Issue Four

 

Grandfather tells me about how he lost a ring finger in the jungles of Fujian where you could hear the bullets sailing through the tops of trees like firecrackers on New Year’s.

When it happened he’d been holding a Type Zhongzheng rifle, Chinese make, a copy of a German Mauser down to the bolt action and before the jungle he had fired it twice. Once in a Kuomintang firing range surrounded by rice farmers whose ears pricked up at the sudden noise. Once by accident while filling his canteen in a nearby river when he heard the rustling of grass and thought Mao’s guerrillas had made it past the NRA lines.

They called it Chiang Kai Shek’s rifle after the general himself had gotten the exports from Germany and provided the guns to his best troops. But the first shipment of rifles hadn’t been enough, so the troops also bought the rejects which the Wehrmacht refused to use. In camp, whenever an NRA man got a Type Zhongzheng, he was told to pray for luck every time he pulled the trigger. But in the deltas and rivers with the bullets sailing by no one had much time for prayer.

In the Fujian jungle, Grandfather loaded his Zhongzheng with copper jacket rounds and propped the gun on a rocky outcrop. He waited for the glint of sunlight that would give away the brim of a soldier’s helmet. After fifteen minutes of waiting, Grandfather wiped off the sweat that had gathered on his brow, letting it drip onto the grass. Then Grandfather caught a glint of steel in the light and pressed his finger on the trigger to fire.

That was the third and last time Grandfather fired a rifle in his life. The Zhongzheng he’d received was of brittle make and collapsed with the combustion of the gunpowder in the barrel. Bits of the metal chassis cut into the bark of nearby banyan trees and one shard pierced Grandfather’s ring finger and cut it at the bone, leaving it splayed on the jungle floor as if pointing its way to sanctuary. Grandfather swore in Fookien, cursing himself for forgetting to pray.

At this point in his story Grandfather stops to roll up the sleeve of his loose button-down polo and points out two red marks on the skin of his left arm. Two smaller shards of the rifle lodged themselves into the flesh there. The welts are like small valleys among the ridges of his wrinkles. Grandfather gestures at them as if to say that to this day he still remembers the heat of the jungle, still remembers the digging of metal shards against his skin.

After the medics sewed up his wounds and discharged him, Grandfather went home to Gulangyu Island and burned his poster of Chiang Kai Shek. He told me the name reminded him too much of the rifle that severed his finger and left it in the soil. While letting the ash coat the bottom of an iron barrel grandfather realized that it was no longer safe for him to stay, so he boarded a boat bound for the Philippines.

In previous stories Grandfather said he went to the Philippines because his uncle had set up a small business there shipping rattan to Indonesia. But today Grandfather says something different and tells me he was drawn somehow to the fractured archipelago. On humid monsoon days, he would unfurl maps of the world within the spare ship cabin and circle out the country in red marker. In his dreams instead of counting sheep he would count the bulbous and broken landmasses, trying to divine how many islands there were based on his recollections of the map. Sometimes his counts reached two hundred, though he could never get past that number before drifting off, leaving the bottom regions of Mindanao uncharted.

On the rattan ships of his uncle, Grandfather developed callouses on his remaining fingers. He drew rope to anchor and dragged coils of it across the steel flooring of the craft. Sometimes when the ship was ready to unmoor he would untie rattan cords from the harbor’s posts, leaving rough patches on the undersides of his thumbs. Grandfather tells me that though his uncle was frugal and paid him little, he was able to see much of the world. The busy Jakarta ports with stone lions and many-armed goddesses on the prows of skiffs; coral scraping onto the hull in the shallow regions of Scarborough Shoal; the rough typhoon winds of Basilan, which almost grounded his craft. In each of these places Grandfather coiled and uncoiled lengths of rattan rope for trade, leaving small scratches on his fingertips and shedding flakes of his skin.

Once again Grandfather stops his story to unfurl his hands and asks me to run my small smooth fingers across his wrinkled ones. I avoid the stump of his ring finger on the right hand, then feel the callouses on his thumbs, like jutting promontories or islands so small they sink underneath the high tide. There are so many bumps and crags that each mark seems to carry the weight of its own unrecorded history. For some reason I imagine Grandfather again in the cabin of the Philippine-bound ship, this time tracing out the lines of his palm with red ink before sleeping.

Grandfather then gestures to his right calf, discolored with a large bruise. And his story continues forty years past the rattan ship to the suburbs of San Francisco where he stayed for a few months in a home for the aged. He kept busy there, acting as a bookkeeper and typing out the purchases of the directress.

