Iris Chang's Legacy (ZT)

A student won second place at the college wide competion "Student Writing Showcase" for his paper submitted to Creative Writing class at a community college in NY. He wrote it after reading two books by Iris Chang: "Chinese in America" and "The Rape of Nanking".

The story is set during WWII, it's about a girl orphaned from Northeast China ("Manchukuo"), who lost her mother to Japanese invaders along with other fellow villagers in NE China (influenced from Iris Chang's book "the Rape of Nanking") and somehow she escaped to San Francisco and lived with her uncle who tried to teach her English by reading to her before bedtime (influenced by Iris Chang's "Chinese in America"). It seems that Iris Chang's works are taking effect among American young people now, not just Chinese know about Japanese' war crimes, but many Americans do, too, maybe more and more.

Words Before Dreaming (by Robert Costello)
English227/Creative Writing, Dr. Starmer
03/28/2005

Uncle still comes to my bed each night to read to me words from his thick American book. It is always late when he climbs the stairs outside the room where I sleep. He tries to step quietly, so I will not know that he approaches, but the stairs always betray him with their same creaking chatter. When they speak like this, I can hear in them the same low complaints often given in winter by the slack boards of our small house in the village near Harbin where I once lived with Mi-Ma.

On the coldest nights, the playful West wind would fall upon our thin walls as if he thought we lived between harp strings and were eager to dance to his tuneless plucking. If I were wakened by these troubled sounds, Mi-Ma would hum the simple songs taught to her by her mother and shame the foolish wind into stillness. Her soft voice could always calm me back to sleep. Yet there is no soft voice to soothe me when Uncle wakes me now, and I do not still recall those simple songs to hum them to myself.

When he enters, he first ties back the worn sheet, printed with fading plum blossoms, which is the only door between this room and the hallway. The limbs of dim lamplight from the hallway stretch like branches into the darkened room as his shadow, light as a hungry sparrow, lands on my face as if to peck away the first crumbs of sleep that have collected in the corners of my closed eyes.

He sits by my bed on the wounded wooden stool he found abandoned in the street one day on his walk home from the fish market. This happened long before I came to live in his house. He has mended the cracked leg with glue and strong twine many times since. He says they throw away much that is still good here. I have seen that he is right.

At first, when he comes, I keep my eyes shut tight. They will lie for me and tell him that I still sleep. When he is settled on the stool, I can peek around my shut eyelids to watch him as he begins his reading. He does not ever notice. He has too much work with the clumsy English words in his book to see that I am not yet home with Mi-Ma in my dreaming. She waits patiently for me each night, while his slow, rough fingers press down upon the old pages, pushing hardest against the longest words.

I think he wants to hurt them like they hurt him. Maybe he wishes them to cry out their own names, sparing him his effort. But they stay silent and he must fumble them from his own mouth, so softly, so as not to wake me, but still out loud, so that this American poison will seep slyly into my dreams and murder my memories of home.

Mi-Ma will not let this happen though. She waits for him to be finished, enduring as a weary ox each night, until he has closed his book and shuffled off to his small cot at the end of the hallway. It is then that she is free to whisper to me stories of my father's sturdy laugh and the times when he would dangle me like a plump, ripe pear from the stems of his fingertips. These are long-ago days that I am now too grown to hold onto for myself, so she gives them to me like soft buns, feeding me bits of my father's ghost to make me stronger and less afraid. She tells me that his spirit watches over me now in this strange land. She tells me that he watches over Uncle too, and that he, her brother, is the only hope for my future, the reason she gave me up to the great laughing ocean now between us.

I think of these things each night as Uncle reads to me. But I can tell that he sees nothing but the foreign words of his book. Uncle says that I must practice these watery Yankee words so that I too may flow gently with the tides here. He says that I am like a fresh, dry rag that will soak them up much better than he, his brain already sopping with the thoughts and memories of his long lifetime. It is true that I already speak them better than he, but I hate these words. They spill from my lips like the muddied waters of the Songhua in spring, shapeless and treacherous. They have no meaning, only sound-no beauty, only function. Speaking them makes me dead inside.

Even my American name is dead. Susan-it means nothing in this country and only makes a sad, little noise when spoken. Uncle picked it for me when I first came here because he said it sounded like my real name. But I do not think it sounds like Xue Hua at all. Ice Flower. Mi-Ma told me once that she gave me this name because on the frozen, white morning when I born, I came out of her belly as bright and red as a fresh winter sweet blossom.
Uncle calls himself Jack when he speaks to the Americans at the fish market, but they only ever call him Chan or Charlie. I hear them when I help Uncle scrub the stand on Sunday afternoons. The women watch over me with fear, as if they think I will gobble-up their children. I can tell that the men think other thoughts.

I hate these tall, pale ghosts with their slick skin clear like melted wax. Uncle tells me that I must learn to swallow their leers and insults as if they were sweet bean paste, hearty and filling, so that they will feed my angry heart and make it grow stout. He tells me that I must remember that there is little room in this country for a Chinese, especially a girl.

He tells me that I will not see Mi-Ma again. He tells me that the Japanese have killed many people and that our village has been burned to dust. He tells me that they have given our country a false name, Manchukuo, that the Emperor has been made into a leaping monkey within his own palace. He tells me that Mi-Ma is lost to me forever.

It is true that I have not had letters from her since many years ago. But I do not believe that she is dead. I still can feel the steady beating next to my own pulsing heart that tells me she still lives. I know that she is waiting, perhaps in some other village far from the bones of our old home, hoping that I will grown strong enough to one day seek her out.

Uncle does not wish me to speak like this. He will not hear me if I do. He says that I must accept my fate here that I must always dance like the humble leaves for the pleasure of the foolish wind. This is why he reads to me, each night, when he thinks that I still sleep, while I, near dreaming, wait for Mi-Ma to sing to me again the simple songs once taught to her by her mother.