Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
“And we would,” Vera said, “if we could get out of here—”
“This boy,” Black Spot interrupted, and looked toward Rupert,
“he can helping us. He can making us invisible. He can disappearing
us. Then SLORC cannot finding us.” Black Spot added a version of
what Rupert had been heard to say with his card tricks: “Now you
seeing, now you not.”
My friends looked at one another. Moff broke the news: “It was a
magic trick. He can’t really make anything disappear.”
“How you know?” Black Spot said.
“He’s my son,” Moff said.
Black replied: “He also Younger White Brother to Karen people.”
My friends decided it was no use arguing with the boatman. They
would have to find their own way out.
T HAT EVENING, Rupert was the first to shiver. Moff felt his son’s
forehead and whispered in a hoarse voice verging on panic: “Malaria.”
Others would follow over the next few days—Wendy, Wyatt,
Dwight, Roxanne, Bennie, and Esmé—knocked down one by one
with bone-racking chills and delirium-inducing fever. Those who
had not yet taken sick were occupied with tending their compatriots
and frantically warding off buzzing mosquitoes they now viewed as
mortal enemies.
But it was not these female mosquitoes that infected them with the
Plasmodium parasites. It takes at least a week for the parasites to in­
cubate before bursting from the liver. Seven days earlier, they were in
China. Seven days earlier, they were being cursed by the Bai minority
chief at Stone Bell Mountain. As Miss Rong had told them before
she left, the chief had promised that from here on out, trouble would
follow them wherever they went and for the rest of their days. And
even before she informed them, he had already made good on his
word, for at the very next rest stop after visiting the grottoes, the mo­
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