Chapter One
Tunglam, Guangdong Province
Yut Ying
The first time I turned invisible, I was hiding inside a cupboard—about a broom’s sweep away from the soldiers looting Mama’s bedroom.
It was a sticky sort of morning, the air was thick and tasted like warm gasoline, and in every corner you’d find a mosquito humming, drunk on the heat. Unpleasant but bearable, unless you were stuck in a cupboard, as I was.
Slowly, not daring to make a sound, I pressed my face to the opening between the lacquered doors.
The crack was narrow, scarcely letting in any air or light, but I was desperate for a breath.
Inhaling, I peeked into the bedroom. I could make out a stripe of green uniform and the occasional flash of a brass button, shiny as a coin. I wished I hadn’t seen the guns.
Vipers, my brothers called them. They were slung across the soldiers’ backs, hanging by a leather strap, silvery fang pointed down. Not a real fang, of course, but a short knife attached to the barrel of a rifle. One bite and I’d become a ghost.
I leaned back, folding my body as small as I could. Don’t look in here, I prayed as shadows swept by my hiding place. Not here.
They were going through Mama’s dresser, snickering and holding up her white undergarments and making jokes I was glad I couldn’t understand. Then someone found Baba’s cigarettes.
I was surprised Mama had kept them. They were at least three years old and probably stale, but the soldiers didn’t care.
Their hoots of laughter were manic as one of them lit a match.
Almost immediately, columns of smoke swirled in the air, wreathing the bedroom in an ashen haze. The smell made my throat itch.
I covered my mouth to keep from coughing.
Inside the cupboard hung a sparse row of quilted jackets, and I reached for a dangling sleeve, pressing it to my face to smother any sound.
As I leaned back, a mothball dropped against my palm and rolled away, hitting the door with a bright and treacherous ping.
I froze.
The soldier closest to the cupboard stopped laughing. I didn’t have to know Japanese to realize he was saying, “What was that?”
I wanted to cry. Through the crack, I saw his mouth overturn like a sinking boat, and underneath his cap, his dark eyes sawed back and forth, back and forth, in the motion of a knife being sharpened.
One step. Two.
My brothers said that the Japanese turned into goblins at night, and their favorite snack was little seven-year-old girls like me. They’d put me in a cage, fatten me up with peanuts and sticky rice, and slowly roast my body over a pit until my skin crackled.
Maybe it won’t be so bad, I thought. At least they’ll feed me first.
Then again, it was daytime. More likely they’d stab their vipers into my heart and leave me to rot.
They wouldn’t waste a bullet on the likes of me.
My corpse would be a feast for the ants, but if I arrived in the underworld in such a tragic state, I’d be rejected by the gods.
There’d be no hope of being reborn into a luckier life.
The soldier pointed his gun at the cupboard.
My entire body clenched. This was it.
The doors swung open. I wanted to be heroic, to look my murderers in the eye and spit at them. But when the moment came, I buried my face behind the jackets and held my breath so I wouldn’t scream.
The merciless tip of a bayonet swiped across the cupboard walls. I bit down hard inside my cheeks as the blade skimmed across my pants, grazing right below my knee. My throat pinched, pain burning away my fear. Still, out of some desperate hope, I didn’t make a sound.
Please, gods, I prayed, let me live and I’ll be good. I’ll never talk back to my brothers or wish a rash upon Ah Ma’s back. I’ll be twice as helpful to Mama, and—
The bayonet pushed aside the jackets, and sunlight fanned over me, hazy with smoke. I was exposed.
Don’t, I begged silently.
Any second now, the blade would come stabbing down. I’d never learn to read, never see a movie starring my idol, Bak Yeung, or become a famous singer and make Baba proud enough that he’d finally come home. I’d never hold Mama’s hand again.
Tears leaked down my cheeks. I was alone, and that was what frightened me most. As my face became slippery with regret, I stole one last glimpse at this world I had barely gotten to know.
The soldier’s eyes were two bleak bullets boring into me.
As he leaned into the cupboard, I could smell the tobacco on his breath and the pine-scented soap in his hair.
I could even count the reddish pits in his cheeks and see the filmy layer of sweat clinging to his chin.
But to my bewilderment, he didn’t grab me.
