My mother tried to be strong.
She went to work.
And made sure my younger brother, Elijah, and I continued going to school.
But I often heard her crying after she thought we were asleep.
The apartment became quiet in a way that frightened me.
Mrs. Lau noticed.
She began inviting me downstairs after school.
Sometimes I helped fold paper bags.
Sometimes I counted coins.
Sometimes I sat near the kitchen watching her prepare food.
She didn't force me to talk about my father.
She simply made room for me.
At first, I went because I liked the bakery.
Then I began going because the sound of people speaking Cantonese made the world feel alive again.
Mrs. Lau taught me words for ordinary things.
Then she began teaching me sentences.
She made me repeat them until I could hear the tones properly.
If I got something wrong, she corrected me.
But with the seriousness of someone who believed language deserved care.
"Listen first," she would say.
I learned that Cantonese wasn't simply Mandarin with a different accent.
It was a language with its own pronunciation, expressions, and rich everyday speech.
Mrs. Lau taught me through conversations rather than textbooks.
We talked about food.
And the stories she remembered from Hong Kong.
She told me about crowded streets.
Ferries crossing Victoria Harbour.
The importance of Lunar New Year.
And the first winter she spent in California, when she was astonished that people complained about rain while enjoying weather that would have felt mild elsewhere.
Sometimes she laughed at my questions.
Sometimes she answered with more questions.
And sometimes, when she missed her late husband, she became quiet in a way I understood.
We had both lost someone we loved.
Perhaps that was why we became so close.
By ten, I could speak enough Cantonese to hold simple conversations with her customers.
By thirteen, I could understand stories she told without translation.
By sixteen, I was studying written Chinese and learning to distinguish between the formal language used in documents and the Cantonese we spoke in the bakery.
Mrs. Lau was delighted.
But she never let me become arrogant.
One afternoon, I translated a customer's question badly and nearly gave him the wrong order.
Mrs. Lau corrected me.
"But I understood most of it."
She shook her head.
"Most isn't always enough."
I rolled my eyes.
She pointed toward the customer.
"If someone says no peanuts and you hear most of the sentence, what happens?"
She raised one eyebrow.
Then said quietly, "A little missing meaning can become a big problem."
I remembered those words years later when I first saw a forty-million-dollar difference hidden in a bilingual contract schedule.
But at sixteen, I was mostly embarrassed that I'd made a mistake in front of someone.
Mrs. Lau smiled.
Then handed me another pineapple bun.
"Eat. Then try again."
Language became the thing that made me feel capable when everything else seemed uncertain.
I loved mathematics too.
Numbers behaved differently from people.
They didn't care where you lived.
They didn't care what your parents earned.
They didn't care whether somebody thought you belonged in a room.
If a calculation was wrong, it was wrong.
If it was correct, anyone who understood the method could verify it.
I found comfort in that.
In high school, I took advanced mathematics and economics courses.
I joined a student business club.
And I helped Mrs. Lau organize her bakery's receipts after she complained that her bookkeeper's invoices were becoming too expensive.
I wasn't an accountant yet.
But I could create spreadsheets.
Track payments.
And identify where expenses were increasing.
The first time I showed Mrs. Lau a report explaining why one supplier was charging significantly more than another, she stared at me.
Then she laughed.
"You made the numbers speak."
"Something like that."
She nodded approvingly.
"Good. Make sure they tell the truth."