9/26/99 -- Sunday

First Sunday of the collection. After the service Annie and I and two deacons counted in the church office with the door locked and my adding machine, two people on every envelope and both of us initialing the tally sheet, because that's how you do it, even at church, especially at church. Checks from people I've never met. A twenty folded into a tiny square from the grandmother who sits in the front row. A peanut butter jar of coins from the Sunday school. I'm not going to put the total here. It isn't mine. It goes out tomorrow by wire.

The pastor prayed in Taiwanese for Nantou and Taichung and everyone, and read the names of the families in our congregation who still haven't heard from someone. Fewer names than Wednesday. Not none.

Ma tonight: an engineer came Saturday and looked at the building. It's standing, but nobody can live in it for now. Months, maybe. Maybe it has to come down. Nobody knows yet. Ba got on the phone and said, "It was well built. That's why we're alive." He's right. He is also going to lose the home he's lived in since 1985, and he knows it, and he said it anyway.

About the name. I haven't been able to do the debits and credits since Monday. I sat down on Wednesday night, after I talked to Ma, and tried, and couldn't put anything on either side. Nothing balances this week, and it isn't supposed to. The Chinese papers here are already calling the earthquake nine-two-one, the way dates get said in Chinese, just the numbers, the way people over there will say it for the rest of their lives. Where were you on nine-two-one. So that's what this is now.

I told Ma I'm coming home for Lunar New Year. Not "next year sometime." February. She didn't say "we'll see." She said, "Good."

9/24/99 -- Friday

Mid-Autumn.

The church potluck turned into a meeting. Forty people in the fellowship hall, and the eight boxes of mooncakes I ordered last Sunday, when the world was normal, sitting on the table in their red boxes like nothing happened. The pastor asked me to keep the books for a relief collection, since I'm the accountant. We decided money, not clothes or canned food, because that's what the people over there keep asking for. Three Sundays. I said yes before he finished asking.

My six o'clock call this morning, nine at night there, to Shu-fen's parents' house. They celebrated anyway. "Of course," Ma said. "What else would we do?" No barbecue, nobody had the heart. Mooncakes in the yard, on borrowed stools. Hao-hao wore the pomelo hat without being asked. A-ma sat outside with the red shawl around her shoulders, the one I brought her last year.

There's a poem Ba made us memorize when we were small, by Su Shi, nine hundred years old, that everyone recites on Mid-Autumn. The last lines go something like: We can only wish that we all live long, and share the beauty of the moon across a thousand miles. Tonight I sat on my balcony with one egg-yolk pastry and looked at the moon over the parking lot. It's six thousand miles, Ba. Close enough.

9/23/99 -- Thursday

I slept nine hours. I went to work. People came by my desk all day. Stan brought me coffee without asking how I take it and got it right. Tran hugged me, which he has never done, and then looked embarrassed for an hour.

Under the relief there's something else, and I don't have a good name for it. I'm here, in an office with air conditioning and a coffee machine, and my seventy-year-old father carried my grandmother down seven flights of stairs on his back in the dark. I left in 1983. I left, and they stayed, and when the ground moved they were the ones who were there, and I was in a meeting about depreciation schedules.

Wei-ming called tonight on a borrowed cell phone, and I told him that, and he said, "Jie" (older sister), "stop it. What were you going to do, carry A-ma down on your back? You can't even carry your own suitcase. I had to sit on it." And I laughed, and he laughed, and then after we hung up I sat in the car in the parking garage and cried for ten minutes before I could drive home.

Gu-ma says Ma told her Ba's back hurts. He hasn't said a word about it.

9/22/99 -- Wednesday

They're safe. Everyone. Ba, Ma, A-ma, Wei-ming, Shu-fen, Hao-hao.

At four this morning I remembered that Shu-fen's parents have a house out in the country, one story, and I found their number in my address book from the thank-you note I wrote them last year. At 6:04 a.m., on the third try, it rang, and Shu-fen's mother answered, and said "Wait, wait," and then Ma was on the phone.

She talked fast, like she'd been saving it up. At 1:47 in the morning the building started to shake and didn't stop. Everything fell: dishes, the altar, the TV, the orchids off their shelf. The power went out all at once. Ba found the flashlight next to the bed. My flashlight, the one I mailed in August, the one she called ridiculous. Their old one had dead batteries. He got A-ma out of bed and they went down the stairs in the dark, all seven floors, Ba carrying A-ma on his back, Ma behind with the light, and on the fourth floor Wei-ming was coming up the stairs to find them with Hao-hao wrapped in a blanket.

They slept outside two nights, in the schoolyard across the street, on mats, with half the building and half the neighborhood, because the aftershocks kept coming. They listened to the radio all night, everyone around it. The radio I sent. Today Wei-ming drove them out to Shu-fen's parents'.

The building is standing. But there are cracks down the walls of the apartment, and a crack across the stairwell you could put your hand into, and doors that won't close. Nobody can go back in until an engineer looks at it. Ma went up once, with Wei-ming, for A-ma's medicine and the photographs from the altar.

I said I'm coming. She said no. Don't come. Where would you sleep? There's nothing for you to do here. Stay there. Eat. Then other people needed the phone, and she said "Ping an," and hung up.

Ping an. It means peace and safety at the same time. It's what you write on a card for someone who's traveling.

Credit: ping an.

9/21/99 -- Tuesday

No word.

