Excerpt from Confessions of Madame Psyche

Because I lost my mother when I was only eight years old, every shred of memory of her is precious, but the shreds are meager. She brought no documents with her when she fled the Jade Palace. If any existed elsewhere in the City, they were destroyed in the 1906 quake, as was my birth record, which might have given her full name. When I asked her about China, she described a land of dragons and river gods. When I asked how she had come to America, she said that beautiful goddesses had woven her into the corner of a rich brocade which was then rolled up and sent to America. When the brocade was unrolled by an art dealer, she said, she leaped out of it and ran away to Hunters Point, where she found me in a basket of shrimp, swallowed me, nurtured me in her body, and, when I was big enough to nag at her for my freedom, spat me out.

I had been born so beautiful that the water goddess who lived in the Bay was jealous. That was why I must never swim out too far in the water, and that was why I must always obey my mama, because disobedient, beautiful children were easily caught by jealous goddesses who would not let them return to their mama until they had performed awesome tasks.

Instead of being frightened by her story, I was delighted and begged my mother to invent one story after another of my disobedience and capture by the water goddess. The high point of each story was the terrible task imposed by the envious water goddess.