PseudoPod 1002: The Squatters
Show Notes
Alex’s review of the anthology: I approached Silk & Sinew with high hope of a companion for the Stoker Award winning anthology Black Cranes, and those hopes were exceeded. This book is good from cover to cover, and both the foreword and afterword are essential reading. “Mother’s Mother’s Daughter” by Audrey Zhou is a well executed dark fantasy metaphor to kick off the stories in this anthology. “The Squatters” by Shawna Yang Ryan is brutal and unflinching exploration of forensic work on mass graves. “If I Am to Earn My Tether” by Geneve Flynn has excellent nesting storytelling and use of second person. Lots of compelling layers both visceral and intellectual for a satisfying story. I’m a fan of Geneve’s and this is possibly her best story yet. “Guilt is a Little House” by J.A.W. McCarthy shows us that there is a thin line between horror and tragedy. “Mindfulness” by Rena Mason really drives home that you can never go back home.
Additionally, these stories often contrast the crush of humanity in ultra-dense urban environments with green wilderness within a short drive. This is a different version of the “Rural Poor as Monstrous Other” theme through different lenses and experiences. That is one of my favorite themes to explore, and these new views were very satisfying.
Notes from author: The context in the anthology has some mistakes. Though Indigenous Austronesian Taiwanese were the subject of horrific violence by the various colonial powers in Taiwan, the 1947 massacre in my story was of ethnically Chinese Taiwanese who had been in Taiwan for hundreds of years (and of course had mixed blood–Indigenous, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese) by the Chinese KMT who arrived in 1945. Scholar say that it was in fact this event that solidified a sense of a separate “Taiwanese” identity from “Chinese.” Before that. Taiwanese were aware of their Chinese roots and were hopeful about the arrival of the KMT after fifty years of Japanese colonialism. The 1947 “2-28” Massacre was a terrible wake-up call. (Now, a “Taiwanese” identity is claimed by everyone in Taiwan, despite ethnicity–akin to a national identity rather than an ethnic one.)
From the back of the anthology: Glimpses into the Historical Context; Colonialism in Taiwan (informing Shawna Yang Ryan’s story “The Squatters”)
The story of colonization and displacement in Taiwan is a complex one. No one can say definitively what would or would not have occurred without the disruption of the West throughout Asia. Western imperialism exposed and aggravated preexisting fissures and weaknesses in Asian governments and societies. Simultaneously, we cannot excuse, forgive, or forget acts of Asian imperial violence including the massacres of native Taiwanese at the hands of the Kuomintang (KMT) government. The road to these atrocities includes the history of Western imperialism, Cold War powers, economic and political instability, and civil war. But the acts of violence were directly committed by those who came to power in Taiwan—those who were ethnically Chinese and affiliated with the KMT. The victims were Austronesians, the indigenous peoples of Taiwan.
History tends to work in a domino effect. Overwhelmingly, the narrative is familiar where Western imperial powers colonized peoples and lands to serve its interests and enrichment. To muddy the waters further, competition and conflict between groups have in various instances even welcomed Western hegemony.
The road starts with six centuries of Western economic manipulation, imperialistic infiltration, and abuses that did much to further weaken the Qing Dynasty’s rule in China.?1 The result would be the ultimate overthrow of the Qing by the KMT establishing the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912. (The imperial ambitions of Japan made upheaval worse with the 1931 invasion of Manchuria.) Later, with the rise of Mao Zedong’s Red Army, a Communist-terrified West threw support behind the KMT. In the subsequent Chinese Civil War, the KMT would lose to Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leading to the creation the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as we know it today.
Taiwan’s native peoples have been colonized and/or brutalized by multiple powers including the Dutch, Spanish as well as Asian powers including Imperial Japan and most recently the KMT. Fleeing its loss in the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong’s forces, the KMT arrived in 1945 and took control of the island, establishing the ROC government there. Anxieties of control and beliefs in racial superiority, the Chinese KMT displaced indigenous Taiwanese from their homes and lands. Schools forbade the use of the many Austronesian languages of indigenous children. Often dissidents disappeared and were never heard from again. In addition, ROC forces committed multiple massacres of native Taiwanese, including the one featured in Ryan’s story, the 228 Massacre (1947), and others such as the 1987 Lieyu Massacre.
