Free Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende

do that with him for several years and was hoping that in the future Tao's enthusiasm would not flag because that was going to be her priority in life. They pleasured themselves that night and a good part of the following day, until hunger and thirst forced them to stagger from the room, drunken and happy, holding hands for fear that they would suddenly wake and discover that they had been wandering lost in an hallucination.
    The passion that joined them from that night, and that they nourished with extraordinary care, sustained and protected them in their inevitable moments of adversity. With time that passion resolved into tenderness and laughter; they ceased to explore the two hundred twenty-two ways to make love because they were satisfied with three or four, and now they felt no compulsion to surprise each other. The better they came to know each other, the greater was their affection. From that first night of love, they slept in a tight knot, breathing the same breaths and dreaming the same dreams. That did not mean their lives were easy. They had been together for almost thirty years in a world that had no place for a couple like them. Over the course of the years, the small white woman and the tall Chinese man became a familiar sight in Chinatown, but they were never completely accepted. They learned not to touch in public, to sit apart in the theater, and to walk down the street with some distance between them. In certain restaurants and hotels they could not go in together, and when they went to England—she to visit her adoptive mother, Rose Sommers, and he to give lectures on acupuncture at the Hobbs clinic—they could not travel in the first-class section of the ship or share a stateroom, although at night she would slip stealthily down the hall to sleep with him. They were married in a discreet Buddhist ceremony, but their union had no legal standing. Lucky and Lynn were registered as illegitimate children recognized by the father. Tao Chi'en had managed to become a citizen after an infinite number of negotiations and bribes; he was one of the few who escaped the Chinese Exclusion Act, another of the discriminatory laws of California. His admiration for and loyalty to his adoptive country was unconditional, as he had demonstrated during the Civil War, when he traveled across the continent to offer himself as a volunteer at the front and work as aid to Yankee medics for the four years of the conflict, but he felt profoundly foreign, and although he had spent all his life in America, he wanted his body to be buried in Hong Kong.
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    The family of Eliza Sommers and Tao Chi'en lived in a spacious and comfortable house more solid and of better construction than most in Chinatown. All around them the main language was Cantonese, and everything from food to newspapers was Chinese. Several blocks away was La Mision, where the Spanish speakers lived and where Eliza Sommers used to stroll for the sole pleasure of hearing her language, but her day was spent among Americans in the vicinity of Union Square, where her elegant tea room was located. With her pastries, Eliza had from the beginning contributed to the upkeep of the family. A major part of Tao Chi'en's income ended up in the hands of others: what didn't go toward helping poor Chinese laborers in times of sickness or misfortune would likely be spent at the clandestine auctions of child slaves. Saving those creatures from a life of ignominy had become Tao Chi'en's sacred mission; Eliza Sommers knew that from the beginning and accepted it as characteristic of her husband, another of the many reasons she loved him. She set up her pastry shop so she would not have to torment him by asking for money; she needed independence to give her children the best American education, for she wanted them to integrate completely in the United States and live without the limitations imposed on either Chinese or Chileans. With Lynn she succeeded, but her plans went awry with