by
Ken Liu
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I play the next stone in the gap.
Dad plays as I thought he would, and my stones in the northeast corner are gone, cast adrift.
But my main group is safe. They may even flourish in the future.
“Maybe there are heroes in Go,” Bobby’s voice says.
Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful. Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.
We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.
I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”
“It is a beautiful day for a walk, isn’t it?” Dad says.
And we walk together down the street, so that we can remember every passing blade of grass, every dewdrop, every fading ray of the dying sun, infinitely beautiful.
this story had the best ending imo. everything came together
At the end of the week the Chinamen were paid.
“This is not what I was promised,” said Lao Guan to the clerk. “This is not even as much as half of what my wages should be.”
“You are deducted for the food you eat and for your space in the tents. I’d show you the math if you could count that high.” The clerk gestured for Lao Guan to move away from the table. “Next!”
“Have they always done this?” Lao Guan asked San Long.
“Oh, yeah. It’s always been that way. The amount they charge for food and sleep has already gone up three times this year.”
“But this means you’ll never be able to pay back your debt and save up a fortune to take home with you.”
“What else can you do?” San Long shrugged. “There’s no place to buy food within fifty miles of here. We’ll never be able to pay back the debt we owe them, anyway, since they just raise the interest whenever it seems like someone is about to pay it all back. All we can do is to take the money that we do get and drink and gamble and spend it all on Annie and the other girls. When you are drunk and asleep, you won’t be thinking about it.”
“They are playing a trick on us, then,” said Lao Guan. “This is all a trap.”
“Hey,” said San Long, “it’s too late to cry about that now. This is what you get for believing those stories told about the Old Gold Mountain. Serves us right.”
The Chinese made up a large percentage of the population of Idaho Territory in the late 1800s. They formed a vibrant community of miners, cooks, laundry operators, and gardeners that integrated well with the white communities of the mining towns. Almost all the Chinese were men seeking to make their fortune in America.
By the time many of them decided to settle in America and become Americans, anti-Chinese sentiment had swept the western half of the United States. Beginning with the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a series of national laws, state laws, and court decisions forbade these men from bringing their wives into America from China and stemmed the flow of any more Chinese, men or women, from entering America. Intermarriage between whites and Chinese was not permitted by law. As a result, the bachelor communities of Chinese in the Idaho mining towns gradually dwindled until all the Chinese had died before the repeal of the Exclusion Acts during World War II.
To this day, some of the mining towns of Idaho still celebrate Chinese New Year in memory of the presence of the Chinese among them.
jesus. in the footnotes: The Chinese were 28.5 percent of the population of Idaho in 1870.
As the economy recovered, labor costs rose. There were fewer and fewer young men desperate enough to take jobs as Diggers in the Tunnel. Progress on the American side had slowed for a few years, and Japan was not doing much better. Even China seemed to run out of poor peasants who wanted this work.
Hideki Tōjō, Army Minister, came up with a solution. The Imperial Army’s pacification of the Communist rebellions supported by the Soviet Union in Manchuria and China resulted in many prisoners. They could be put to work, for free.
The prisoners were brought into the Tunnel to take the place of regular work crews. As shift supervisor, I managed them with the aid of a squad of soldiers. The prisoners were a sorry sight, chained together, naked, thin like scarecrows. They did not look like dangerous and crafty Communist bandits. I wondered sometimes how there could be so many prisoners, since the news always said that the pacification of the Communists was going well and the Communists were not much of a threat.
The man at the front of the chain was only a few meters from us, and in the remaining cone of light cast by the small opening that was left I could see his face, contorted with fright.
“Please,” he said. “Please let me through. I just stole some money. I don’t deserve to die.”
He spoke to me in Hokkien, my mother tongue. This shocked me. Was he a common criminal from back home in Formosa, and not a Chinese Communist from Manchuria?
He reached the opening and began to push away the rocks, to enlarge the opening and climb through. The corporal shouted at me to stop him. The water level was rising. Behind the man, the other chained prisoners were climbing to help him.
I lifted a heavy rock near me and smashed it down on the hands of the man grabbing onto the opening. He howled and fell back, dragging the other prisoners down with him. I heard the splash of water.
“Faster, faster!” I ordered the prisoners on our side of the collapsed tunnel. We sealed the opening, then retreated to set up more dynamite and blast down more rocks to solidify the seal.
When the work was finally done, the corporal ordered all the remaining prisoners shot, and we buried their bodies under yet more blast debris.