The nation of Taiwan continues to struggle with this legacy and the government (as also depicted in the story) has made efforts to recognize and honor the memory of the violence. As with any colonial power, “sorry” is never enough. Greater discussion of the massacre has been used as a political example of the dangers of authoritarian rule encouraging and emphasizing an identity of Taiwan as a nation of true democracy. The 2000 election which ousted KMT control is considered an example of Taiwanese anti-authoritarianism in action. Indeed, Taiwan is considered a vibrant democracy today.
Nonetheless, this idea simplifies and excuses the ongoing societal problems that persist against native Taiwanese peoples, who continue to experience systematic racism and prejudiced treatment from many ethnically Chinese Taiwanese. Much of this violent history has only just begun to receive greater attention. The indigenous people of Taiwan have not only been disenfranchised of ancestral lands, but all too many have stories of loved ones who never came home. It is likely that many of the vanished were victims of racialized massacres and other instances of violence.
The Squatters
by Shawna Yang Ryan
The government begins excavating the bones in late February to coincide with the events planned to commemorate the massacre. It is meant to gesture that they truly do intend to follow through on their promise of “truth and reconciliation” and with the upcoming election, a way to score political points for the candidates of the ruling party. The site is one of a number of mass graves that have been located in the past two decades, and now there is an official governmental department in charge of identifying the victims and honoring them with a proper burial and headstone.
I would like to tell you we were always solemn as we cataloged and analyzed these lost lives, but we made jokes because laughter is what made us human, alive. Dissociation was part of the job.
When I told my mom I was heading to Taiwan, she was both delighted and dismayed. Neither she or I had been back to Taiwan in almost a decade, and we both longed for it. She warned me to not mix myself up in the island’s contentious politics. “It goes so much deeper than you can understand, Alex,” she said. I told her the very reason they were allowing me in was because of my neutrality. And my elementary Taiwanese, Tâi-gí, which no one in my American organization spoke.
There were no direct flights to Taiwan from the United States. They’d ended three years before as part of the expansion of “strategic ambiguity,” so I took a seven-hour flight from Honolulu to Narita, passed five hours in Narita eating udon and wandering past shops selling meneki-neko and ceramic Totoros. I bought a plastic No Face charm and hung it from my computer bag strap.
After the final flight to Taipei, I was fingerprinted and photographed, and greeted at the customs exit by a man sweating through his white dress shirt and holding a sheet of paper with my name scrawled across it.
I was once again home.
The earth smells rich and damp as we cut away the green and turn the soil. My colleague, Pei-chun, works with a small trowel. A heavy rain has swept away part of the hillside, but she thinks she can determine the parameters of the original grave. The washed bones have been strewn by the drifting mud, but we cannot touch them yet.
It was a dog—a Golden Retriever—that made the discovery. It galloped down the hill with its newfound toy—gleaming like a sanitized pet-store bone—in its mouth. Wrestling the object away, its human discovered a jaw in her hand. A tibia could be mistaken for an animal bone, perhaps. But not a human jaw. She called the police. The news crews were there before the police could rope off the area and Pei-chun now picks up gum wrappers and bottle caps with a snort.
I have been to a number of mass graves. At each excavation I am newly struck by an inarticulable sense of loss. Certain things hit hard: the skeleton of a teenager in a Jon Bon Jovi t-shirt and moldering jeans in Bosnia; a skeleton in Myanmar still wearing a stack of beaded bracelets, an open hand of bones that had slipped from the baby it held; a heap of bodies outside of Mexico City without hands. Sometimes the cadavers are partially fleshed, and I can almost see their lives. A tarnished barrette still holds back a hank of chestnut hair from a decaying forehead. A Pokémon watch sinks into a softening wrist. Maggots stream out of Nike Air Force 1 high tops.
The bones today are clean though Pei-chun finds scraps of cloth. I photograph each piece, record it in my notebook and on my laptop, and put it in a plastic bin. Clean bones are usually old bones, so we have an idea of what we are looking at.
“How many of these have you done?” I ask Pei-chun in my stilted Taiwanese. I have known Pei-chun for three days, since the briefing at the university. Bleary-eyed, we shared an awkward breakfast this morning in the hotel slurping rice porridge and eating fried eggs.
“This is my third.” Pei-chun answers in English.
“Are there ever any surviving family members?”
“With DNA testing, we find quite a few, but they are usually distant relatives. Many family lines ended in these graves.”
So it often is. Change by degrees is too hard; some prefer to do it in one fell swoop, a sweep of bullets, a community destroyed, rubble to build a new country out of. I have seen it in a dozen places around the world.
