We spent the week touring factories in southern China, and Thanksgiving morning found us in Shenzhen where we were met at our hotel by our account manager at a plastics factory, a miniature firecracker who had chosen the English name Linda. She started calling Porter “Harry Potter” right off, which set his mouth in a flat line until mom’s raised eyebrow and a subtle death threat convinced him to dredge a smile from his emergency supply. It might have made him feel better if I’d pointed out that he had a couple inches on her and could probably take her in a fair fight, a fact made all the more startling as Porter is barely nine and Linda was wearing four-inch heels hidden under her long pants, though we couldn’t see that detail until hours later when we were all racing tandem bicycles around a lake in an obscure manufacturing town with a name that included an assortment of Fangs and Dongs.

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