My name is Liu Hong. In my laboratory everyone calls me Hong, and on my visa I am Hong Liu, so I have become used to wearing my name backwards. I am 35 years old, from Shanghai. I finished my Ph.D. there in 1997 and came here in January 1998 for a postdoctoral fellowship in molecular biology, at a university near Durham, North Carolina. My husband Wei is also a postdoc, but in Cleveland, Ohio, about 500 miles away. (I measured on the map.) Our son Xiaoming is five years old. He lives with my parents in Shanghai. I write here in English because it is good practice, and because in English it hurts a little less.

Last night was the telephone night. Every Saturday at 8 p.m. I buy Sunday morning in Shanghai. This week's card was a new one from the Chinese grocery in Raleigh, twenty dollars, and the man promised me "very clear line." It was very clear. I could hear my father turning the pages of his newspaper while Xiaoming talked.

Xiaoming asked if Spring Festival is before or after his birthday. (After. His birthday is in December.) Then he asked if I will come home for Spring Festival. Then he asked if he could come to America "on the airplane with the TV in the chair." He has seen an advertisement.

I said, we are making a plan.

This is true. On Wednesday I went to the international office and asked about the H-4 visa for a dependent child. The lady gave me a list: my approval notice, a letter from my lab, bank statements, his birth certificate with a translation, photographs. He must go to the consulate in Shanghai for an interview. A five-year-old, for an interview. My mother says she will take him and wear her good coat.

Wei says wait until next summer, when maybe he finds a job near here and we are three people in one city. I say a child does not wait. He grows while we are waiting. Every Saturday his voice is a little different, and I am not there for the difference.

We did not decide. I wrote the list on an index card and taped it above my bench, next to the gel recipes.

P.S. On Friday the revised paper went out by FedEx, four copies, to a different journal. Now it belongs to a new Reviewer 2.

In Shanghai the festival came twelve hours before it came to me. When I woke at six this morning, it was six in the evening there, and my family was sitting down to dinner without me. By the time I parked at the lab they had cut the mooncakes, and Xiaoming was asleep.

On Sunday I bought one mooncake at the Chinese grocery: lotus seed paste, one salted egg yolk inside, in a red tin box much bigger than the cake. It cost too much. I bought it anyway. At home my father always stands in the long line outside the old shop near their apartment for the fresh-meat mooncakes, which you must eat hot, and burn your mouth, and nobody minds.

At the lab nobody knew what day it was. Why would they? I worked until 7, came home, made tea, and cut the mooncake in four pieces the way my mother does, so the yolk is in every piece. I ate one piece and wrapped three.

There is a poem by Wang Wei that every Chinese child learns: mei feng jia jie bei si qin. Each time the festival comes, I miss my family twice as much. He was seventeen and far from home when he wrote it. I am 35, and it is still correct.

It was cloudy tonight, so I did not have to look at anything. I called Wei. He had forgotten, then he remembered, then he was sorry. He said, save me one piece. I said, I saved you three.

Grant figures until 2 a.m. The grant must be at NIH by October 1. Figure 4 has six panels and I do not love any of them, and Dr. M. changes his mind about their order every time he drinks coffee.

On the radio in the car this morning: a very big earthquake in Taiwan, in the middle of the night there. I have no family in Taiwan, but I sat in the parking lot and listened to the whole report anyway. News like this makes every Chinese person hold the telephone a little longer.

Too tired. Tomorrow.

The power in our building came back at 3 this afternoon. I will write this now, while I remember it exactly, because tomorrow it will become a story.

Floyd arrived Wednesday night. Rain like someone emptying buckets on the roof, all night, and the wind in the pine trees behind my apartment making a noise like the sea. At 4 a.m. Thursday the power went off. At 6 I called the lab, and the phone rang and rang.

The university said stay home. I drove in anyway, around two fallen trees. The building was dark. The emergency generator was running, but only for the red outlets in the hallway, and our -80 freezer is plugged into a white one, because the red ones were all full when it came. I have told Dr. M. about this since February.

Inside that freezer: two years. My cell lines, my plasmids, every sample for the paper. A -80 that nobody opens stays cold maybe one day. Nobody knew how long the power would be off.

Our building manager had ordered extra dry ice on Wednesday. I will bake him something. Sanjay from the next lab and I carried it up four floors in the dark, the flashlight in my teeth. Dry ice is about -78 degrees, almost the same as the freezer, and it burns the skin, so we wore the thick gloves. We packed everything in the Styrofoam boxes our reagents come in: layer of ice, layer of samples, layer of ice. By flashlight I wrote down every box on a sheet of paper, so nothing could be lost twice.