I call my mother back in California and tell her where I am staying. I flip the phone camera and slowly spin around the room so my mom can see the soft buttery walls, the recessed lighting, the black tiled bathroom. Out the window a few random lights twinkle up the hillside.
“Gong Gong and Po Po had a country house over there,” my mom says. “We went when we were kids, but when Po Po died, we stopped going. I don’t know what happened to it. You should go look at it. Send me a picture. I remember we spent whole days catching crickets.”
My heritage here in Taiwan is only partly known to me, obscured by language and my mixed-race blood. I want to see a piece of my mother’s life. Her childhood home had been bulldozed decades before for a high rise. I’d only seen slivers of it in the background of old photos, and I thought it would reveal something important to me about her, and maybe us.
“There wasn’t an address.” My mother continues. “But I can tell you how to get there. There’s a small town that the highway cuts through. It was called Camphor Grove then. Just past it, the road veers to the left and goes into the forest and up a hill. You’ll pass a small temple, like a garden god altar really. Well, who knows if it’s still there. It’s been, what, forty years? Fifty? But the house had a gigantic banyan in the courtyard. It took five of us to reach our arms around it. If you see the banyan, you will know it’s the right place.”
I know Camphor Grove. It is where the woman who had found the original jaw lives. It is mere hundreds of meters from the excavation site. I will go after work tomorrow.
Pei-chun is friendlier today, jokes with me and with Yan-ting, who is the other archeologist on the dig and comes from what I assume is a rival university.
After work, Pei-chun asks me to join her for a beer.
“I have to run an, uh” I search for the word “errand” in my Tâi-gí vocabulary, “job for my mother.”
“What a filial child,” Pei-chun says.
“I’ll go with you,” Yan-ting volunteers.
Pei-chun pretends not to hear him.
After work, we walk back to the main road where Pei-chun has parked her car, and Yan-ting and I have our bikes. I wave goodbye. Then I continue up the road and find a small opening in the tall grass where it looks as though there might be a path. I look over my shoulder and a woman sitting in front of the town’s last shop, which sells dusty bottles of sarsaparilla and Pocari Sweat, stares at me. I wave and the woman gives a barely perceptible nod. I turn into the grass.
To the most attentive eye, there is a path. As I push my bike through, I consider going back to the work site for a machete. The birds call, the sky grows darker as if rain clouds have moved in, and I have already lost the sounds of other humans. After a while, I see a large stone partially obscured by the grass. I push aside the blades and see a small paint-chipped god nestled in the alcove beside two melted red candles. This must be the god altar.
It gets dark faster than I anticipate. I am usually back in the hotel after a cheap meal of noodles or an individual hot pot eaten under a blaring news report at the shop two doors down from the hotel. I flick on my bike light and keep going.
The canopy of a giant banyan appears on my left. I can’t believe I have found it. The grass ends at a fence with an arched gateway. I push through to a dirt courtyard where the giant banyan stands, a hundred trunks roping down into the earth. A flock of quieting birds murmur in the boughs. A house stands just beyond the reach of the banyan’s canopy. The rounded black roof tiles are disrupted, broken, and one corner of the overhang is cracked, exposing its inner workings. An open veranda surrounds the house, in a Japanese style. Shingles have fallen from the exterior. A flat bicycle tire lies half under the veranda.
I could leave. I should leave. It is even darker now and the mosquitoes have bitten me in half a dozen places. I’m hungry. But I have come this far, and I’ll have to wait until Saturday before I can visit in the daylight. I unclip the light from my bike and head to the front door. Respectfully—or reflexively—I sit on the veranda and take off my muddy boots before opening the door.
What do I expect to find? A discarded table, thick with dust? A forgotten calendar? Nests of chewed straw and grass holding tiny pink newborn rats?
For a moment, my grandfather’s face flashes in my mind. General Hwang Chang Wei, war hero. He had died when I was just ten, but his presence echoed on. He commanded a room. He was taller than average, with thick shoulders, a hard jaw, a shock of white hair. My mother adored him. He was hard on his sons and indulgent with his daughters, especially my mother, the youngest. I’d heard from my cousin stories of him beating my uncles, of his rage, of the creative cruelties he inflicted for obedience. But from my mother, it was all adoration. The charm he effected on women also applied to my grandmother, Po Po, who forgave him the ways he made her cry with his infidelities and when he stonewalled her for complaining, how he withheld money or love or acknowledgement. Po Po could only remember the glow she felt when he looked upon her.
