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mother looked after things inside, my mother added that she
thought she now understood the divination I had got from the
temple on top of Miao-feng Shan (a small mountain near
Peking) during the spring preceding his death: "Henceforth tall
trees in the front courtyard provide no shade." It must have
meant that he would no longer be able to shade the family from
the heat of the sun, she thought, and this interpretation seems
to have been confirmed by another of my mother's dreams. One
late spring night the year after his death, she dreamed that he
said to her with concern, "The sun is beating down on K'ang-
k'ang." The next day, my seven-year-old nephew K'ang-k'ang
said to my mother, "Niang-niang, I have a headache."
At this, his own mother asked Cheun-lan, the young nursemaid who looked after him, what she and K'ang-k'ang had done the day before. "Nothing," answered Chuen-lan. "Nothing!" repeated my sister-in-law sternly. "The young master has a headache!" "Really nothing." Chuen-lan tried to recall what they had done. "We played out in the courtyard most of the time. It was such a nice sunny day." Three years later, K'ang-k'ang, my only brother's only son— and thus the family's only heir—came down with scarlet fever. My mother cared for him and within a few days the crisis was over, my nephew's temperature returned to normal. But one morning at about 4:30,I jumped awake from dreaming that my nephew's temperature had shot back up to 39.4° Centigrade (102.92° Fahrenheit). I tiptoed out to knock on my mother's door. "What's going on at such a wee hour in the morning?" she whispered. Upon learning what woke me, she seemed puzzled. "His temperature has been normal for almost three weeks now," she said. "Go back to bed. You can still catch a little sleep." That day when I returned from school, I saw no nephew at the window, and my mother was sitting downstairs in the living room, evidently waiting to tell me something. I quickly asked, "How is K'ang-k'ang?" "After I told you to go back to bed, I myself tossed and turned, waiting for him to wake up so that I could take his temperature. It was indeed 39.4°, and he has white spots on both sides of his throat." My mother looked at me for a long time, and then away, into the empty courtyard. In recounting this dream of mine of exactly 40 years ago (1936), it occurs to me for the first time that, because I was so upset at the time by the unexpected rise of my nephew's temperature, I neglected to notice that in my dream his maid 205
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