Sounds become muffled.
Shadows pool in corners, poised to spread as soon as the key turns in the lock. So it is with Michael David Kwan's haunting memoir, nonfiction winner of the 2000 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, which begins in the mid-1930s, just as the privileged world into which he has been born starts its terrifying disintegration. Cosseted by servants in his father's Bavarian-style mansion behind the high stone walls of the Legation Quarter in Beijing, David watches his comfortable world unravel. His loss of innocence is brutal and complete when, during the disastrous 1938 flood of the Hai River, he views the devastation with his beloved nanny, from the high window of his bedroom. I am,' she said.