Grandfather tells me that one humid afternoon he was walking to the local convenience store for groceries when he heard the loud horn of an approaching Cadillac. At the sound, he turned around with his walker in front of him as if to shield himself from the blow. It wasn’t enough; the metal twisted with the impact of the car and the front bumper of the Cadillac bruised his right leg. The last things grandfather heard before passing out from the pain were the screeching of brakes and the crunch of metal.

In the hospital he fielded nightmares. All of them were punctuated by the sound of twisting metal and bone, though the landscape was always shifting – first Jakarta, then Fujian, and afterwards San Francisco. Always grandfather felt as if a part of him was being rent away by something beyond his control. Always the parts of him that were pulled away from his body still retained sensation. In his nightmares grandfather cried out as a steel-toed military boot crushed his ring finger in a Fujian jungle, as dry flakes of his skin sunk onto the spines of sea urchins clutching to Scarborough rocks. Grandfather tells me his dreams were what an archipelago must feel like when it is being born, torn by currents and tides into constituent islands.

For the last time Grandfather stops his story, mid-nightmare, leaving out the part where he wakes up. Perhaps it is because he is inviting me to fill in the rest of the tale with my own recollection – a rushed Delta airlines flight from Metro Manila to San Francisco; a child holding the hand of his father while staring at the IV drips injected into his grandfather’s withered frame. I cannot be sure; instead I let my fingers feel, again, the ridges and contours of this discolored bruise, this landmass of dried blood, Grandfather’s geographies spelled out for me in silent ritual.

—

Grandfather died five years ago on this day, and these words are the last things of him I remember. He did not say whether he wanted to be buried or cremated though I knew he would have loved neither. My father cremated him and placed his ashes in an urn; he placed the urn within a two cubic meter marble tomb; he embossed grandfather’s name on the marble in golden lettering. Like any child I did not want my grandfather to die. And when I saw him cancerous on the hospital bed breathing the last ragged breaths of his life, I wanted in vain to freeze his flesh into sculpture somehow, so as to never lose the features of his skin.

Though I know Grandfather’s ashes lie contained within the Sanctuarium urn, I do not imagine that to be his resting place. Instead I tell myself this: it takes roughly one month for new skin cells to reach the top layer of one’s body, meaning that the skin I will wear one month from today will be completely new. But that does not mean the old skin is gone – it is gathered as dust on picture frames, television sets, library books, and typewriters, trillions of discarded geographies and islands lost to the high tide.

Grandfather’s bones now make up the roots of banyan trees in Fujian which are only today beginning to sprout. His dust is spread across the Pacific Ocean leaving trails of trade routes from metro Manila to Jakarta where skiffs vending rattan cords once ran yearly expeditions. On a San Francisco freeway the front bumper of a Cadillac still holds a small part of Grandfather’s salt lake bruises, smudged ever slightly by red paint.

Long ago grandfather dreamed of being born like seven thousand islands proceeding from the body of one. That is the image of him I carry now, five years down the line, as I press my palm against the gold-embossed letters of his tomb.

 

Ethan Chua is a Chinese-Filipino spoken word poet from the Philippines and a freshman studying at Stanford University, where he is part of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective. He has written poems about stars, short fiction involving bisexual vampires, and essays where his grandparents escape Communist soldiers in Fujian again and again. He’s also the cofounder of Ampersand, an organization dedicated to giving the youth avenues to express themselves through art. Read his work at medium.com/@ezlc327.

In short, high school has ruined me. After middle school I felt as if the world and all its possibilities were at my fingertips. Ninth grade created a crack in my bubble of childlike wonder. The kind you see in cartoons. Small at first, advancing towards the feet of the main character who then falls off a cliff or in a hole. By tenth grade however, this bubble had shattered. It’s hard to know whether or not the world had always been cruel, if people were dying while I was swaddled against my mother’s chest, while the ribbons in my hair came undone, while I learned how to ride a bike. I’d like to think not. I’d like to think that before I turned fourteen life was as beautiful for everyone as it was for me.

Of course tenth grade mathematics annihilated me but most of my cynicism arises from the world around me, rather than my academics. Though I did learn that no matter how hard I want to pass math, no matter how hard we all studied the most efficient way to succeed was through a whisper and pleading eyes on the day of a test. When I go home I’m meant to have a reprieve from my high school woes. No, instead it seems like every day a new video of an innocent person being murdered in public. People who are five years older than me being shot on what was supposed to be a night out. Things are meant to be easier when you go off to college. But how can I ever go to a club or the movies when even now my chest get tight when a man in a hoodie walk inside of a dark theater?

