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of his death, I told Mother that I had frequently recalled her
saying that once, when I was only three, our family dog had
faced the full moon and howled for hours during the last month
of the Chinese (lunar) calendar, and that before the year was
over, Niang-niang (our term of address for our paternal
grandmother) passed away. The night before the death of my
father, I said, I myself heard our dog A-ho cry.
"Yes, I heard it, too," my mother responded, and went on to say that that same night she had had a dream. In the dream she and her six-year-old grandson K'ang-k'ang were going to visit Mrs. Ch'en, a close family friend. In the dream my mother and my nephew K'ang-k'ang were walking somewhere in a vast, desolate and silent place with no houses or people in sight. But then, as they walked along, they came to something like the corner of a white house. Wondering what was on the other side of the corner, my mother went around and saw a coffin with no lid. But why did it have no lid? A strangeness gripped her, and looking into it she saw Pa-pa lying there. A few days later, when the family laid his body into his coffin, she saw that it was exactly the same as the one in her dream. It has been over 40 years since my father's death, but it did not occur to me until now, in recalling these dreams, that the day after he died, Mrs. Ch'en came with thimble in pocket to help sew coarse, unbleached flax over our gaily embroidered shoes as a sign of mourning, a duty normally performed by persons close to the bereaved family. And that must explain that part of my mother's dream in which she set out to find Mrs. Ch'en. Meanwhile, my mother said she had awakened to hear the dog A-ho howling. "And the next morning, while my dream and A-ho's howling were making my heart sick," she said to me, "you came jumping in to tell me what fun you had had in your dream, playing in your fur coat in a heavy snow. For you did not know yet that snow in the summer signifies mourning—the wearing of white." On my part, I thought of how our entire lot of preserved duck eggs had turned tasteless the year before, the significance of which was commonly taken to indicate the death of a major member of the family within the year. Then my mother went on to recall a snow dream of her own. One June night in 1909, when the family was living in Manchuria, she said, she dreamed that snow was falling on her. A few days later, a special messenger arrived to inform her that Wa-bu (our term of address for our maternal grandmother) had died in Shanghai. Turning her thoughts to my father, whose responsibility it was to look after family affairs outside the home while my 204
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