The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

Faye, a Chinese American nurse, is working with the American Volunteer Group in Kunming, China in 1942. Like the other nurses, she has signed a contract agreeing that she will not marry, and as she sits drinking and discussing this contract with another recruit, Lois, she hears a plane crash landing. Racing outside, she rescues pilot John Garland from the wreckage of his P-40 airplane. An American member of the Flying Tigers (a group of pilots sent to China to fight Japan), John loses consciousness at the crash scene and undergoes an operation. While she assists in the surgery, the surgeon commends Faye for her heroics. Faye afterward reads the unconscious man poetry, particularly Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and comments on “a familiar feeling like Ci cang soeng sik—waking from a dream,” which she describes as a “Chinese version of déjà vu [that] generally referred to two people who had met before” (13). While Faye is reading, John Garland has a seizure and dies. As Faye goes through his personal effects to figure out to whom to send his belongings, she finds a photo of herself from a newspaper. Odder still, “FIND ME” is written on the reverse in her own handwriting.