I brace myself as I open the door.
It’s just as I imagined. Torn tatami. Overturned furniture. The smell of old cat piss. I cough.
A moment later, my light flashes on a child’s face, glowing blue in the dark doorway. Startled, I drop my light.
“Sorry.” I sink to my knees and grasp around for the light. “I didn’t know someone was here. Sorry.”
The child echoes me. “Sorry?”
I scurry through the front door. My hands shake as I clip the light and roll my bike through the gate.
I look over at the banyan—I am an archaeologist, not a botanist. I don’t know how many trees of this size can exist in one community. Either I have the wrong house, or my mother is wrong, and the home belongs to others already. Nostalgia, at its root, means the pain of returning home. I know the past is dreamy in her mind, some Thomas Kinkade vision of glowing windows, meadow flowers, dewy stone pathways. She doesn’t think of how mold creeps across the walls, mildew furs on fabrics, softens beams, lures termites.
She forgets that this is a place where flesh disintegrates in a matter of days.
We stake off the site with plastic yellow ribbon, build scaffolding out of uniformly cut bamboo, and drape a large blue tarp to keep the late winter rain from turning the grave into mud. With string, we mark off a grid over the excavation. Under another canopy, we set up two tables with our cameras, tools, notebooks and computers. Plastic bins sit stacked beneath the table. Even up this vine-tangled slope, our cell reception is strong, and we tether our computers to our phones. A rainbow of colored labeled flags flutter down the hillside, marking the placement of each artifact.
The week passes quickly. A man from the government comes to survey our progress and take down a report. So far, it looks as though we have the bones of at least three separate people.
“A mass grave,” he says. He looks at me and explains, though I am familiar with the history: After Japanese colonialism ended, the Chinese Nationalists came in from China. A brief bright window of hope for Taiwanese self-rule was shut by the military rule of the Nationalists, who violently suppressed any suspected “dissidents” in what was known as the 1947 March Massacre. The executions and repression continued on for years, including thirty-eight years of martial law.
“Or maybe it’s just an ordinary domestic murder-suicide,” I offer.
The man clears his throat. He doesn’t understand the caustic humor of people who hold death in their hands on a daily basis.
“We’ll tell you soon enough,” Pei-chun continues.
“Of course, of course,” the man says.
Like any child of the diaspora, I suppose, there was a lot I didn’t know about my family. Despite my mother’s favored daughter status, she left Taiwan for America, with no plans to return. Marrying my father, a Jack Mormon from Iowa, ensured it. My knowledge of Taiwan was limited to a few childhood visits and a couple trips as an adult; the rest of it came from books. Taiwan was a history reported on by white men, a list of restaurants in the Lonely Planet guide, children’s picture book images of water buffalo and rice paddies and crowded cityscapes.
My grandmother was a thin woman, impeccably dressed in qipaos long after they fell out of fashion. She wore pantyhose exactly one shade darker than her legs, block heeled shoes. She had her hair washed and set once a week at the local salon. She claimed to have been part of Madame Chiang’s mahjong circle. She was a devout Christian.
My grandfather had what was considered a lucky, masculine face: square jawed, with a broad forehead. His face portended his authority and his ability to endure hardship. He grew into his physiognomic destiny, was promoted and promoted through the army ranks until he made General. He was deeply superstitious and fixated on etiquette, protocol. Once, when I ignorantly left my chopsticks standing in my rice, like an incense offering to the dead, he swiped it so briskly that the chopsticks flew off the table and clattered to the floor. The room went silent. Never do that again, he said in his beautifully accented English. I knew better than to cry.
Back at the site, I look at bone fragments, teeth, bits of fabric, jewelry. The dead come alive. Identified so far: Female, 20s, scraps of a blue crepe dress. Male, 30s, wristwatch. Female child, approx. 10-12 years old, jade bracelet. A shattered rib bone indicates gunfire.
Ulna and radius wrapped around the child’s skeleton, draped in disintegrating fabric, haunt my dreams.
Child skull resting on the women’s ribs, a pile of decomposing hair hanging through like seaweed.
Of course, these details come into focus slowly. Usually, it is just bone by bone, scrap by scrap, so we are shielded from the immediate horror of the story of this trio.
