the storms.

The cold air snapped Yueming out of an afternoon daze. At the corner of Tenth and Winter, someone had cleared the snow in front of the mural, one of the several that were part of Yueming’s daily commute. This one The History of Chinatown, looked especially bright today, the sun’s reflection off the snow, working some magic with the colors. There, in paint, Chinese immigrants worked their jobs, one bent over a clothes iron, others caught up in railroad construction, and a giant figure on the horizon, his gaze locked on the passerby. In the lower left-hand corner, a child no bigger than Wei tugged at a kite in a schoolyard. As many times as she had seen them, these figures still caught Yueming off guard, incongruous as they were—motionless—with the rush of Philadelphia’s urban city traffic heading for the Vine Street Expressway.

Mother and Wei would come tomorrow after this visit, their next one would be for Yueming’s graduation. [A] Having to tell them soon, tomorrow, over her decision to stay, that she would not be coming home to China. [B] She would remain instead in this world, familiar and new. [C] Suddenly, laughter turned the corner in her direction. It belonged to a small group of young men, each carrying a piece of a giant dragon. [D] She would see the toothy, quaking creature in all it’s festive entirety the following evening with her family. But now, Yueming hesitated under the arch that opened into Chinatown. As the traffic light changed and changed again, she watched the distance grow between herself and the undone dragon, color bobbing on a cityscape of snow.