The following excerpt is from my upcoming short story collection, China Girl. For more on China Girl, including release and purchase info, visit the China Girl page.
We did not want to attract attention. America is a new place, my father told us, and it was best to merge, be no different from the others. Thus denim pants. Yellow plastic barrette in my hair. Braces to straighten my teeth. Once upon a time, our first home was an old brown building that reeked of janitor soap and gas. On a window sill broad enough for flower pots, my parents insisted on rosemary shrubs—good for cooking, good for keeping the insects away, good for shelter against everything except the people who lived above us. They blasted their music, thump-ba-thump-ba-thump rattling in my head, as if it was coming from inside me. They would toss their cigarettes out their windows and the butts would land in the rosemary, scorch holes in them, leave an after-scent that was like coal. My father collected a pail full of butts, that’s how many they threw, and presented it to those upstairs people very politely, all Rodney King-like, can’t we get along? They would slam the door on him, spit nonsensical Oriental-sounding words at him. And then I knew two things for the first time. First, this country is a battlefield. To win, you had to swell with aggression, and refuse to compromise. Second, my father was a coward. This conclusion didn’t arrive all at once, but when he returned from upstairs in defeat, there was something in the way his mouth went slack that stayed with me, and later the image coalesced into a notion: He is a coward. Seven years old at the time, already burning passion, I yelled at those upstairs people to stop, chucked pebbles at their windows, but all that did was make them angry: Shut up, ching-chong motherfucker! I wanted to bust down their door, rip down wallpaper that I imagined was sun-bleached and sad, knock over furniture and belongings, tell them they were assholes, because I was a good girl, and I wasn’t going to sink to their level and use the f-word. I recited this plan out loud, every detail, down to the asshole, and my mother heard. She slapped me in the head for bad language. Like the time I was trying to open a package of donuts, my hand slipped and I yelled Shit! She hit me then too, and for me the word shit means a bunch of powdered donuts scattering tragically to the floor. I fell flat to eat them anyway. You cannot waste anything, not a single speck of sugar. So I lapped it up, tongue to hardwood like a cat. And Mother, horrified, treated me just like a cat, thrusting her broom at me, and the straw poked me in the eyes, scratched my face. Yet later she was very reasonable, and said: People who use bad language are out of ideas. You’re smart enough to always have ideas. Always.
The soldiers created a game out of it, I am told. A test to eradicate the coward inside you, vanquish every single fiber of being that does not allow you to attain your full potential. It was a diversion from the damn heat, the dust that stung their eyes, the sewers poisoned with dysentery and rotted limbs. If it had been winter, it would have been different. Snow to drink, water boiling all day and night. But in the summer, in the midst of drought, gas was rationed, hardly enough to even burn the prisoners’ bodies. They tried, but the corpses could only burn halfway—the husks remained, blackened rusty gnarled trunks sprouting from the earth like contagion. Perhaps a tiny sliver of conscience remained in their souls, and the sight of the corpses was disturbing to them. So they created this game. Prisoners were lined up by the dozens, and the prisoners greatly outnumbered the soldiers, and yet the prisoners’ eyes held only pleading, fear, supplication, which infuriated the soldiers all the more. What an utter lack of pride and will and resistance—not even the desire to survive. Worse than animals. The game would begin with the commander instructing the newly arrived conscripts: It must be one swift, sure stroke. Observe! And with that his blade swooped, a prisoner’s head severed cleanly. Soon all of them were taking their turns, racing to see who would accumulate the most heads, the most accurate blows. The inexperienced troops couldn’t get it right at first—heads would dangle from bodies, connected by flaps of skin, bobbling in place, and more blows were required to fully sever them. Through it all the prisoners never moved. They only trembled, cried out, muttered words to their gods in their own guttural language. Shut up! the soldiers would shriek, and they doubled their pace, just to quiet them all. Soon, inevitably, blood would run down the soldiers’ faces and clothes, and it was strangely refreshing, even as the ground turned to mud with the blood and sank under their feet.
Tonight there is much ceremony and rejoicing, and thank you all for coming, I want to dedicate this on behalf of, without whom, thank you again. The waiters in their cute little half-tuxedos smile at me, and I want to ask, How do you feel? Really? Business cards are passed to me: people’s entire lives and reason for being condensed into razor-thin slices of 80-pound paper stock, a multitude of them in my hands. Let’s talk sometime. I really cannot handle this responsibility. But nonetheless, I exhort my colleagues, give private little pep talks, You should take on that job… I’ve heard about that diet and I think you should try it… Grab these opportunities, recognize how lucky you are. I have written a single book, a straightforward chronicle of war crimes, and now I seemingly know everything. I leave rows of smiles in my wake, like tiny explosions. Pats on the shoulder, proper and friendly kisses on each cheek. Why am I here? Restatement: I know why I am here, but not the true why, because nothing has been done, nothing prevented. Events have been documented. That is all I have accomplished. In American society, there is no honor in merely observing. I am an instrument. Something blows a wind through me, my mouth moves, my fingers jump up and down like keys. I finish my fourth glass of wine, head throbbing, skin filled to bursting. Someone says, What’s your next masterpiece? General laughter, as far away as the wind whipping through the exhibition hall’s statue-gray courtyard. Above all, only one thought, stark as the flashbulbs that drone on ceaselessly, directed at myself: You are nothing. How dare I think that way, how self-absorbed, but this is not about me, this is about the thought, this is outside my purview, and I hold one hand to my head, the other to my mouth, not sure which one will erupt first, and all the while, You are nothing you are nothing you are nothing you are nothing you are nothing you are nothing you are nothing.