Trayvon Martin died when I was twelve years old. Of course my family was furious, as was I. Because I knew what it meant to be innocent and black. But I did not yet know what it meant to be sixteen years old, as I am now. From my newly gained experience I can say that I still feel like a kid. And my mom still calls me her baby. Furthermore, I can say that one of my worst fears is that one day my mother will feel the way that Trayvon Martin’s mother felt. Second only to death. I found out the verdict of the Trayvon Martin case in a diner. My greasy fingers were wrapped around a glass of Coke but my eyes were turned toward the TV in the corner of the corner of the room. How could he be innocent after he murdered a little boy? How could the murderers of kids like me, men like my brother, women like mom be…heroes?

The truth is, I’ll never know what it feels like to not go to school because I’m a girl. As a matter of fact I was raised with the moral that a child’s only job is to excel in school and respect their elders. Recently, I’ve watched a documentary called Girl Rising and I’m melodramatic enough to say that it changed my life. It made me ashamed to complain about math when in Nepal, little girls who were younger than me were being sold off as Kamlari slaves. But in all honesty I will continue to complain. I will complain because I don’t think that anyone who has power truly cares about my education. I will complain because whenever we, the students try to fight back everyone who has a nice office goes silent because their hands are tied. I will complain because everyone gets to vote for my future instead of me…and they always pick wrong.

If I am ever to have children I have to make things better for them. And for myself too. It’s so important for me to change something. Right now in Shakespeare class we are reading Macbeth. In it Shakespeare says, “All our pasts have lighted fools The way to dusty death”. Which means that the hate and absurdity that was regurgitated to as by our parents, grandparents and so on is just what I called it…absurd. When we die we return to dust anyway. In my opinion, it is the responsibility of all of us to leave the world better than we found it. This is exactly what I plan to do. One way or another. I think I would like to be a humanitarian. Usually I change my career goal every month. I think this one will stick.

 

 

 

Jordette Cummings is a Jamaican born junior at Hillcrest High School in Queens, New York. As much as she loves writing, she much prefers to immerse herself in stories that are not her own—as they contain dialogue, which she has yet to master. Her three true loves are fiction (film and television included), memes, and debating. She prides herself on having strong opinions and loves defending them. She tries her best to inspire political action amongst her peers without coming off as the pretentious know-it-all that she is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The chilly, mist-filled, early morning breeze swept past my open window as the car slinked along the curved road. The grinding sound of gravel against the tires and the faint hum of the engine echoed in the silent countryside. Over the horizon, a faint light shone atop a distant mountain, beginning to bleach the edges of the dark night. Small houses made out of clay bricks and tiles clustered around the edge of a river; smoke lazily drifting out of their chimneys before dissipating into the sky. I lay sprawled in the backseat, tugging at the platinum blond hair of my favorite Barbie doll. I puffed up my cheeks and leaned forward, tapping my father’s shoulder. “How much longer until we reach the docks, Dad?”

“We’re almost there,” answered the authoritative voice behind the steering wheel. “It should come up three minutes after we pass the lepers’ compound.”

I peered out the window towards the side of the road. There, partially hidden by a jagged rock ledge, stood a solitary building. In the nineteenth century, when leprosy was fairly common in Korea, people separated those with the disease into compounds out of fear of contamination and out of disgust at the sight of their disfigured bodies. The compound seemed to loom over the village, the pale blue morning light glimmering off the stark aluminum walls. A thin line of smoke wafted out from a crude chimney slapped onto the roof.

“Do people still live there? I asked. My father nodded. “Why wouldn’t they want to come out after all these years?”

My father stared at the road ahead, twiddling his thumbs around the steering wheel. “Some people would rather live in isolation than integrate back into the same society that rejected them.”

 

The road rolled past the compound and merged into a four-lane highway. I shifted around in my seat hoping to catch another glimpse of the building, but it had become obscured by the rock ledge as the village shrunk into the distance.

“Don’t be too upset about them,” my father added.

**********

A slender hand hung over the side of the operating table, an IV stuck into its wrist. Suddenly the hand clenched, veins straining against the pale white skin. I craned my neck and stood on my tiptoes to try to get a better view, but the row of nurses standing beside the table towered blocked my view.

“15cc more,” my father commanded, and clear liquid trickled down the tube into the patient’s arm. The hand relaxed, falling back onto the table.

