I have been taken into a village so primitive they file their teeth and eat meat raw

I have been kidnapped by an evil aunt

Couldn't the woman see? She was not Chinese, not even an ABC-Australian born Chinese. Joan was Chinese, all right, but Dad...had been English. Didn't it show?

No she wasn't going home. She was just ducking into a strange and probably hostile country

You're not Chinese. You don't even look like them

The half coin was pulling them both into China. Separately. For Joan the coin was the key to a lost family...

Let Joan find her family, she was going for her Dad

I hate it, I hate China

Imagine Joan living here...Leah smiled and stretched into the swaying fork of the tree...she might want to stay

As the sun set the expanded family ate small paddy fish, salted poem and rice under plum tree

"We are sorry for such a poor meal" Jade said, "It is lovely. Great" said Leah. and she meant it

For the first time, Leah was thinking of Joan's family as her family, Joan's grandfather was her great grandfather. Joan's father was her grandfather and Swallow grandfather was her great uncle-if she wanted it that way

Leah realised that Joan had defended her by conjuring up the nation's old devil-general and rubbing the grey woman's nose in the memory

You can't keep on being angry with you mother all your life. Can you? Not after the train

It's us again the world

Orphan Annie. Look you walked here. Walk back

The night of the mob taught me something important. When everything's gone, when there's nothing more you can do, it is best to turn away

For an instant, Leah saw that night through the eyes of a very little girl. Terrible! So terrible...

Suddenly they were on top of the world. Suddenly the terrors, the long journeys...Suddenly Joan had found her father's ancestral village and she had found the home of the coin

It was funny, Leah thought, how things changed every time they moved. In Guangzhou Jan was a stranger, on the first train she was an ally, in Shanghai an enemy, in Wuhan a little girl with nightmare, in Chongquin a mother

...she wiped at the midst in her eyes with a clenched forearm and jerked away from the hospital

Joan's dragging you off to China, Joan's trying to make you part of her Chinese family, Joan's trying to bury Dad's memory

She supposed Joan, crazy Joan, was in there somewhere, part of the cure, part of growing up, part of everything

The two women clung together in the back of the crowded truck

You're not Chinese, but you're not not Chinese either. It doesn't matter

Leah lifted the egg to her eye, saw the split coin, almost one again