Shaman Summary

The narrator's mother has a medical diploma from China, which was airmailed over in 1950 in a can. When the narrator opens the can, she claims that the smell of China flies out of it. Inside the can are three scrolls, which are stamped and signed by numerous officials. The narrator looks at a photo of her mother's graduating class and sees that she is thirty-seven even though her diploma says twenty-seven. The narrator feels that her mother looks younger than her, intelligent, alert, and pretty, but she cannot tell if her mother is happy. The narrator comments that emigrants learn to stare in America, and compares this formal picture to those of the laughing photos of her father in America. There are no snapshots of the narrator's mother, but she notices thumbprints on her mother's forehead in two small portraits and cannot figure...