My father, clothed in mint-green scrubs and black tennis shoes, hunched over his patient. With a clean “snip,” he sighed and flexed his back. He gestured towards the attending nurse, and triumphantly set down a bloody surgical scissor on the metal plate. Plucking a towel from the side cart, he wiped down the patient and observed his handiwork.

“Come,” he gestured towards me.

The patient’s bloated face stuck out from a green surgical sheet, stitch marks running along the eyelids and on the side of the nose.

“She got a blepharoplasty and a rhinoplasty. I made incisions on the corners of her eyes to make them open wider.”

I nodded silently, carefully examining the changes to the patient’s face. The stitching across her skin seemed as intricate as the embroidery on my grandmother’s blankets, the evenly spaced thread contributing to some grand design.

**********

“Ms. Cho,” My father smiled exasperatedly, “you mean to say you want a second rhinoplasty?”

The middle-aged woman sat across from my dad in the consulting room, hands firmly pressed against the table. I sat next to my father with my hands respectfully folded across my lap. She inspected her stitches in the mirror before pulling a crumpled sheet from a magazine and smoothing it down across the table. She directed my father’s eyes to the airbrushed model smiling up from the cover. “I want a pointier chin and wider-set eyes. And-” she took out another magazine clipping, “I want my nose bridge modeled after hers.”

I stifled a snort and quickly glanced up at the woman. She had clearly struggled to yank up what gravity had weighed down, resulting in a permanent maniacal, almost fiend-like expression on her face.

“We’ve already put in a silicone insert-,” my father pleaded.

She impatiently tapped the picture. “I want my nose to be exactly the same as hers.”

My father opened his mouth, then closed it. “Very well, Ms. Cho.” Without a second thought, he took a notepad from his side drawer, scribbling down the details of her request and attaching the worn magazine image. My eyes widened and my foot instinctively nudged my father under the table. His eyes flicked to the side, instantly silencing me. I lowered my gaze and he continued scribbling.

**********

I sat on the edge of the subway bench, absentmindedly picking at the frayed ends of my jumper as the subway car came to a jolting halt and announced Seo-dong station. Only two stops till my grandmother’s house. My casual beach ensemble stood out amongst the businessmen and Korean students entering and exiting the train. Unlike me and my classmates back in New Jersey, they still had a month before summer vacation started. I looked up at the young woman across from me as she scrolled through her phone. Rhinoplasty, double eyelid procedure, I assessed. Further down the row, a woman flipped her hair to the side. Rhinoplasty, jaw reduction, and columella augmentation. Another dabbed on powder from a small compact. Double eyelid surgery and an epicanthoplasty. They were everywhere: a dozen double-eyelid surgeries, ten rhinoplasties, three brow bone reductions, three jaw reductions, and a cheekbone augmentation.

My eyes fell on a girl wearing a pleated skirt and a collared shirt quietly seated next to a heavily made-up woman in stilettos. I recognized her uniform from a high school near my hometown. She sat with her hands folded in her lap. Once in awhile she’d nervously lick her lips, exposing a row of wire-framed teeth. The student turned her head and timidly peered up at the woman beside her: a woman with long, silky black hair, a chin augmentation, and bright red lips set in a haughty pout.

One woman flicked her gaze toward the student, then did a double take. Her brows crumpled with annoyance, and her lips curled into a sneer. The student quickly lowered her eyes, slumping down in her seat as an embarrassed blush bloomed across her chubby cheeks. I looked down at my stubby toes that peered out from my cheap flip flops; they were baked to an earthy brown by the sun and sand from Hae-Un-Dae’s beach was still caked under my nails. I adjusted the spandex band of my training bra, still unaccustomed to its sweaty constriction, and diverted my gaze to the student as she sat with both feet planted while mine still dangled in the air.

When will she first go under the knife? Will she become that woman that so easily dismissed her?

Will I become that woman?

Sensing my stare, the student looked up. My mouth curled upwards, attempting a grin. My gesture was not reciprocated. Her gaze flickered down to my shoes, then up to my tangled, still-damp hair. She quickly turned her head away from me. The train plunged into a tunnel and the harsh fluorescent lights drew sharp shadows across my features. In the window, I could not recognize the foreign girl who stared back at me. I frantically searched my face looking for some similarity to the other subway passengers, but there were none. Tanned, unkept, different, alien.

The subway came to a rumbling halt. The student quickly stood up, glanced at me once more and shuffled out. The doors hissed closed, and I sat in the almost-empty car, my feet still dangling.

