She had been reading children's books in English together with him for five or six hours a day. Since he watched a lot of TV, he had begun to pick up words, able to say "Uh-oh," "Okey-dokey," and even "Get lost." Having him with her, Pingping felt more certain how she would live. In the past years she had prepared herself mentally for returning to China, because Nan had planned to go back and teach at his alma mater, a small college in Harbin City. Yet whenever she dreamed of home, she'd have nightmares, in which she rushed around looking for a clean toilet but couldn't find one. Nan told her that modern restrooms had been put up in many Chinese cities lately; in fact, there had been a campaign to modernize the public facilities, and to use some of them you'd have to pay, like buying a cup of tea. Nan would joke, "Like no free lunch in America, there'll be no free bathrooms in China anymore. Too many people." Still, Pingping couldn't stop searching for a toilet in her dreams. But since Taotao came, her nightmares had mostly stopped and her head had grown clearer. Even if Nan changed his mind and returned to China someday, she'd live in America raising their child alone. She was sure of that.

Nan had come to the United States alone in the summer of 1985. A year and a half later Pingping had managed to leave China. But the officials wouldn't allow her to bring Taotao along for fear she might not return, so the boy stayed with her parents in Jinan City, a provincial capital more than two hundred miles south of Beijing. Soon after her arrival in Boston, Pingping told Nan that she wanted to save $20,000 before they went back home. That astonished Nan, to whom the figure was unreasonable, though he already had more than $3,600 in the bank. He had never cared about getting rich and would tease her, saying she was a born capitalist. Yet Pingping wanted financial independence, which meant a tidy sum in their bank account so that they wouldn't worry about getting a raise that had to be approved by officials at whose feet many people would grovel.