We find bullets. Yan-ting takes them and turns one over in his hand, inspecting with a squinting eye. “Early 20th century. It’s actually an American bullet, so the killer wasn’t Japanese. Must have been Chinese.”
At the night market with Pei-chun, we shuffle past stalls selling cell phone charms, cheap hair ornaments, t-shirts for 100NT. Pei-chun buys a candied haw. I munch on a skewer of squid balls.
“Miss! Foreign Miss!” a middle-aged woman, sitting at a table with a large physiognomy chart hanging behind her, calls out.
Pei-chun nudges me and nods toward the aunty-prophet: “I think she’s talking to you, ‘Foreign Miss.’”
“Me?” I ask.
The woman beckons me over.
“Sit, sit.”
“I don’t…” My protest dies. Because of my unusual face, I am always being called over into one hustle or another.
“This one is free of charge. Tell her it’s free,” she says to Pei-chun. The woman reaches across the table and strokes my face. “You need my help, Miss. It’s all over your face.” She takes a small, embroidered pouch, the kind from a temple with a paper blessing folded inside, and dangles it on her finger. “A wanderer. You don’t belong here.”
“Oh shut up, you old—” Pei-chun begins.
The aunty shushes her and folds my hand around the charm. “You’ll need this for wherever you’re going.”
#
In the lead-up to the island-wide commemoration of the March Massacre, a journalist and photographer come by to interview us and write a laudatory piece about confronting the past. The story elicits hundreds of comments, many of them lamenting the poor child. Instead of reconciliation, it triggers anger anew at the government.
On our next call, my mother asks if I’ve found the house.
“Someone lives there, Mom.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone is living there.”
“It must have been the wrong house. Did you see the banyan?”
“Yes.”
“That’s our house. If there are squatters, we have to tell Oldest Uncle. I loved that house. We slept with the doors open in the summer.” She sighs.
“But if we aren’t using it…”
“It belongs to us! If we want to let it fall apart, it’s still our house! Go back. I carved my name in the banyan. Then you will know for sure. Let me know.”
Ever filial, I reluctantly return to the house. The banyan roots that grow from canopy to ground look like vines of hair. I wriggle my way between these, trying to find the center. Caged within the roots, I finally spot what I think is the primary trunk. It’s so dark here in this grotto that I must turn on my phone’s flashlight to see. I run the light up and down the bark, looking for a sign of characters, something that might distinguish them from the usual knots and cracks. My light catches an old etching. My mother’s name.
I extricate myself. The sun is low in the sky.
I go back to the house. Again, I leave my work boots by the door. Knock. I call out a greeting.
A little girl opens the door.
“Sor-ry?” she says, and laughs.
“Is your mother home?’ I ask in Mandarin. She shrugs.
“Is your mother home?” I ask again, this time in Tâi-gí. She nods and beckons me in.
A moment of dizziness and panic. The tatamis are pristine. The furniture gleams. In the alcove, fresh lilies bow their white heads, and the room smells of spring. A folded futon in the corner. Am I lost again?
A woman enters—wire-rimmed glasses, hair pulled into a low bun—startles to see me, and asks my name, what I want.
I try to explain with my elementary language skills. I ask the mother how long they’ve been in the house, if they are the owners. I explain how I am looking for an old family summer home.
She answers in Japanese. I shake my head. “American,” I say.
She tries again in Tâi-gí. From what I understand, the house is theirs. They have lived in it since they built it. But my mother’s name in the bark?—I apologize for my mistake, for bothering them.
I guess my Americanness is a novelty though, because she asks me to stay for dinner.
She brings out a bucket of freshly steamed rice, sets out boiled chicken, a stack of pomelos, and a teapot. Kiyo, the girl, talks to me in a mix of languages that amuses and confuses me, and her mother tells her to quiet down and eat.
The food feels like air and leaves me hungry.
I thank her for her hospitality.
At the courtyard gate, I turn for another look at the house. The door opens and I glimpse Kiyo’s face, ghostly in the shadow. She shouts my name.
I wake up ravenous and drenched in sweat. The AC is dead, and a spear of light falls between the blackout curtains. I find a bag of chips in my backpack and devour it while standing naked in the bathroom.
I’m kneeling on dirt, working, when my phone vibrates. I send it to voicemail.
Another call. It’s my mom.
I ignore it, but she calls a third time.
“Mom, is everything okay?”
