Bat has said something that most in our fishing camp cannot believe. A male shrimp can become a female. He cuts them open, not to eat or sell, but to examine. The males die sooner he explains, becoming a female is a matter of survival. Xin says he doesn't believe this; it goes against all nature. He also says such experiments are wasteful. Why study what can be sold? But that is why we call Bat as we do; his mind hangs upside down.

I, for one, believe Bat. What was once one thing can become another. It is an idea everyone here should understand. In China, we were fathers, sons and now, we are quite another: bachelors and orphans, all of us. I was once a tailor with a plate glass window and bolts of embroidered silk; now I mend nets and sails and peel the speckled shells from the grass shrimp that wander the muddy bottoms of this ghostland bay. Here, we become what is necessary to live.

Our fishing camp, one of dozens along this coast, sits on a bend in the shore like the shallow curve of an oyster. Two small hills rise to either side and it is halfway up one of these slopes, tucked between sweet yellow grass and bitter green blades of Eucalyptus, that Xin and I share a cabin. Xin left this morning for San Francisco, crossing the bay in the new shirt I sewed for him. Like most, he will send money home to his wife and if there is extra, sleep with his whore. I no longer ask about such things. Like most, he still dreams of returning home to Canton, to Pearl River. I do not. I wrote my wife, Tell them I have died. You are free.

Bat and I sit on his porch sipping black tea. It is a late February afternoon like any other, clear and very cool; a brush-like wind paints everything with salt. Ahead, six men rub tung oil on the redwood hull of a beached sampan. In this camp, there are only two seasons: shrimping and waiting to shrimp. Xin says my fingers are too fine for planting nets and that my bones are as thin as an egret's. I like it when he says this. In a few weeks, the season will begin again. But there is always work; even now my mending basket waits. I ignore it and as always, look for Xin's boat to return.

Here is what I see: the water's edge runs like a thick white seam connecting a blue silk swath to burlap sands. A dock juts out, its weathered piers like rough stitches. Button boats rise and fall beyond the break. The world is a perfect robe, I tell Bat even though I know this camp, this life is far from perfection. Just a dozen miles away, San Francisco breaks its back to rebuild from quake and fire; so many still in tents. But the city is not visible from our little bend and however hard San Francisco must work, it is no more than us. At this moment, I feel that all we need is here.

“The emperor's robe is the world,” Bat gently corrects. We list the elements that must appear on the Son of Heaven's brilliant yellow robes: the nine dragons with feet of five claws, the four mountains, the twelve symbols of luck, each a small prayer on the tongue. I do not know how Bat knows such things but I have learned not to ask about the life before this one.

“The emperor will fall,” Bat says suddenly. He does not mean that the emporer will die; the Son of Heaven is still a child. Bat squints as if the coming change were visible over the breakwater. “More tea?” he asks.

*

For over a year, Xin and I have shared two rooms; one with a stove and table and the other for sleeping. Over the months, I have pushed our bed mats together, movements as small as stitches. Once Xin noticed and pushed the beds apart, but the next day, I began to move them back and he has not pushed them away since. Tonight, they almost touch.

When Xin returns, I have already lighted the lantern. His long braid is gone.

“You look like a ghost,” I tell him and hold up the flame to see his new American haircut. I cannot imagine him returning to Pearl River now.

“It is easier this way,” he explains. It could mean any number of things. Then he looks at the bedrolls. “You have cleaned,” he says, nothing more.

Xin lights a second lantern and reads to me from a paper bought in the city. The ghost mayor wants to rebuild the crumbled Chinatown at the city's fringes. I light the stove against the falling fog and we eat a simple soup of bass and scallions. Xin lights one cigarette after another. Twice, he opens the front door to stare at nothing. The voices of drunken men outside Quan's grocery carry up the hill. Xin is restless; he has not been to see his whore.

Later, when the room is dark, I picture the emperor's ceremonial robes. To wear the universe! To face a certain direction, to recite a certain prayer, to make a certain offering. There was a time when I took comfort in the thought of an ordered world, times when even here, I felt the reach of the emperor's pale, perfect hands. But the world is not still; eventually, everything shifts like the tides and now I find myself thinking of what Bat has said, of grass shrimp, of the speckled brown bodies that wander these muddy flats. One thing can become another. I touch Xin's cropped hair where his braid used to fall. Husband, I whisper. Xin turns towards me and I open my robe to show him what I too, have become.