Two Trees Make a Forest. Jessica J. Lee

      Half the world away, in a different country, I watched Gong fold dumplings the way he had learned at his mother’s hip seven decades earlier. He was nimble-fingered and gentle, and each dumpling was perfect on the plate. He shaped and laid out each folded bundle with care, offering them, perhaps, for inspection to a friendly, familiar ghost.

SHAN

      n. MOUNTAIN; HILL

       Mountains are shaped amid opposing forces: even as they are forced upward from the ground below, erosion wears them away.

5

      AT FIVE IN THE MORNING, IN THE HAZE-BLUE period before light catches the mountains, I shuffle off the futon bed and onto the floor next to me. The others still sleep—their breaths catching every so often on their journeys toward waking—as I lace my boots and zip up my fleece, tracking my way silently to the door on rubber-soled tiptoes. The latch is dew-covered, and my hand slips as I press the door shut behind me.

      The vale hangs heavy with clouds, and in that blue light, at the right angle, everything glistens. The deepest gash of the slopes is still shadowed, but in minutes the contours of the peaks grow haloed. Sun creeps into the morning around the eastern hillside and onto the terrace on which I stand, slightly chilled but warming at the thought of breakfast to come: coffee and steaming congee with salted turnip omelet.