Tomorrow is our birthday. We spend the evening on my brother’s phone, reminding our parents about our earlier birthdays. They WeChat us from their apartment in Beijing, a light-filled structure of imitation marble, with a housemaid clattering about in their kitchen. Tell your mother about the first one, our father says. The first one after we moved to the States, we assume—oh College Station and your grasshoppers and Cracker Barrels and inflatable pools sagging on your front lawns. “Tell her about the cakes she spent all morning making,” he says.
“Cakes?” Kane says. In the smaller video box showing our faces in the corner, the hackles rise on his eyebrows. Our faces are identical, except Kane has all the hair, the length of which, cascading down his head, falls out of the frame. “There were never cakes, Dad. Ma made one and cut it in two.” [ . . . ]
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