There was a massive prisoner uprising. They attempted to sabotage the project, but failed and instead killed themselves.
This was the corporal’s report of the incident, and I signed my name to it as well. Everyone understood that was the way to write up such reports.
I remember the face of the man begging me to stop very well. That was the face I saw in the dream last night.
dark
To study the progress of syphilis and other venereal diseases, we would vivisect the women at various intervals after they were infected. It was important to understand the effects of the disease on living organs, and vivisection also provided valuable surgical practice. The vivisection was sometimes done with chloroform, sometimes not. We usually vivisected the subjects for the anthrax and cholera experiments without use of anesthesia since anesthesia might have affected the results, and it was felt that the same would be true with the women with syphilis.
This was not the first time I had read this letter. I had seen it once before, as a little girl. It was one of my mother’s treasured possessions, and I remember asking her to explain all the faded characters to me.
“He was very proud of his literary learning,” my mother had said. “He always closed his letters with a tanka.”
By then Grandfather was well into his long slide into dementia. Often he would confuse me with my mother and call me by her name. He would also teach me how to make origami animals. His fingers were very dextrous—the legacy of being a good surgeon.
i liked this twist - i genuinely didn't see it coming - but most of all, i liked the ruminations on the legitimacy of punishment, which is something i've been thinking about a lot lately. is it right to punish someone for their past crimes if they have dementia and aren't even the same person anymore? what if they don't have dementia but have still changed?
[...] Buddy’s mother, during one of Zane’s visits, had said something about how wonderful it was that Zane was helping preserve the balance of nature, and Zane had made a face and said the balance of nature was a dead dodo.
“Nothing is really balanced. Try to think of it as an ongoing poker game, say five-card draw, but everything constantly changes—the money, the card suits, the players, even the table, and every ante is affected by the weather, and you’re playing in a room where the house around you is being demolished.”
Buddy and his father, in sympathy for once, exchanged glances.
“Truth is,” said Zane, “most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. Just tinkering, is one view, another view—”
“Quit while you’re ahead,” said Buddy’s father and silence fell on the table.
enjoyed this
Cheri pointed at Rase. “It’s important a me. This is just the worse place I ever lived.” She glared at him and he fired up.
“Worse place? How about that dump you was brought up in? And I’d like to see how you save up enough money for a house in town by passin out hot dogs at a school cafeteria one day a week. You think you got it bad, but this is the best I can do. I been workin since I was seventeen, supportin this family. You’re dissatisfied with everthing, but you ever think a that, ever think I might a want a go into a different line a work than what I do? I wanted a be a high-school coach, but you got a go to college for that and I been hustlin miserable jobs for years so I could afford a buy this goddamn trailer you piss on, support you and all these goddamn kids. You don’t get it that the bad comes with the good. You don’t take notice that there’s a lot a guys would a walked, you bein so fuckin fat and always knocked up.”
“You don’t like your kids you shouldn’t a made so many a them. Use a rubber once in a while and you’d have the money— and no family.”
“Whyn’t you get on the pill? You take the fuckin housekeepin money and buy them goddamn dumb magazines you always get. You could get birth-control pills instead and not jump on me about kids.”
man
I don’t want to believe this story. It seems designed to make me pity her. Yet there’s an embarrassment in her face that suddenly makes her look very young, like a child who has admitted to a misdeed. “Are you going to try again?” I ask.
“Maybe sometime,” she says. “Maybe after my career.”
“That might be a long time,” I say.
“Probably not,” she says, her eyes set on something in the distance. “I’ll have a few good years, and I’d better make enough money to retire on. I don’t know what other job I could do.”
I consider this. “So what will you do with yourself afterward?”
“I don’t know. Go to Morocco with my father. Have kids. Whatever people do.”
I think of those pictures of my uncle in couture evening gowns, his skin milky, his waist slender as a girl’s. His graceful fingers hold roses or railings or billets-doux. His hair hangs long and thick, a shiny mass down his back. He now wears turtlenecks and horn-rimmed glasses; there are veins on the backs of his hands, and his beautiful hair is gone. I wonder how this can happen to Aida. She seems eternal, the exception to a rule. Can she really be mortal? Even when she fell off the bridge and chanted fever-songs, I knew she would survive to see international fame. In the glossy pages of Signora Cellini’s magazines and those of women all over the world, she will never, never change.
i quite liked this story (a girl whose cousin is a model, trying to find her mother)