Chapter 1

My earliest memories are of my father. 

He points to the murky depths of the river below, mouth ticked upwards in a smile I so rarely see as he recounts the stories of fishing when he was younger. Street vendors line the edges of the water, carts full of fruit, squash, corn, seeds of life spilling across their wheels. Straw hats frame their sun-tanned faces, calling out to anyone who is willing to spare a glance. It's laborious work, written in their roughened hands and bent-over spines, but their faces wear a brilliant smile. This is their life, and it's amazing what they will sacrifice in the name of something better. They have grandchildren at home, and they will wipe sticky watermelon off their face with worn out rags torn apart by love. I wonder if I take their palms, trace my fingers over sandpaper plains, if I'll find rivers of blood and sweat. Coins would glitter in the endless depth – I pick one up, and I see love; warmth, a fire in icy nights and hand-knit blankets. I flip the coin, and I see sacrifice tinted with crimson, an inferno that burns itself away to illuminate the sky.

Years later, as the Second Sino-Japanese War swept through our village like a ravenous beast, the first signs were quiet. In the north, whispers of invasions reached our village, though we barely knew what it meant. Soon, the whispers turned into screams.

The crack of rifles replaced the songs of birds; the rice paddies, once green with promise and stretching beyond the horizon, were trampled underfoot by soldiers in dark green uniforms.

My father left me a few days later, joining the legions to fight. My father was not a warrior. He had no taste for bloodshed, no longing for glory. He was a farmer, born to the dirt and earth. But when the war came, none of that mattered. 

At first, we received letters, though they were sparse and cryptic. He wrote of a sky that rained fire and poison, of the sound of pattering bullets and screams. Our mother began hiding the letters from me, despite my pleas to read them. Then the letters stopped – until 4 years later, a creature of bone and blood came stumbling at our door in a tattered uniform.

We were lucky enough that our father hadn't perished in the war, unlike so many families I knew; war had ripped apart not just bones and flesh, but families too. Yet, he had returned as a changed man. A ghost, in the more ephemeral sense, rather than a living being.

He was alive in everything except soul. 

I would know his name, but I could never name his favorite color, his favorite food, or even what shows he would like to watch. In a sea of strangers, I can identify his time-grayed hair with ease, and yet his gaze will be no different from the rest of the unknown. I could never fault him, because I see the bitterness pressing down on his shoulders, and the loneliness that clings to him like the smoke of long-extinguished candles. If I reached into his chest, peered between his ribs and heart, I would find the same longing that plagues my marrow.

His heart continued to beat like a reedy sparrow song, deep in the confines of his ribs, and his chest would rise and fall every night like the marching of terracotta soldiers. Yet, his eyes carried a weighty emptiness, as if they were gazing at something in the distance – something the rest of us could never see. 

He grew angry. Yelling at my sister when she forgot to take out the trash, slamming our doors until they exploded from their hinges, like a joint ripped apart from its socket. All of us learned far too quickly to never sneak up behind him, lest they want a fist to the nose and a smuggled pocket knife to the throat. Sleep evaded him, slipping between his fingers like a smoky gray ash, leaving the rest of us to become silent witnesses to the terrors in his mind. He would never speak of them, but our nights became filled with the tormented choir of his screams, for while his body was with us, his mind had found a home in warfare, and never left. 

Clearly, he was unfit to work. Even past his deteriorating mental state, his body became a hallowed husk of what it used to be. In the rare moments where he would emerge from his room, a silence would follow his footsteps, save for the dissonant thumps of his heavy limp. He was tired. We all were. 

Therefore, being the oldest child and the only son, the labor of setting food on the table fell to me. A task far more daunting than anyone gives credit for. I was plainly mediocre, with an education falling short of the college level, because not a soul could afford anything past the essential public years. I had no particular skills, nothing that would make me stand out in an ocean of desperate men all trying to make a living for themselves. 

It took months, days and weeks of the same bland, banal rejections, for anything fruitful to come up. An odd job in the corners of a shady factory, one that I'm not even sure has any validity to be standing, sorting textiles. Meaningless work, often leaving my hands more callused and blistered than anything else; a wage that was far below the minimum wage the government attempted to upholster, trying to cover up the sheer wreckage the war held; it was hell personified. And yet it paid. And so I stayed. 

Dreams were a cruel indulgence, especially in the bleakness I trudged through. Not just the physical dreams that haunt the edges of my mind while I chase what little sleep I can find, but hope. As I found myself realizing as the years grew by – with no sign of the ice our rooms receding or the gnawing hunger ever disappearing – hope was dangerous. It was far more perilous than the rats and vermin that prowled the cobblestone of what once was a road, than the thieves that turned nights into a hunt, leaving corpses half-frozen with pockets turned inside out. 

In a place like mine, hope wasn't for people like me. Empty ration tins littered the corners of my floor, becoming the very essence of our home, and I hated them. They were our salvation during the war, their contents eagerly consumed in a bid to stay alive. I loathed the sight of them now, scraps of our poverty. 

It was November 1950, roughly 5 years since the end of the war that decimated our population, and yet I was still barely surviving.

