Her aunt had once taught her how to break into a brown coconut with her boot. Xiuying had thought this so fascinating that she hadn’t even been bothered by the dried shriveled flesh inside. Now, she scraped the tender flesh from a young coconut, green and sweet, and laid it on a plate for her own niece, watching the small girl laugh with her round, baby cheeks, holding a white sliver between her fat fingers.

"Again," Meimei demanded.

"You have plenty." Xiuying wiped the knife on a cloth and set it on the counter, away from small hands. The kitchen smelled of ginger and the particular green-water scent of the coconut, and underneath both, dried chrysanthemum and the inky smell that had lived in this apartment as long as Xiuying could remember. As long as her mother had lived here, and as long as her mother's mother before that.

Her grandmother had come from Fujian with three things: a husband who would be dead within the year, a leather case of bone needles wrapped in silk, and the knowledge, pressed into her like a thumbprint into dough, of what the women in their family were. The needles were gone now, lost or hidden, but the knowledge passed hands: in kitchens in whispered conversations when the house went still save for water boiling on the stove.

When you peel ginger, peel toward yourself and mean it. Her mother's voice, low in her ear. When you give food to someone you love, put your thumb to the center of the plate first. That way, they can carry a little of you with them. Xiuying had been twelve when she first understood these were not superstitions.

She pressed her thumb to the center of Meimei's plate now, an old reflex. The girl didn't notice. She was stacking coconut slivers into a tower, lopsided and slipping until the whole thing came crashing down in a fit of small giggles.

At some point, Xiuying would need to tell her sister that Meimei had the gift. She had seen it three weeks ago: the child standing in the garden, holding a dead sparrow she had found beneath the hedge, and the bird's foot twitching once beneath her fat thumb. Meimei had looked up with an expression of total calm, and said, it's sleepy.

Xiuying had said, yes, put it down now, gently.

She had called her aunt that same evening, a gracefully gnarled woman who still lived in the same village outside Fuzhou, who still kept the needles.

How young? her aunt had asked.

Three.

I'll come.

The coconut tower fell again in a rain of fragrant water and Meimei shrieked with delight as she smushed her fat hands into the juice.