I knew a girl who only ate white things. Told by her mother it would make her lighter, though it only worked on her eyelashes. When she blinked, her cheekbones were seasoned with a kind of dandruff. The girl ate pears, navy beans, flanks of cod cooked in tinfoil, Q-tips, sofa stuffing, boneless chicken wings (minus the skin), candles (wicks too), handfuls of salt, baby teeth. We dated for a while, snuck into movies, climbed over the fence to the train tracks, kicked around all the things people dumped there: dead vacuum cleaners, mattresses with stains in the center, a box-set of DVDs about deep-sea creatures. Wherever we went, she brought a ziploc bag of white things to snack on: her nai-nai’s hair (plucked off the curlers), lollipops (just the sticks), a ball of floss. She offered me the bag, asked if I was hungry, but I always said no, not for that. All the white stuff reminded me of the time I found a single bloodless finger in the dumpster behind the restaurant. It was throned on a dented soda can. Bruised around the knuckles. I couldn’t tell which finger it was, maybe the fourth finger, one of the forgettable ones. I thought about that finger for a long time, especially while I was working in the restaurant and watching the customers pick up bones with their chopsticks and mop their mouths with the napkins. I looked at their hands while they ordered or paid the bill or waved me down for more water. None of them found this rude. They must have thought I was bowing my head in Oriental deference.

One time on a date, the girl was sucking on a molar, moving it from cheek to cheek, and when I asked her where she got the tooth from, she told me her aunt was a dentist in Arcadia and kept all the extracted teeth in a locked drawer, all kinds of teeth, rotten ones and wisdom ones and broken ones and infant ones. The dentist-aunt liked to open up the drawer and scoop up the teeth and rattle them in her fist like dice. No one in my family had ever gone to a dentist before. On the news there was a story about a woman who went to a scam dentist and got drugged and molested and dumped in a parking lot. My mother said that’s why you never trust people who tell you to lie down on your back, doctors included. When she burned her hands at the restaurant, her skin spiraled off in ribbons and the scars hardened in rock formations, but she still didn’t go to a doctor. Her hands looked like canyons. You could get lost inside them for days, traversing ridges and folds and valleys. After she fried her hands, my mother stopped her sewing work and I had to learn to use the Singer. She showed me how to take in a waist, how to make a buttonhole. I liked to flick the tip of my tongue through the slit of the buttonhole, web it with my spit, make the girl moan as I did it.

The girl and I went on maybe six dates, but when I tried to kiss her, she said her mouth had too many tenants. Like who, I said. Like all my teeth, my tongue, and two-and-a-half languages. I thought that made sense. I also had a half-language. When I spoke Taiwanese, it came out fermented, all the words pickled. Di sai. Li jia sai. Shao za bo. The girl laughed when I said them, said I sounded like a man. I drove her around in my mother’s Honda Civic, taped the glovebox closed because it kept opening into her lap, spilling cough drops and a BB gun and a pair of dentures I don’t know whose. The girl lived north of me in Monterey Park and her mother was an accountant, and sometimes when I dropped her off, I pretended her house was mine and I was the one returning to it. It had two stories and big windows I thought about driving into. I’d accelerate through her living room, wreck everything she’d ever touched. The house was always bright because of the windows, and I thought of my grandfather’s apartment that was dark because he’d boarded up the windows. Last month a robber had broken in through the balcony and taken the box TV and also the jade urn with my grandmother’s ashes. None of us had liked my grandmother, but the urn was a kind of bone-jade that’s translucent in certain lights, that looks like fog in another city, a cloud pulled apart like bread. After that, we decided to put our dead people in protein-powder jars.

The apartment before, we’d gotten evicted for putting too many people in one room. I think we even had the cousins sleeping in the bathtub. The bathtub fell through the floor one day, crashing down into the apartment below, and my three baby cousins were asleep inside it. Didn’t even wake up, not even when a piece of ceiling fell on their faces and flattened them. That’s what my family is, heavy sleepers. My grandfather said he even slept through the day Nantong fell to the Japanese. Woke up to the rivers cement-thick with dead people and oxen and chickens and the sky folding itself up to quit. The army had shot everyone in the house but him. When my mother sleeps, she looks dead too, her eyelids only half-buttoned, her tongue swelling like an udder full of sour-milk dreams. That’s the way to be safe, my grandfather said: resemble the dead.

I told the girl this story once. She said it was sad, but I thought it was pretty funny. Him waking up in a house full of dead people, being the only one left out, still living. The dogs were shot, too. He’d had two dogs, born attached to each other. They’d been separated with a cleaver. Dogs tall as horses, black pelts, stars on their foreheads. There’re strays all over this city. The girl never noticed them. In the parking of a Ranch 99, we ate our bingbang side-by-side, hers lychee, mine mango. I offered her a lick of mine but she said she couldn’t mix colors on her tongue. We watched the traffic, the cars nosing each other’s asses like dogs do when they meet each other. When she stood up, I got behind her and started nosing between her shoulder-blades, sniffing. She laughed and said something in Taiwanese, a word I didn’t know, and it was the most we ever touched. Later, when I was home, my grandfather was asleep on the couch. Even with the TV stolen, he liked to face the wall and watch the shadows on it, liked to catch up on the movement of the sun. I was hoping he might wake up and summarize the news for me like he always did, making up half the stories. A girl was caught stealing the moon, he might say. Rolled it out of the sky like a stolen tire. Or a girl was caught robbing a dentist. The only thing she stole was a plaster cast of a jaw. Or a car chase ended earlier this afternoon when both cars transformed into dogs. Days later, the drivers were pooped out. But he was asleep, and my mother too. In the bedroom, I lay down next to her and counted the popcorn on the ceiling. The fan turned clockwise, then reversed time and went the other way. I drove back to that girl’s house a few times, even after the summer was over and we both got busier. I heard she was interning at her aunt’s dentistry practice. I wondered if she ever stole teeth from the drawer to eat.

Outside her house, I saw her through the big windows, holding up a bald apple like a lantern. When it was night, I got out of my mother’s car and tried the door a few times, strangled the knob with both hands, but it didn’t open. I don’t know why I did it, who I wanted to wake, but I looked all over the street for something to throw through the window. Of course there wasn’t anything, so I used my fist. Punched it a few times, but the glass didn’t even have the courtesy to crack. Double-paned, probably, to block out street house. Because this is the kind of family that can afford silence. Then some kind of alarm went off, and I should have run, but I was too busy looking up, looking at each room of the house light up. It looked like a TV winter, that much light at once, a whole blizzard of it. And I heard the people inside waking up, coming down the stairs, ready for an intruder.

When we got robbed, my mother and I checked under the bed to see if they’d stolen the painting she’d bought at a flea market and claimed was famous, when really it was just a sheet of rice paper with two strokes of ink on it like eyebrows: - - We checked the bathroom too, behind the toilet where we kept our citizenship papers in a burnt-yellow folder. Checked the oven where we kept the plates made of bone, but other than the urn full of my grandmother, nothing was gone that hadn’t always been gone.

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow and Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her debut novel BESTIARY is forthcoming from One World / Random House in September 2020. She lives in New York.