– August 13th, 1943 –

The three of us sat around the low dining table in the small, dimly lit room that had been both our shelter and our cage for as long as I could remember. My mother placed three chipped bowls on the table, each filled with a small portion of steamed rice and a few slices of pickled radish. I could tell by the circles underneath her eyes that this was all she could manage tonight. Outside, the last pieces of daylight crept in through the single window, casting a faint, orange glow on the faded walls. 

It was our dinner ritual, though I suppose the word "ritual" was too grand for what it really was: a quiet, almost somber acknowledgment of survival.

In the stillness, I could hear the faint murmur of voices from the street below. Some vendor, calling out his wares; children, laughing as they chased each other through the narrow, crooked alleys. My mother took small bites, her fingers trembling slightly as she lifted the rice to her lips. Across from her, my sister held her bowl close, silent and withdrawn, as though afraid that speaking might shatter the fragile peace.

"Is it enough?" I asked, glancing at my mother. She looked at me with a faint smile, her eyes heavy yet softened by a tenderness I had seen only in brief moments.

"It's enough," she said, though we all knew it wasn't. But this was our way of enduring. She reached across the table and placed a gentle hand on my sister's shoulder, her touch light but firm, as though reminding her to hold steady.

The sky outside darkened, and the thin, wavering light in our room grew feebler. Soon we would have to rely on the single flickering bulb that hung from the ceiling, its dusty filament our only source of light in the darkness. I stared at my now-empty bowl, willing myself to feel full, but hunger gnawed at me, a familiar ache that seemed to grow sharper with each passing day. I noticed my mother, carefully gathering the grains left in her bowl with her fingers, and a sense of guilt washed over me – a shameful, bitter feeling that I couldn't quite shake. I wondered, not for the first time, if things would have been easier without me here, another mouth to feed, another burden on her already frail shoulders.

My sister reached for the last slice of radish in the dish between us, her fingers hovering as though uncertain, her eyes flickering to me and then back to her hand. I caught her hesitation, a habit formed from years of rationing, of pretending she wasn't hungry so there might be more for the rest of us.

"You should take it," I said quietly, though a part of me wanted it for myself. The slice was thin and nearly translucent, but it was a final taste, a last bit of flavor before the hunger settled in.

She paused, her fingers trembling slightly, and took the radish, chewing slowly, savoring it. My mother watched her, and I noticed the faint lines of weariness etched in her eyes. She had sacrificed herself, day after day, piece by piece, until there was barely anything left. And yet, here I was, taking it all without question, expecting more even as I knew there was nothing left to give. 

My mother, sensing the tension, cleared her throat and reached for the small, cracked teapot on the table. She poured a thin stream of tea into each of our cups, the liquid barely enough to warm our hands. She lifted her cup to her lips, her eyes closed, savoring the taste even though I knew it was weak and bitter, barely worth drinking.

I stared into my cup, the pale, watery tea a poor comfort against the hollowness in my stomach. Gratitude was simply something I couldn't quite grasp, slipping through my fingers like sand. 

After dinner, my sister retreated to our shared bed, curling up with her book, her face illuminated by the faint light from the bulb. My mother, her movements slow and weary, began to gather the dishes, her hands shaking slightly as she stacked them one by one. I watched her, feeling a strange mix of pity and irritation. I knew I should offer to take the dishes from her hands, but I remained where I was, rooted to my seat.

I glanced at my sister, her face serene as she lost herself in her book, and felt a surge of envy for the determination that I lacked. She believed in a future that I couldn't see, a world beyond these four walls, and despite my resentment, I found myself clinging to that belief, if only because it was the only shred of hope left in this quiet, hollow existence.

Sometimes our conversations drifted into the future, a hazy dreamscape where we imagined ourselves free from this room, this life. Other times, though, our words were laced with fear, resentment, and the realization that maybe, for us, there was no escape. 

"Do you think we'll find a way out?" She had asked.

She had turned to look at me then, her eyes wide, searching my face as if seeking some confirmation, some proof that I was right. I wanted to tell her that I would protect her, that I'd find a way to give her the life she deserved, but the truth was unbearable. I feared the price of karma that would arise from lying wasn't something I could afford. 

I had hesitated, choosing my words carefully, afraid that anything I said might spark a flame of hope too fragile to survive.

"I don't know," I had finally replied, feeling the ache in my own chest as I spoke. "But if we do, it'll be because we make it happen ourselves. We can't wait for anyone to come and save us."

China is no longer war-torn. Guns do not ring in the battlefield, we do not lose our sons in the front against Japan, but we have still lost. I am 26 now, and sometimes I feel just as awkward and unfitting as I did all those years ago. I feel as if I am a child trapped in the body of an adult, someone who was supposed to know what to do – someone who was supposed to have their life together.

But perhaps, no one really knows who they are anymore.

Tomorrow, we would wake to the same bleakness, the same hunger, the same unending struggle to survive. To be alive was nothing more than to endure, and the thought of enduring yet another day filled me with a quiet terror. And though I resented it, though I hated my own helplessness, I knew that there was no choice.