Chapter Two
I stumbled up the hills, weaving through the tall grass, keeping low.
The only direction that mattered was away.
Away from the sloped gray rooftops where roosters used to strut about and announce the morning—now lookout points for the Japanese.
Away from rutted dirt roads where I’d aimlessly kicked pebbles with my friends after school—now graveyards of stolen bicycles and barbed wire. Away, away, away.
My shoes squeaked with every step, mud sieving between my toes. Soon I was panting. I let out a grunt every time I lifted my legs. My muscles had turned into concrete and every fiber of me burned. But I didn’t stop.
Until a hail of gunshots exploded behind me.
I pitched forward, taking a mouthful of dirt as my head hit the ground. Heavens, it hurt. But the fear was worse. I curled up into a ball and covered my head with my hands, shaking. The enemy had found me. I’d never see my family again.
Another round of gunshots roared, and I let out a shriek. I shot up to my feet and ran.
“Ying!” howled the wind. “Ying!”
Someone grabbed my wrist from behind. Still shrieking, I flailed. I beat my arms and fought. I wouldn’t let them take me. I wanted to live, I had to live!
“Ying.”
It was whiplash how rapidly I went spinning into my mother’s arms.
I didn’t recognize her at first. Through the blur of my tears, all I saw was an oval face, round as a goose egg.
But I knew Mama’s voice. I knew the sound of her breathing, even though it was hard and fast like she’d been running for hours. I knew the warmth of her arms.
She held me close, her body sagging in relief.
“You’re safe,” she soothed, pressing her forehead to mine. Her skin was flushed and warm, almost feverish. “Shush, Ying. Shush. It’s only leoi san, the thunder god, beating his drum.”
Over and over she repeated the words, rocking me to the singsong lilt.
It was as if we were back home, sitting together on her bamboo daybed by the window as she told me about leoi san and his wife, the goddess of lightning.
Together, they brewed storms in the sky and struck down all depravity in this world.
It was a story I’d heard dozens of times, and the familiarity of it calmed me. I stopped shaking.
“I thought they were gunshots,” I whispered.
“No,” Mama said. She lifted my chin. “There’s no one here. Look.”
She was right, the hills were empty. No soldiers, no guns. Only dragonflies fluttering in whorls against the soft flute of the wind.
“You see?”
I nodded numbly.
Mama wiped my mouth clean with her sleeve and raised a canteen to my lips. Gently, then, she pried me off her lap, but she didn’t let go of my arm.
She faced me. Her expression had gone firm, and her voice took on a low but urgent gravity.
“Did they see you?” she asked.
They. The enemy.
I hesitated, remembering how the soldier’s eyes had danced over me as though I weren’t there. “No one saw me, I was careful.” I reached inside my shirt for the medicine pouch. The hemp was moist with sweat, but everything within was intact. “I got the medicine for Yi Gor.”
Mama took the pouch, her teeth clenched. “You shouldn’t have gone to the house on your own. You could’ve been killed.”
“I wanted to help.”
“No.” Her face was tight with anger. “Ah Ma told you to go.”
I bit down on my lip. Of course Mama would know that.
What could I say? I didn’t want her to pick a fight with Ah Ma. Whenever the two quarreled, it was always Mama who yielded in the end.
“I’m sorry.”
Mama’s eyes turned hard. “Never again, do you understand me? Never leave without telling me.” She held me by the shoulders.
“I don’t care what Ah Ma says, you listen to me.
If they saw you, they would have taken you someplace where I’d never find you.
” Mama’s voice had gone raw, and every word trembled.
“Someplace . . . where they hurt girls. I’d never see you again. ”
I covered one of her hands with mine. It was hard for me, a young child, to fathom that my mother could be more frightened than I was. That she needed my comforting.
“Yes, Mama” was all I could say.
She inhaled, composing herself. Her gaze raked over me. “You’re bleeding.”
I hadn’t noticed the cut on my knee, where the bayonet had scraped across. Dark blood crusted the threadbare fabric of my pants, and Mama took off her scarf and wrapped it around my leg.
