Two Skies, One Girl / 两片天空，一个女孩

两片天空，一个女孩 / Two Skies, One Girl

The dust was still falling when she found it.

She had been sitting on the floor of Nai Nai's bedroom for nearly an hour, sorting through a cardboard box of letters, silk scarves, and jade pendants that no one else in the family had known what to do with. Outside, the late-October wind was pulling the last of the persimmon leaves off the old tree in the backyard. Inside, everything smelled of cedar and camphor—the scent that older Chinese women use to keep moths out of wool and rot out of memory.

Lily Chen was fifteen years old, and she had just lost the person who had taught her how to look at the sky.

Underneath a stack of 1980s Hong Kong movie magazines and a brittle envelope of black-and-white photographs taken on the cliffs of Galway, her fingers closed around something that did not belong. A notebook, smaller than a paperback, bound in faded blue cloth, its spine hand-stitched with red thread. On the cover, drawn in ink that had gone the color of dried plum, was a figure that made her breath catch.

A dragon. Not the cartoon kind you see on New Year's posters, but a long, sinuous, ink-brushed 龙, its scales suggested in quick wet strokes, its eyes two gold dots that seemed to follow her across the room. Wrapped around the dragon—or being chased by it—was a constellation she recognized from her astronomy textbook: Orion. The three stars of the hunter's belt were rendered in silver, the surrounding nebula picked out in pale blue, the whole Western sky pinned to the page as if by the dragon's tail.

She had never seen the two together before. In every book she had ever read, dragons lived in the East and Orion lived in the West. They were not supposed to share a cover. They were certainly not supposed to share a sky.

She opened the notebook.

The first page, in her grandmother's careful brushwork, read:

> 五行札记 > *Wǔxíng Zhájì* > *Notes on the Five Phases*

And underneath, in smaller characters, almost an afterthought:

> *"凡得此书者，愿你学到我花了六十年才学会忘记的事。"* > *"For whoever finds this: may you learn what I had to spend sixty years unlearning."*

That was how Lily Chen—half-Chinese, half-Irish, daughter of a Teochew mother and a Galway father, raised in Vancouver between dim sum and soda bread—found herself holding a book that asked a question she had never thought to ask:

Why do the East and the West both look up at the sky to make sense of what happens down here?

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1. A Girl Who Lives in Two Tenses

To understand how Lily came to be holding that notebook, you have to understand where she came from. Because the question on the cover—*why two skies?*—was already living inside her before she ever opened it. It had been living in her kitchen, in her name, in the way she pronounced certain words, in the way she apologized and the way she celebrated, for as long as she could remember.

Her grandmother on her mother's side—Nai Nai, *奶奶*—was born in 1934 in a village outside Chaozhou, in the eastern province of Guangdong. Her name, before marriage, was Lin Xiuying (林秀英), which means "elegant and brave forest." She grew up in a courtyard house with a wooden altar to the kitchen god, a family shrine to the ancestors, and a grandfather who read the *I Ching* by oil lamp. She learned, before she learned to read, that the year you were born in determines the *bāzì* (八字)—the "eight characters" of your birth moment—and that those eight characters tell you which of the five phases (木 wood, 火 fire, 土 earth, 金 metal, 水 water) you carry inside you like a fingerprint.

Her grandfather on her father's side—Daideó, *granddad* in Irish—was born in 1941 on a farm outside Galway, on the west coast of Ireland. His name was Seán Ó Conchúir, which in English becomes Sean O'Connor. He grew up in a stone cottage with a turf fire, a statue of Saint Brigid in the front hall, and a great-grandmother who could name the constellations by heart because her father had been a sailor and she had learned the sky as a second language. He believed, in the soft way of people who live on islands and look at water, that the month you were born under determines your sun sign, and that the position of the planets at the moment of your first breath leaves a print on your soul that no priest can wash off.

Two grandfathers. One looked up at the sky and saw the *Five Phases* cycling through wood, fire, earth, metal, water—the same way the seasons cycle, the same way the body cycles through breath and blood, the same way a teakettle boils and a forest burns and a mountain weathers into sand. The other looked up at the sky and saw twelve *zodiac signs* marching around the sun—Aries the ram, Taurus the bull, Gemini the twins, all the way around to Pisces the fish—each one a temperament, a story, a small portable myth you could carry in your pocket.

Two grandfathers, two skies. And Lily, born in Vancouver in the year of the Wood Snake under a Cancer moon, growing up in the middle.

Her mother, Meilin (美琳), had emigrated to Canada at twenty-two to do a master's in library science. Her father, Patrick, had emigrated at twenty-four to do a master's in marine biology. They met in the stacks of the University of British Columbia, fell in love over a shared copy of *The Odyssey*, and produced, nine months later on a rainy Tuesday in November, a baby girl who weighed six pounds, four ounces, and who came out crying in a pitch that the midwife said sounded almost musical.

Meilin wanted to name her 莉莉, *Lily*, after the flower and after her own mother. Patrick, who had by then learned enough Chinese to make himself understood and not enough to make himself safe, agreed happily, because *Lily* was also an English word, and it meant the same flower on both sides of his daughter's future.

From the very beginning, then, Lily's name was a bridge. 莉莉. Lily. The same sound, the same flower, two languages, one girl.

She grew up speaking English to her father, Teochew to her mother, and a kind of careful bilingual patois to Nai Nai, who understood English perfectly well but insisted, on principle, that *a proper granddaughter should speak her own tongue*. She went to a public school where she learned the Western zodiac the way everyone does: through horoscopes in teen magazines, through the bit-part astrology of group chats, through the way her friends would say *I'm such a Scorpio* as if it explained their entire personality.

But she also learned the Chinese calendar the way Nai Nai taught it: through the year stickers on the lunar calendar in the kitchen, through the way her grandmother would stroke her head on her birthday and murmur, *"This year the wood in you meets the fire in the year. Be careful of your temper in summer."* Through the way her mother would refuse to sign a contract in a *yin* year without first checking with a fortune teller. Through the slow, daily, unspectacular practice of looking up at a sky that everyone, in every culture, has always looked up at, and asking it the same question: *what am I, and what am I becoming?*

It never occurred to Lily, until the day she opened the blue notebook, that the question was the same.

She thought she was living in two different systems. She thought one was for her mother's side and the other was for her father's side. She thought they were two separate languages, like Teochew and English, that you switched between depending on who was in the room.

She did not yet realize that she was holding the answer in her hands.

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2. The Eastern Artifact: Nai Nai's 五行札记

The notebook had 168 pages, and almost every one of them was full.

The handwriting was a mix of two styles. The early pages, in a darker, more confident ink, were written in traditional Chinese characters, in the brush-influenced *kǎishū* (楷书) script that her grandmother had been taught in a village school in the 1940s. The later pages, in a paler, more hesitant ink—the ink of someone whose hands had begun to tremble—were written partly