H.V. Chao‘s fiction has appeared in Epiphany and Le Visage Vert, and is forthcoming in Brèves. He is at work on a short story collection called Guises. He has never been to Shanghai.
Spring 2013
My Father’s Hand
My father was not a man to show anger, but to hold it in. He did the same with pain. When his mother died, he must have mentioned it at dinner. Maybe it was a month later that I snuck into his room, I can’t remember—long enough that the death of a woman I’d never met had slipped my mind.