Ruby’s Wish

If you walk down a certain road in a certain city in China, past the pet market with its yellow-and-green ricebirds hopping in their bamboo cages, and the goldfish and the terrapins in their porcelain bowls, you will come to a block of houses, five houses wide and seven houses deep. Many families live here now, and the buildings are brown with age and dirt. But if you look closely, you will see that, once upon a time, this was all one house, the magnificent home of one family.

The house was built by an old man who returned from the Gold Mountain. That was what the Chinese called California, when many men left to join the Gold Rush there and few came back again. But as I said, this man did come back, and he came back very rich. And he did what rich men did in old China: he married many wives. His wives had many sons, and these sons also had many wives. So at one time, the house was filled with the shrieks and laughter of over one hundred children.