Chasing Halley

In 1986, eight-year-old Eddie Lau's father pulled him from a bed that smelled of mothballs and Tiger Balm to see Halley's Comet over Malaysia. He looked up for three seconds. He went back to sleep. From the kitchen, he heard his father say to his mother: mei you hao qi xin. The boy lacks the heart for wondering.

He carried those words across an ocean and through forty years. Now he is forty-seven, settled in Louisiana, with a wife who has waited out every kind of weather and a non-speaking son who rolls paper napkins into tight white cylinders and moves through the world in patterns only he can read. A scan lights up his skeleton like a constellation. Stage IV. Metastatic. The comet returns in 2061. He likely will not.

In the quiet that follows, he finally sees what those napkins have been. Comet tails. Drawn, for eleven years, by the only Lau who never stopped looking up.

Chasing Halley moves from a sugarcane field in 1910 Fujian, where a boy hiding from armed men decides to follow the sky out of China; to a Malaysian childhood measured in exam results and departure dates; to the ordinary Louisiana nights when a father learns that presence is the only inheritance that outlasts him.

A memoir about what we sleep through, what we inherit, and the people who wake us. It is also a promise-made in 1986, due in 2061-by a man who intends to be there.