The evening’s reception was a resounding success. There must have been over 100 people in attendance!

Smiling through sweet sips of champagne, Mr. Wu gazed proudly around the pristine reception hall. The place was nothing short of immaculate, with its teak walls, jade sculptures, marble-top tables, and crystal chandeliers...

Mr. Wu drew in a deep breath. Then he nodded in satisfaction, and his eyes twinkled as he soaked in the sights and smells of the feast, and his ears perked up at the clinking of wine glasses, hum of chatter, and choruses of laughter.

This was it. His years were coming to fruition. He’d bought a big house and a fancy car. He’d married a beautiful woman and had a beautiful baby. Yes. This was it. He was on his way to being a true tiger. He could see it now. The IPO, the private planes, Swiss bank accounts, luxury ski trips, interviews on TV. It was happening. By Buddha, it was happening!

Mr. Wu’s daughter, Lin, eyed her father with disgust. Her eyes blazing as she sat rooted to her chair. Watching her father drink and be merry, it made her sick. Watching him brag about “his” business ... Ugh, it boiled her blood.

Lin hated everything about her father, starting with his personality. She hated him as a person, first and foremost. But she also really hated his appearance. Particularly his head. The shape of his head, it was weird. It was like a big, boiled egg, like his face was just a drawing on a boiled egg. Oh, and the way his forehead slopes at too sharp an angle, like a ramp, as it curves to his scalp, to her, that was also highly unnerving.

Not only did he have a big stupid weird head, but she hated his short legs and arms too. With his short legs and arms and big bald head, her father reminded her, unflatteringly, of a Mr. Potato Head doll.

How could any woman be with a man like that, she’d pondered, in dismay ... She’d suspected her mother had had an affair. That he wasn’t her real father.

God, she really hoped he wasn’t.

Mr. Wu’s wife, Shan, sat by his side, like always, steeped in silence. While Mr. Wu bloviated, Shan incessantly checked her phone, tapped on her tablet, kept track of products, sales, and clients. Shan was a shrewd, serious, silent, and solemn woman. A woman with eyes like crystal balls. A woman with eyes that always appeared to be staring directly at you, like an Andy Warhol painting.

Shan was a woman of few words. But when she spoke, her words were elegant and refined, shot at measured clips.

And when she spoke, people listened.

Lin glowered at her father, thinking of ways to kill him. She’d most enjoy murdering him with a blunt object of some sort, she fantasized. To feel the flaying of his flesh ... To feel his bones breaking as she beat him to death ... His big stupid head bursting and squishing open like a watermelon...

God, she hated her father. She hated him more than anyone. It was a secret hate, though, one she’d never confessed. It was a secret hate that manifested itself in fits of silence, lack of eye contact, and, during college, a series of online “hookups” with older men, of varying ethnicities.

She’d read once that a woman’s first relationship with a man is the father/daughter relationship, how that sets the tone for all future relationships with men.

The mere thought of that made her want to jump off a bridge.

As usual, they left before the drinking games began. Above them hung an inky-black, starless sky, featuring only a fuzzy outline of its low-hanging crescent moon, and Lin and Shan crossed through the parking lot, in lockstep, arm in arm, stepping swiftly in the heavy cold and its growing darkness.

Shan clutched Lin’s arm tighter. Her opal eyes bulged. Then she peered around, panoramically, and swung her gaze, touched her lips to Lin’s left ear, and whispered in wet hot pulses that perhaps the car had been bugged. That Lin’s father had possibly planted a listening device in the vehicle’s dashboard.