He picked up the mothball that had fallen out of Mama’s jacket and muttered “yōkai” under his breath. It sounded vaguely like Cantonese for—I shivered—demon.
Bullet Eyes snorted and flicked the mothball back into the cupboard. It caromed against the back wall, stopping at my feet.
Then he kicked the doors closed.
Once more it went dark inside the cupboard. The soldiers laughed at him, uttering “yōkai” with mocking snickers that drowned out the thunder of my heart. With a shaky exhale, I leaned forward to peer through the crack.
How had he not seen me? I waited, certain they had an evil plan, like setting fire to the cupboard with me inside. I’d never know, for there came a shout from the corridor.
Hurriedly, they extinguished their cigarettes and filed out of the bedroom.
I waited. My pulse was still a stampede, the shock of having escaped certain death taking its time to recede. Only when the room was so still that I could hear the curtains brushing against the walls did I push the cupboard doors open.
New air swept into my lungs, laced with the soldier’s cigarette smoke. Instead of reinvigorating me, it only made me feel more sick. My stomach roiled, acid threatening to rise up in a bitter spew. It was the hardest thing, swallowing it down.
I crawled out, too numb to feel the gash on my leg. The world was spinning, and I had to lean against the wall. I needed a moment to wipe my nose on my sleeve and let the nausea in my gut settle. I couldn’t believe I was alive.
A crow was nattering outside the window trying to get into the house, when all I wanted was to get out.
I wanted to climb out of the window and run up the hills, back to where my family was hiding.
I wasn’t even frightened of Ah Ma’s cane or the harsh words she’d holler if I returned to our camp empty-handed.
But I stayed.
The medicine’s in a pouch, Ah Ma had instructed me, underneath your mother’s mattress.
Every sound rattled me, even the soft padding of my own feet. My entire body was shaking, my hands most of all. I twisted them until they turned red, a habit Mama hated, but it helped calm me.
I crouched beside the bed. Slash marks had mutilated the mattress, and out of its bowels, little lumps of stuffing poked out like maggots.
Mama’s undergarments were strewn along the headboard, and the neat stack of newspapers she kept on her desk—diligently studying an article a day to practice reading—was scattered about the floor, ink smudged from the sweat of careless foreign fingers.
Just looking at it made me furious. Even though the soldiers had gone, the crude booms of their laughter were forever scorched into my memory.
I slid my arms deep under the mattress, searching for the coarse outline of a shoe.
There.
I yanked on the slipper, then fished out a small hemp pouch sewn into the toe box. Inside was a packet of herbs along with three matchsticks, a handsewn charm for safety and luck, and a string of rosary beads with a thin wooden cross. I buttoned the pouch and threw the cord around my neck.
The day that the Japanese arrived in Guangzhou, Mama hid such a pouch in every room. She started rationing our rice and growing vegetables in the hills.
“You’re wasting your time,” my grandmother chastised her daily. “The Japanese have the city. They’ll never venture this far inland.”
For a while, Ah Ma was right. We were safe in the countryside, hours from Guangzhou and its precious ports on the Pearl River Delta.
But though we felt a world away from the airstrikes, the bombings, and the fires, we shared the same sky.
Ashes from the fallen city sprinkled into our town, and before long people started to leave.
My teachers went back to their villages, and Ah Ma’s friends sold everything they had and fled to Hong Kong.
Our little town grew quiet, and with no hope of school resuming, I spent my days with Mama learning to farm and mend and cook.
A year later, my oldest brother, Dai Gor, spotted Japanese scout cars crawling up the dusty roads into Tunglam. “They’re coming!” he cried.
Mama was calm. She watered the flowers, fed the carp in the pond and the chickens we kept behind the kitchen. She gathered my brothers and me, and Ah Ma—her mother-in-law—in the courtyard. Her back was stooped, three stuffed bags hoisted over her shoulder.
“It’s time to go,” Mama told us. “I prepared a camp in the hills.”
For once, Ah Ma bit her tongue. I noticed the bulge in her pockets, the extra jade bangles on her wrists and the chains of gold dangling from her neck.
I hugged my favorite doll, combing my fingers through her spiky black hair.
Though her porcelain face was ever smiling, it did little to comfort me.
The walk was long. Ah Ma leaned on Dai Gor, wobbling forward on her tiny bound feet, while Yi Gor and I helped Mama with the bags.