When the lights came back today we moved everything home again and I checked every tube. Everything is fine. Then I sat on the floor of the cold room and cried, which I did not do on Thursday, because on Thursday there was no time.

Tonight on the news: the flooding in the east of the state, whole towns under the water, people on rooftops. I was ashamed to cry over tubes. But they are two years.

At the grocery store everyone was buying bread, milk and bottled water, so I bought bread, milk and bottled water. The hurricane is named Floyd. On television it is a white wheel covering half the map.

My mother called. She never calls, it is too expensive, so when I heard her voice I was frightened. She saw the storm on the news in Shanghai. She told me to fill the bathtub and buy candles, which is what we did for typhoons when I was small. I said, Ma, I am 35. She said, then you are old enough to buy candles.

Wei says his whole lab is in mourning because the Cleveland Browns lost their first game, 43 to 0. He does not understand American football, but he was sad with them to be polite.

Wei drove back to Cleveland this morning. Nine hours through the mountains of West Virginia, with a thermos of tea and the rest of the dumplings. He will pay the Turnpike tolls with the quarters I saved for him in a film canister.

Three days together. We did ordinary things, which is what I wanted: the laundromat, the grocery, a walk by the Eno River. On Sunday we had our argument. It is always the same argument, so now we do it quickly, like a song we both know.

Me: Xiaoming should be with one of us.
Wei: When we are settled.
Me: When is settled?
Wei: When one of us has a real job.

The thing is, he is right, and I am right, and Xiaoming is five and does not care who is right.

At night we watched Titanic on video. Wei fell asleep during the second tape, before the ship sank, so in his version everyone is still dancing. I like that.

In China, Labor Day is May 1. Here it is the first Monday of September and means summer is finished. Everybody in America had a barbecue except us. We had dumplings.

Tonight at 7 I called Shanghai, where it was 7 in the morning of September 1st, so I could hear Xiaoming before his first day of da ban, the big class at kindergarten. He was eating rice porridge and talking with his mouth full, and my mother was saying hurry, hurry, in the background.

He told me: Mama, in da ban we are the oldest, so we must show the little ones how to behave.
I told him: yes, and you must also listen to the teacher.
He told me: I know already. You always say this.

I always say this.

The card beeps when one minute is left. It is the worst sound in the world. When I hear it I talk faster, and I always say the wrong last thing, something like "drink your milk," instead of the thing I want to say.

Afterward I sat for a while with the phone in my lap. Then I went back to the lab to change the medium on my cells, because cells do not know it is anybody's first day.

The paper came back today. Rejected.

Two reviewers. Reviewer 1 says: important question, careful work, minor changes. Reviewer 2 says: the conclusions are not supported, the authors must show this in mammalian cells, and the English is "awkward in places." Reviewer 2 wrote three pages. Reviewer 2 has feelings about my paper that I did not know a paper could cause.

Dr. M. read it standing up and said, "Well. He's not wrong about the mammalian cells." Then he said we will do the experiment and send it somewhere else, and went to lunch.

I went to the cold room, which is where people in our lab go to be alone. It is 4 degrees in there. You cannot stay long, which is good, because otherwise I would stay.

About the English. I read every sentence of that paper aloud before we sent it. Maybe it is awkward. Maybe I am awkward. On the phone Wei said Reviewer 2 is probably a man with a bad stomach. This made me laugh, which is what he wanted.

For a few months I have read other people's journals on the Internet, late at night after the phone call. A woman writing about her mother, a man writing about his farm. I never wrote to any of them, but I felt less alone. So maybe I will write one too.

The facts of my life are simple. I wake at 6:30. I am at the bench by 8. I do experiments on a protein I will not describe, because you will fall asleep, and because I am superstitious about it. I come home at 9 or 10. On Saturday night I call Shanghai. Wei and I talk on Wednesday and Sunday nights, ten cents a minute, which after Shanghai feels like free.

In my freezer at home there are dumplings from Wei's last visit. In my wallet there is a picture of Xiaoming at four, holding a slice of watermelon bigger than his face. In the freezer at the lab there are two years of my life in small tubes.

That is enough for the first day. The Chinese say a journey of a thousand li begins with one step. I think a journal is the same.

If you would like a short note when I write a new entry, please e-mail me and I will put you on my list. I am slow to answer, but I read every letter. To the reader in Ohio who wrote that her own mother raised her daughter for two years while she finished school: thank you. I read your letter three times.