Stan told me not to come in. I dialed all day, every fifteen minutes. Sometimes the fast busy, sometimes the recording, and twice, this afternoon, it actually rang at their end, and rang, and rang. Nobody picked up. Then I remembered: last year I brought Ma a new cordless phone, because the old one crackled. A cordless phone doesn't work when the power's out. I bought my mother a phone that doesn't work in an earthquake.

At two this afternoon, an e-mail from my cousin Jenny in Taipei. They're all right up there. Their power came back on this morning. Buildings down in Taipei too. She can't reach Taichung either, nobody can, the lines are jammed with everybody in the world calling at once. Her father is going to try to drive down tomorrow if the highway is open.

Gu-ma came over at six with a pot of rice porridge. A-ma is her mother. We sat on my sofa with the phone between us and took turns dialing, and when it was her turn she held my hand with the other hand. She's sleeping on the sofa now. I'm not sleeping. I'm writing this, so it goes somewhere.

9/20/99 -- Monday 11:50 p.m.

At ten to eleven this morning Annie called me at work. "Joyce, is your family in Taichung? Turn on the radio."

We don't have a TV at the office. Stan found it on the news radio: a huge earthquake in central Taiwan, in the middle of the night there, 7.6, centered in Nantou County. Nantou is right next to Taichung. We went to Sun Moon Lake there when I was a girl. Ba rowed the boat.

I dialed home. Fast busy. Dialed again. A recording: all circuits are busy. Wei-ming's number: same. I dialed for an hour, and Stan came and stood by my desk and said go home, and I didn't argue.

At home, the news, all afternoon and all night. Pictures in the dark. Flashlights. People standing in the street in their pajamas. A building lying on its side somewhere, and the reporter didn't say where, and I leaned so close to the TV looking for pale green tile that my nose touched the screen. It wasn't. I don't think it was. The whole island lost power, they said. So even if the lines were free, who would answer? They're outside. They must be outside in the dark. That's what I keep telling myself. They're outside.

I've dialed 112 times since eleven this morning. I've been counting. I'm an accountant. I count.

9/19/99 -- Sunday

Mid-Autumn is Friday. Plans:

Here: I'm in charge of mooncakes for the church potluck Friday night. Ordered today from the bakery on Garfield: eight boxes. The flaky egg-yolk ones for us, mung bean for the old people, and lotus seed with salted yolk for the Cantonese members, who will otherwise say something. The youth group is making paper lanterns.

There: Wei-ming bought a new grill. Ma's marinating on Thursday. Hao-hao, six and three-quarters, has announced he is too old for the pomelo hat and will be wearing it anyway. A-ma will sit on a stool in the lobby doorway with a blanket and supervise. My call is Friday at 6 a.m. here, nine at night there, when the grills are going.

Also: Ma finally got my package. "Two flashlights! Forty batteries! A radio! Ridiculous!" Then she put one flashlight by her bed and one in A-ma's room and the radio in the kitchen, Wei-ming says.

Debit: eight boxes of mooncakes, $176.
Credit: Friday.

8/18/99 -- Wednesday

The earthquake in Turkey is on every channel. Whole apartment blocks down, in the night, while people were sleeping. I watched at lunch and couldn't eat.

I was here for Northridge in '94. My bookshelves came down and I slept in my car one night in the parking lot with half the complex. So I know what it's like for about one day. And I know Taiwan is earthquake country, and the building is fourteen years old, and Ba says "very strong" about it the way he says "very strong" about his own knees.

I called Ma at six (nine in the morning there) and nagged. Do you have water. Where is A-ma's medicine. Do you have a flashlight. Ma laughed at me. "Joyce. This is Taiwan. Of course we have a flashlight." Where? Long pause. "Somewhere."

So tonight I went to the hardware store and bought two flashlights, a battery radio, forty batteries and a first aid kit, and I'm mailing it all tomorrow, airmail. It'll cost more to ship than it cost to buy. Ma will say I'm ridiculous. I am an accountant. I plan for contingencies.

Debit: the postage.
Credit: contingencies.

7/25/99 -- Sunday

Thirty-eight today. Ma called at six this morning because she couldn't wait any longer, and sang, and A-ma sang too, in Taiwanese, a different song, both at once. Ba got on and said, "Thirty-eight," as if he was confirming a figure. Then: "Healthy?" Yes. "Eat long noodles." So tonight I made myself long noodles with a fried egg on top, and ate them on the balcony without cutting a single one.

After church, Annie took me to dim sum with her fiance and gave me a card that said Maid of Honor, 38, Still Fabulous. The wedding is October 16th. The dress is lavender. I'm told I can wear it again. Everyone is always told that.

Debit: thirty-eight.
Credit: long noodles, unbroken.

7/11/99 -- Sunday

Yesterday the U.S. women played China for the World Cup at the Rose Bowl, about ten miles from my condo, in front of more than ninety thousand people. I didn't have a ticket. I watched at Annie's, with her fiance and his brothers, who painted their faces. Nothing to nothing after all that running, and then penalty kicks, and the U.S. won, and everyone jumped up screaming, and I jumped up too, maybe a half second late.

Tonight on the phone Ba had read about it in the paper. He asked who I cheered for. I said America, and waited. He was quiet for a second. Then he said, "Good. You're American. That's why we sent you."

Debit: none.
Credit: that's why we sent you.