**********

I pushed up the plastic window shade as the double-decker plane leapt into the sky and peered down at Seoul’s buildings becoming specks. In thirteen hours I would be home. Soon, all I could see below me was white. Wispy clouds streaked past the window and soon my childhood home disappeared from view. My younger brother squirmed in the seat next to me. “How much longer?” he whined, pushing his coloring book to the side. I had asked the same question at his age. I thought of the lonely leper compound looming underneath the mist; smoke curling out of its jagged chimney. The smoke dissipated into the sky, and became one with the clouds. Had I isolated myself from my society or had my society isolated me? I looked out at the blanket of clouds, the orange yolk of the sun beginning to settle into its pillowy folds. Or was just I headed for a new horizon? Soon, from the ground in Korea, the plane had become a solitary dot floating in the sky as I steadily drifted back home.

 

Chaeyeon (Annika) Kim is a high school junior from New Jersey. Originally from South Korea, Chaeyeon explores the concept of identity in her writing. She also enjoys binge-watching Orange Is the New Black, eating breakfast for dinner and playing with her cat, Butterfly.

 

 

“Come here. You said you weren’t Chinese, correct?” A stout, middle-aged woman said in a commanding voice. At the bold age of five, I was proud of my origins; it was known by everyone in my grade that I was not “another Chinese kid” and that I was the only “Korean.” Just the week before, I had figured out where the peninsula was located in Asia on my older brother’s globe and had admired the land’s vivid fuchsia color on the circular map. A piece of my heart felt like it was home, despite that I had never stepped foot in the country.

I nodded my head vigorously, trying to suppress my excitement. Why would a teacher call me over? Was it for a special treat? Had she somehow bought some Korean candy or snack? I had introduced many of my friends to Korean foods before; they had always raved about it whenever we had play dates at my house. The thought of a treat filled me with joy. She motioned me to stand beside her, where she was holding a food wrapper of some sort. “Can you read this?” I tried to ignore the pang of disappointment, before looking at the shiny blue plastic. It appeared to be from some assortment of cookies.

“This isn’t Korean,” I said defiantly, staring at the loopiness of the characters. “I think it looks Japanese.” The woman looked puzzled at my words as if I had uttered some gibberish to her. She was one of the after school program teachers who looked after children whose parents were too busy to come as soon as classes were over, although I had yet to talk to her. She seemed aloof most of the time, and not interested in whatever games we children had.

“But isn’t it the same?” I frowned at her question, furrowing my brows. I could not bring myself to meet her gaze, and steadied my eyes on the blue wrapper. A flash of light from the fading sun distracted me, and I shook my head slowly, sneaking a peek at the woman’s wristwatch. It was almost time for my mother to pick me up from the after school care. I did not want to stay here anymore. I could hear my friends, their shrill voices behind me somewhere on the playground in a vicious game of tag. A part of me longed to join them, but a larger part of me wanted to vanish under the woman’s scrutinizing gaze.

“We aren’t the same. Japan is an island. Korea isn’t!” The woman shrugged, and I felt a flare of anger at her obvious disinterest. It was worse than the children who always assumed I was Chinese—at least they would acknowledge South Korea as a country after I spoke. “You can just ask my mom when she comes.” It seemed almost like a desperate way for me to prove myself, by dragging my mother into such an issue. The woman nodded, her gaze unfocused on me. She lost whatever scrap of care she had for me the moment I made my uselessness to her evident. At age five I would not have known that there are hopeless cases to walk away from, but I was too stubborn to leave, my feet glued to that spot on the asphalt. I watched children run by, their shrieking laughter begging me to join. I did not.

By the time my mother came to pick me up, I was still standing beside the woman, my determination to prove her wrong overwhelming. She was fiddling with her phone, not sparing me a single look. My mother’s warm eyes were wide in anxiety as she saw me standing there, and I could see the panic on her face. She was worried I had caused trouble, and the teacher was reprimanding me for my behavior. I waved at her brightly, my pigtails flickering from side to side at my enthusiasm, before I pointed at the discarded blue plastic on the ground, picking it up to show off the label.

“Is this Korean? It isn’t Hangul, right?” I pestered as my mother looked over the blue wrapper. The woman put her phone away, diverting her attention back to the wrapper. She stared at my mother, ignoring the glee on my face as my mother shook her head. I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out, while the woman quirked her lips slightly, a hint of a frown revealing itself on her face.

