Summary

The family arrived in Twentynine Palms, CA, where Ama's daughter Kathy lived with her two grandchildren. Grace was horrified to find the house made of metal, the yard dingy and dried out, and a half-deflated bounce house in the front yard. Grace struggled to figure out Ama's age, and Kathy's. The reader can see through Grace's inability to figure out the other women's ages that Ama must have been very young while she was Charles's wet nurse. Kathy's grandchildren were the product of a mix marriage between Kathy's daughter (who remains unnamed) and a man from the Dominican Republic. Despite their usual disapproval of Chinese marrying outside their own ethnicity, Charles and Barbara both agreed the children are "well mixed" (81). Grace compared this to a time when her father and stepmother called one of her school friends "mixed ugly" (81).

As Grace registered her...