brilliant meaning. Japan, I was told one day at school, had the rising sun; symbol of hope and of some unspecified future promise. 
          "Which country has the setting sun?" I asked, that night at home. I was full of annoying questions.
          "No country," said my father. "Go run round in the backyard."
          I never seemed to get enough answers. 
           Sheryl and I knew what to do. If we couldn't be American, we would pretend to be. We read Nancy Drew and Archie comics, watched endless reruns of Little House on the Prairie and made appalling stabs at the American accent. We listened to Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. My favourite song was The Gambler; I knew all the words. Sheryl was in love with Magnum P.I. 

          Kane, an avid reader of history books, had tried to talk to us about the Munroe Doctrine, the New Deal, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Martin Luther King, Vietnam, the Cold War, but we didn't care about all of that. We wanted the culture of America, not the history. Happy Days, not Watergate. And then there was Hallo-ween. This particular custom was considered to be one of our favourite country's finer points. We decided to appropriate it, to make it ours. 

          A week before October the thirty-first, we decided we would haunt our neighbourhood, taking from the locals what sweets we could. I didn't really know what would be involved in this, though I had vague ideas about pumpkins and ghouls. Sheryl filled me in on the finer points.  
          "Basically," she said, "you go round knocking on doors dressed up as something scary, making vague threats and they give you stuff. Usually candy. And what you say is 'trick or treat?' It's a

 

                                                                                             

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