The acrid stench of disinfectant seared his nostrils—sharp enough to burn through the haze of memory. Alan White's last coherent thought lingered on the Wall Street subway explosion: flames roaring like a ravenous beast, his briefcase hurtling upward like a kite snapped from its string, the freshly signed merger contracts inside curling into charred butterflies before dissolving into the heat wave. Then darkness, thick and smothering, swallowed him whole.
When his eyes fluttered open again, the world blurred into unfamiliar wooden rafters. Sunlight filtered through carved lattice windows, dappling the red quilt stitched with peonies at his side. A woman in a blue slant-collar shirt hummed softly in a lilting dialect, the tune sweet as melted sugar—yet every syllable tangled like thorns in his ears, unintelligible.
"The baby's awake!" Her voice brightened, rough palms pressing to his forehead. Dirt and soap clung to her skin, a warmth so vivid it shattered any pretense of a dream. Alan tried to croak, "Where am I?" but only a gurgle escaped. Horror coiled in his chest as he realized: he was staring through infant eyes, his arms swaddled like plump lotus roots, helpless as a moth in a jar.
The next three years became a linguistic purgatory. Like a monkey paraded in a foreign zoo, he mimicked those twisting syllables daily, only to fumble. When the neighbor's yellow dog snapped at him, the "fuck off" he spat earned scoldings sharper than Texas dust storms; when his mother taught him "吃饭 (chīfàn, eat rice)," he mumbled through a mouthful of grains, only to be laughed at for slurring "吃粪 (chīfèn, eat dung)."
On a late autumn day when Alan was three, the sky hung like a tattered ink-soaked cloth. Clutching a hatchet taller than himself, he stumbled in his father's footprints up the mountain. The path slick with dew, he'd just caught his balance when a whistle split the air. Wind howled down, flinging dead leaves like icy fingers tearing at his clothes. "Hold the tree!" his father shouted—then a brute force lifted him, sending him tumbling down the slope, rocks biting into his skin as the world spun black.