It was the scarf Baba used to wear in the winter. I ran my fingers across the navy wool, wanting to sniff and see if it still smelled like him.
“How did you get that cut?” Mama asked, tying a double knot. “You said they didn’t see you.”
“They didn’t.”
Mama was no fool. The gash was a clean sharp line, not a scrape from a fall. “How did you get that cut?” she repeated. “Tell me what happened.”
Her brusque tone made me wince. “I was in your bedroom and I heard soldiers coming, so I hid in the cupboard by your dresser—the one with all your jackets. The soldiers came in. They went through your jewelry and your clothes, and”—I was babbling, but I couldn’t stop—“and they . . . they looked into the cupboard. They opened the doors, but . . .”
“But what?”
“I’m not sure what happened. Only . . . they left me alone.”
“You were hiding behind the jackets,” Mama reasoned.
“Yes, but they pushed them aside. And then—” My mouth went dry with all the impossible reasons to explain what had happened. “Maybe they decided to let me go.”
Mama did not reply. Her eyes were faraway, pooling in gray like the clouds above us. Every so often, this look came upon her, and it always unsettled me.
“Mama?” I whispered. I shook her gently. “Mama?”
She blinked, and her eyes filled with my reflection. “Never speak of this again,” she said at last. “Not to your brothers, not to your uncles and aunts, especially not to Ah Ma. Do you understand?”
I didn’t understand. “Why—”
“Do not speak of it again.” Her grip on my arm tightened. “Swear it.”
“Yes, I swear.”
“Good.” Mama rose, and I glimpsed the blade of a butcher knife at her side, swaddled inside a rag. I didn’t have to wonder what she would’ve done with it if she’d had to. “Climb onto my back. There’s mud everywhere and if your cut gets infected you’ll lose a leg.”
One of Mama’s talents was shocking her children into obedience.
She lifted me easily. I wasn’t heavy for my age, and her back was strong.
I wrapped my arms around her neck, pressing my cheek against her.
The thunder god was beating his drum hard.
The clouds looked oily, slick with rain about to fall.
My stomach grumbled and I thought of the fillets of fried dace that my uncles had sent right before the Japanese took Guangzhou, twenty-nine cans’ worth, which Ah Ma had thought was too much until it became too little.
My uncles worked for a cannery in the city, and they’d been sending us dace since I was born.
Mama wouldn’t let me try it until I was three, for fear I’d choke on a fish bone, but the fermented black beans in the can became my favorite food.
Yi Gor told me the beans were actually eyes, a ploy to make me push away my bowl in disgust—so he could steal my share.
“Don’t feed your sister nonsense,” Baba scolded my brother, spooning a large scoop of beans into my rice. It was the nicest thing I could recollect him ever doing for me.
He left us on a day such as this, overcast with thunder clapping, pellets of rain dropping like the fat beans in my dace can. For a year, every day, I had asked Mama when he would come back.
I don’t know, she’d reply tersely. Or, When his work is finished.
Sometimes, she’d throw in a detail about a shoe factory in Hong Kong that my aunt’s husband had bought a few years before, and add that Baba was helping her with it.
That was the end of the conversation. Eventually, I’d stopped asking.
Except my brush with death today had kindled a new urgency inside me. I couldn’t steady the restlessness in my heart.
“Why did Baba leave?” I whispered behind her ear. “Is he coming back?”
The wind blew against her cheek, making the tiny hairs on her skin rise.
She pressed forward up the hill. “You’re too young to understand.”
“I’m almost eight years old,” I protested, as if eight were eighty. “Mama, tell me.”
“When you’re older.”
“How old? Please. Tell me.”
I couldn’t see Mama’s eyes, but there was a snag in her breath, as though she were actually considering. Then: “Don’t argue with me, Ying.”
Her words were clipped, the end of their cadence pressed as tight as a chestnut shell.
The rain had finally come, and the pitter-patter of heaven’s tears filled the silence between us.
Mama was hiding something. A secret so dark and dear she couldn’t share it with me.
More than anything, I wanted to know what it was.