“This is Japanese. I’m sorry I cannot help you.” My mother spoke in her gentle voice. The woman forced out a chuckle, and it was obvious she could not simply state that they were “the same” as she had before. My mother gripped my tiny hand in her own before bidding the woman farewell. I did not wave goodbye.

 

Brittany is a high school junior from northern New Jersey. Interested in psychology, Brittany explores the concept of character development in her writing. She also enjoys drawing, playing with her dog Angel, and baking goods to share with friends and family.

The room was quiet and still, and I would have thought myself deaf if it hadn’t been for the buzzing and whirring of the machines keeping my aunt alive. I hadn’t even known rooms could be so dark until that night, and the only window in the room let in the deeper darkness of the night. The silence itself was remarkable, achieved by a room crowded with bodies. Heat radiated from the bodies and made the room stuffy and suffocating. Everyone in the room was waiting for death. My aunt was lying on the bed that was more hardware than cushion, and many people who loved her were standing and sitting in various parts of the room. The room was definitely too small to hold all of the love… or the sadness.

ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, is a degenerative nerve disease that slowly and viciously kills its victims. My mother’s side of the family carries the ALS gene, and Auntie Chi Chi had developed the disease. My mother had taken care of her for as long as we could at our house, but in the final weeks of her life, we knew she would have to stay in a nursing home. I watched as my aunt, the energetic sales rep glued to her cell phone, became a wisp of a human body that could barely say anything. I had seen her spirit leave her eyes. She was not ready to die; she was too young and loved life too much. Everyone in the darkness that night realized the same thing: the end was near.

While privately mourning, I remembered my first-hand experience with my aunt and her lack of basic motor skills. My mother and father were busy preparing a medication in the kitchen, which was serving as a pharmacy. My task was to feed my aunt ice cream. This was the same ice cream the rest of the family ate, no special medications or supplements, just a creamy vanilla. I put the ice cream in a bowl, a bowl that we had all used for years. I grabbed a spoon, not a special feeding tool for the sick, a spoon that I had used countless times before. I sat in front of her, perhaps the only ill relative of mine who hadn’t been ready to die when it was time. Taking a spoonful of ice cream, I guided it towards her mouth. This was a mouth that could barely speak anything besides what must be described as a moan, let alone eat with much success. She opened her mouth and I inserted the spoon. I saw her molasses-like lips close around the spoon and I gently pulled back, as if I were feeding a baby. She had taken just a little off of the top. We went on like this, and we couldn’t even get halfway through the dessert before the ice cream had melted.

I knew no young child in my parents’ eyes would be charged with the duty of feeding the sick. My playroom had been long gone as well; my old toys were moved out and replaced with a bed and various medical accessories to keep first my grandmother (a victim of cigarettes) and then my aunt alive. I realized I was becoming a young adult. I was a twelve year old growing up alongside the diseases and sicknesses that had taken two family members in quick succession.

I struggled to keep the ice cream off of her face realizing what my aunt had to go through. She couldn’t even have ice cream without getting it dribbled down her chin. Ice cream, a universal symbol of happiness and glee, was an arduous task for her to consume. I thought of the kind of happiness it must have brought her when she was my age and younger; images of little kids running around playfully after the ice cream truck ran through my mind. I thought of the joy ice cream had brought me in previous years. I thought of Maya, Chi Chi’s daughter, who so enjoyed ice cream. My God, her daughter: How would she survive the years after her mother’s death? How would she deal with a motherless house? What was being imprinted in her brain at this moment, watching her mother slowly die? What would be left in my mind after this was all over? Would it ever really be over? These thoughts made me sick as I stared at the melted ice cream, and when we were done, I pushed the bowl away as if I could distance myself from these feelings.

That night in the nursing home, amongst the silent darkness, I came to my epiphany. My aunt would die soon, but it was okay. She was going to enjoy the heaven that she believed in much more than this life. Her long-term suffering, pain, and embarrassment (terrible for her Japanese pride) would finally come to an end. She would fly higher than the superficial world of today, escape the chains of her diseased body, escape the nursing home she despised so much, say farewell to the crowd of loved ones in her room, fly past my inescapable feelings and be reunited with wherever the spirit of her parents went. I knew Maya would soon come to the same realization, and the love in the room would guide her to this eventually. Chi Chi would die with those she loved on Earth all around her, and she wouldn’t have asked for more.

 

William Blomerth is a high school junior and Eagle Scout interested in English and the human mind. When not in school or on the track, he enjoys writing, playing music, and camping.