Free Jewel of the East by Ann Hood

made a sloppy or imprecise character, Mr. Kung made them do it all over again.
    “When letters were invented,” he reminded them each time, “heaven rejoiced. They must be written with reverence.”
    Felix carefully practiced the characters for
family
and
friend
so that he could teach Lily how to make them when he got back home.
Home.
As timepassed, Felix was getting more homesick. When he counted up the days and then weeks and months since they’d been here and realized it had been six months since they landed in the market, he grew worried that they weren’t going to be able to get back. The Christmas party and Lily Goldberg seemed almost blurry to him now. Still, Maisie reminded him often—too often—that they had stayed away a long time last time, too, and they’d gotten back easily.
    Maisie’s letters were always sloppier than Felix’s, and she and Mr. Kung argued over his insistence that she practice until she get them just right.
    “Maisie,” Mr. Kung said, exasperated, “he who does not show reverence to lettered paper is no better than a blind buffalo.”
    “Says who?” Maisie demanded, putting her pen down.
    “Says Confucius,” Mr. Kung told her.
    Even Maisie didn’t argue with Confucius. She dipped her pen in ink again and tried to make the strokes as neatly as she could.
    On their way back home, Maisie stopped and pointed to a tree with small boxes hanging from its limbs.
    “What are those?” she asked Mr. Kung.
    “Ah!” he said. “Inside those boxes are papers,letters, anything with writing on it. You see, Maisie, writing is so powerful that the only way to dispose of it properly is to burn it in those boxes, then hang it on a tree so that the smoke takes it back to heaven where it belongs.”
    Maisie studied the tree, thinking hard.
    “I like it, Mr. Kung,” she said finally. “I’ll try harder tomorrow.”
    “You are a smart girl,” Mr. Kung said, patting her back.
    They arrived back home in good moods.
    “I’m sure Wang Amah saved you some crunchy rice, Felix,” Pearl said.
    But her mother met them at the door, frowning.
    “Your father is home,” she said. She glanced at Mr. Kung, whose smile had turned to a worried expression.
    Absalom Sydenstricker, Pearl’s father, had only come home one other time since Maisie and Felix had been with the family. His fierce expression and the large stick he carried everywhere with him made Maisie and Felix afraid to be around him. Even worse, he spoke in a loud, booming voice about how the Chinese were heathens and he meant to convert every last one of them. Pearl told them that so far he’d onlymanaged to convert about a dozen. But he refused to give up.
    After he left and went back up north, the whole house seemed to sigh with relief. Pearl told Maisie and Felix that he did not even mourn all the children he and her mother had lost. “He believes it’s selfish to cry for yourself when there’s an entire nation of heathens to cry for.”
    Now he was back.
    “Is he all right?” Mr. Kung asked.
    Mrs. Sydenstricker glanced at Pearl, then shook her head.
    “He had to close down chapels,” she added. “The landlords refused to rent to him because he’s a foreigner.”
    “What’s going on?” Maisie asked.
    “The Boxers,” Mrs. Sydenstricker said.
    “Mother, you know that’s not what they call themselves. They’re the Righteous Fists of Harmony,” Pearl said. “Only foreigners call them the Boxers.”
    Pearl’s mother looked at her. “Darling, we
are
foreigners. And your father reports that they are even more committed to ridding China of us.” She hesitated and then said, “They gave him a pretty bad beating. He has bruises everywhere.”
    “This is very worrisome,” Mr. Kung said quietly.
    Wang Amah came into the living room, wringing her hands. She said something in Chinese, and Pearl translated.
    “Amah says that they believe Westerners are responsible for the famine and floods that have struck parts of China. They