I catalog because this is meaning. What can be seen, counted, pointed to—these are the things that matter. Three hundred thousand died, but then some claim two hundred thousand, and some even say barely anyone at all. Why not be inclusive and say Far too many died. Quantity shouldn’t matter, but it does, because everything is not the same, we cannot tolerate same, there is no point to same. My set of tragic deaths is more important than your set of tragic deaths. A number becomes a story, statistical significance becomes tangible priority. What about the Yangtze flood of 1975? Over two hundred thousand people wiped off the map, and history was unaware for twenty years. But there must be a number. With a number comes responsibility, demands. You must apologize for this, you must acknowledge this, it is criminal not to be cognizant of it. With the crumpling and burning of a piece of paper containing research, a miniature bonfire, I could make it all disappear. The solar system explodes in eight hundred million years, and none of this will be of consequence to anyone.
Kill them all. That was the directive. The invading commander was disbelieving at first. Then it was all solid, a part of his life, like the ground under his feet. The order from Imperial Command was incontrovertible, with no hint of ambiguity. Still, he would have to communicate this properly to the soldiers. For them, the words would have no taste. But say the word food, in either the locals’ tongue or the soldiers’ mother language, and civilian and soldier alike would cradle their stomachs, look to the cloudless sky, mouths gaping, ready to accept anything. Then a short blessed rain, the grass going green for a triumphant week, and they all scrambled to collect it and eat it, some chewing on the spot, sprawled out like crippled snakes. Perched atop the city wall, underneath the shade of his immaculate umbrella, the invading commander witnessed all this, and with the trembling fingers of an artist, raked a cloth across his brow. He had come to realize how he would have to communicate to his men. And so a week later, the grass gone, the soldiers gathered in a restaurant bombed to a ruin, candlelight spastic on the walls. They fondled chopsticks and porcelain spoons, reduced to imagining, some of them clasping chafed hands over the flames, as if the fire itself was a great delicacy just out of reach. The commander said, Food, and the soldiers convulsed in reflexive response. There is not enough of it, the commander continued. Too many people. There is only one way to remedy the situation. This the soldiers could understand, and in the dim light their eyes danced, while in the distance the midnight watch sounded the bell.
The noise in my ear simply will not go away. It began a few weeks before, as I was handing in the proofs of the new book. I was thinking, And soon this will be sent to Publisher’s Weekly, The New York Review of Books, and it will be up to them, and bang, there it was. Both ears, it would have been fine, but the sound limits itself to my left ear. It is as if someone is very delicately buzzing his lips right next to me. I slap at imagined insects, but nothing is there. I scratch at my face, not even near the offending ear—I simply itch all over. My skin is pockmarked with eczema. Perhaps it is the ear that is blessed, and the rest of my body cursed. This is an evolutionary trick. My left ear has acquired dog hearing, and the rest of me must catch up. I cannot sleep. I paint to pass the time: the daffodils outside the kitchen window, half-remembered horses from old oil paintings. Were the original paintings of memory genuine, or were they knock-offs from Chinatown? My friends say Chinatown food is terrible, because it is not authentic, but I say, As long as it’s good, who cares? My five-year old son looks at some of my paintings. What do you think? I ask him. He grabs hold of my bony arm—I have lost much weight due to lack of sleep—and he says with great seriousness, Are you okay, Mommy? He looks so like my mother at that point, sharing her worry over me. And with that I realize that he hates the paintings. He thinks I have no talent, that my attempt at artistry is an affront, because otherwise he would say something, and instead he is making a vague comment about my health to hide this calamity.
The villagers had no time, I was told. The enemy was like a great wave, very natural, flooding down the hills in clumps, nothing symmetric about them. Fighting had gone on for some time, with many lost on all sides. At this point some only had knives, hatchets, torches. Others lacking even those had resorted to club-like substitute weapons. And now the enemy was approaching, and the villagers were informed: You have one hour to leave. That was all, no conditionals, no or else. Those who could gather food and clothes did—the rest only stared helplessly at their thatched roofs, their floors of dust and burned bits of twig. And on the hour, the enemy set fire to everything, many of the villagers giving up right at that point, sitting and watching the flames creep toward them, even gazing incuriously as their limbs ignited, and then they were screaming, but this was not their pain, not even their voices, this was just the act of a spirit escaping, or at least that is what the survivors would tell their children. Some ran out of their huts only to be immediately bludgeoned or shot. Others simply threw would-be escapees down the well, then tossed grenades in after them. Some of the villagers fled into the mountains, where the roving packs of wolves awaited. The razing of the town took place on a full moon, so for the first week afterwards, you could see the wolves from a distance, their eyes glowing like fire as they flowed between the trees, and when they set upon you, there was warmth and comfort in their hard breaths. You could appreciate their bright teeth, brighter than any human teeth you saw in your life, just as they sank into your neck.