Our neighbors followed us, then came their neighbors and their neighbors.
Mama didn’t turn anyone away. “I have plenty of food,” she’d say welcomingly. “Plenty of supplies.”
My mother had thought of everything. Well, almost everything.
Dysentery spread among our camp, affecting the elderly first, then the children. By the time my brother Yi Gor fell sick, Mama had used up her medicine treating everyone else.
“You have a big heart but a small brain,” Ah Ma berated her. “Look what misfortune your generosity has brought to this family: Your second son is going to die.”
Mama said nothing, but for three days she didn’t eat or sleep. She knelt by Yi Gor’s side, praying with her beads as she wiped his face with a cool compress to bring down his fever.
His health only grew worse. And I saw despair darken Mama’s eyes.
That night, when the sky was darker than an inkwell and the trees rustled with bats, my grandmother shook me awake. “Get up!” she hissed. “Second Brother’s fever is getting worse. You’ll have to go to the house and fetch medicine.”
Why can’t Dai Gor go? I wanted to ask, but I already knew the answer. My eldest brother was a boy. His life mattered more.
Ah Ma poked her walking stick at me, not stopping until I gave a submissive nod. We both knew that the stick doubled as a whipping cane if I dared disobey. She tossed me a boiled yam.
“Go,” she said, “before your mother wakes up.”
It was for Mama, not my brother, that I obeyed. For Mama that I didn’t run away just now from the soldiers. As much as I wanted to be a coward, I wanted to help her more. I couldn’t let her down.
Tucking the pouch under my shirt, I climbed out the window and into the courtyard. Not far away, a jalopy sputtered, and soldiers were plucking fruits off Ah Ma’s prized lychee trees—but no one was watching the south garden.
The shrubs smelled of yesterday’s rain, and the dirt was still soft, making moist imprints of my footfalls. I had to move fast.
It was two hundred steps to the pots of marigold flowers behind the koi pond. There, underneath the largest pot, was a narrow burrow that I’d helped Mama dig last year. An escape to the other side of the wall.
Darting out of the bushes, I scrambled along the pond. The fish inside were dead, their scales and flesh long since picked off by birds. Only bones remained, the gossamer combs half sunken.
I was midway across the garden when I saw the boy.
He came out from the trees barefoot in the middle of the cobbled path. He started at the sight of me, and I almost screamed.
It took me a moment to realize that he was Chinese. Around my age, maybe a year or two older. In his arms was a heap of laundry—bitter melon–green coats with matching pants and cotton socks: Japanese uniforms. Which meant he was a mule, a child that they had kidnapped to work for them.
We stared at each other, equally stricken. Me, at his bruised cheeks and his dirty white shirt, splotched with grease and brown stains that I hoped weren’t blood. Him, at my shoes.
“This is your house, isn’t it? You’re lucky. Commander says it’s the most beautiful house in Guangdong. He has respect for it.”
Hearing his porcelain voice made my heart hurt. It was brittle, as though he hadn’t eaten in days.
“What are you doing here, mui mui?” His words whistled between two crooked teeth. “Hurry, go before they see you.”
“Come with me,” I whispered. I didn’t have as big a heart as Mama, but my heart was certainly bigger than Ah Ma’s. I knew what would happen to this boy if he stayed.
I pointed to the marigold flowers waving at us like little suns. “We dug a tunnel there that leads to the hills.”
“I can’t,” he whispered back. His shoulders wilted. “They have my sister.”
Heat pricked the backs of my eyes. I thought of Yi Gor, whom I was risking my life to save. Would my brother become a mule for me? No. He’d trade me in a heartbeat for a piece of rock sugar.
“Go,” the boy said. “The soldiers don’t leave me alone for long.”
I dug into my pocket for the boiled yam Ah Ma had given me last night. It was half eaten, meant to last until I returned to our camp.
My chest burned. I didn’t know this emotion, whether it was shame or guilt or compassion. I reached for the boy’s hand. His fingers were thinner than the tines of a rake, and I uncurled them, placing the yam on his palm.
For weeks after the Japanese left, I would look for him, this boy with the crooked teeth, and pray that he and his sister found home safely. But the truth was, even in this moment I already knew I’d never see him again.
Without another word, I turned toward the pots, running as fast as my legs could take me.
I didn’t look back.