Julian is almost a year and a half old. The furniture is pulled away from the southern corner of the living room, where his babysitter, Liu Yen, practices Chi Gung each day. When I come home, Julian is lying in her lap. She holds his hand with the pink palm up.

"How was he today?" I ask, tossing my bags and kicking off shoes at the same time.

"Oh, OK," she says, looking at her slippered feet.

She is still mad about our conversation yesterday. That must be it. I had told her for the last time that Julian must not go in any cars without his car seat. It's not only dangerous, I told her, it's illegal. I had tried to make my ultimatum less personal, less my own neurotic mothering. Liu Yen didn't like being told to do anything. It's why she married a younger man, a taboo in her culture. It's why she took part in the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. It's why she left China.

"Is anything the matter?" I ask.

Liu Yen speaks softly, but her eyes are direct, sure in their gaze to the floor, then to me. She holds Julian's fat little starfish hands that never stop grasping at things.

"I have thought many times to leave here," she says.

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Flipping through stacks of pictures, I make two piles: Those to include in the albums and those to return to their envelopes. There are so many to choose from, so many I'll have to leave out of these stories I'm about to tell. Yet the bigger challenge is accepting the difference between the stories in the photos and the stories in my memory. Again and again, I open an envelope and find one truth while remembering the same moments in time as a starkly different truth.

As I sift through the photos of Julian's first years, I realize how random
the moments were when his father, John, and I were inspired to pick up a
camera. Even more unsettling is how random my choices are of what to
include in his album. Will a pattern emerge from the chaos? Will pages of parties, baths and beach trips form a kind of photographic fractal? Is it irrelevant which photos I choose? Maybe all I can hope for is that whichever pictures I paste onto these pages will tell one true story.

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