“Baba” my mother begins. “I had forgotten this. I had a kitten. One day, Baba was painting and she walked across his ink, leaving little footprints. I ran to grab her but before I could, he had broken her neck. I can still hear the snap. He dropped her in my arms and told me to watch my next cat better.”
“Mom, that’s horrible.”
“Maybe I’ve lived too long. I can’t distinguish my memories from my dreams. Did it happen? Did I make it up?”
“The house isn’t ours, Mom. Someone lives there. They say they built it.”
“They are liars. They’ll leave. They have to leave. We’ll make them leave.”
“Mom.”
At lunch, I am finishing my fourth rice burger when I notice Pei-chun watching me, bemused.
“You’re really hungry.” she says.
My stomach growls. “I think it’s the heat.”
Later that night, unable to sleep, I go out alone for hot pot. I order plates of chrysanthemum stems, cabbage, clams, and sliced raw beef. My mouth fills with saliva at the blood pooling in the meat dish. I don’t bother to cook it.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
“Is everything okay? It’s two in the morning.”
“There was a doll with a porcelain face in the room I slept in. I found it under the tatami during our first summer there. And writing in the corner of shoji. Qing. Pure. Why would someone write that?”
“I don’t know, Mom.”
Deep in the night, I go to the house. Kiyo’s mother feeds me: peanuts, rice, steamed chicken, rice wine. I recline onto the tatami, satiated.
“Wake up, lazy ghost,” Pei-chun says, using a literal translation. “You look like shit.”
Pei-chun plops down next to me. “Check this out.” She switches to Mandarin and tells me about her visit to the national archives in Taipei.
She tells me that in March 1947, at Camphor Grove, as in a number of locations in Taiwan, mass killings were carried out by Chinese Nationalist forces. This was the infamous March Massacre. Troops, led by General Hwang Chang Wei, went home to home in the town that was suspected of harboring supporters of Taiwanese home-rule, and systematically killed all residents, including women and children. Because the community was so small, the story did not have the same lingering legacy as the murders in Taipei.
I shuffle through the photocopies that she hands me. My grandfather’s face looks back at me from a newspaper article, standing proudly next to his Generalissimo, Chiang Kai Shek. The flag of the Republic of China is caught in mid-flutter behind them.
I shove the papers back into Pei-chun’s hands and turn away to vomit.
I wear the night market charm tied to my belt loop. Kiyo sits in the front room. She practices her characters, writing each one inside of a pre-printed square. Her jade bracelet taps across the paper. This is how I learned to write Chinese too: Blue sky, white sun.
A woman trudges up the hill toward us.
“Stop! This is a research site. Step around!” Pei-chun waves the woman over toward the left.
“I’m looking for the Foreigner,” says the intruder. She is the face reader from the night market.
I meet her at the edge of the site.
“Time haunted.” She searches my feverish face. “Some places are haunted by ghosts; others by time. Like layers atop each other. The past is hanging over you.”
“We’re excavating a grave,” Pei-chun shouts. “The past is not just hanging over her—it’s under her fingernails and in her hair. Aunty, please leave us.”
My aunty-prophet, with her frizzed-out perm and polyester blouse, ignores Pei-chun. “Believe what’s before your own eyes. Stop fooling yourself.” She surveys our work. “None of you are mere bystanders. You’re all implicated!”
“Every time.” Pei-chun says after the woman leaves. “At every site, every time, some shaman, some seer, comes with a warning. Such a cliché.”
Believe what is before my eyes.
I find thirteen tiny phalanges. A child’s toes. I don’t know where the fourteenth bone is. With a gloved hand, I remove them carefully and place them in a bag to send to the lab.
Today is March 13, I realize. Two days from now, but many decades ago, troops came and murdered my little friend, Kiyo. And the troops will be led by my own grandfather, who will take over their home as a country house for his family for the next few generations.
I will take Kiyo and her mother and hide them before my grandfather and his men arrive. I will do what I couldn’t do for the teenager in Bosnia, for the mother in Myanmar, the child in Rwanda. I will change the trajectory of the future.
It is spring in the mountains. The air is bright and warm, the humidity weighing down again. The house looks freshened up. New flowers sit in the alcove. Kiyo is delighted to see me. I tell her that she and her family must leave the house.
She protests and I grab her arm. I drag her across the room, and she yells at me to stop, to let her go. She cries for her mother.
I yank her across the threshold. She looks at me with startled eyes—betrayal—and then her face begins to collapse in on itself, breaking into a million fragments of bone. Her hair disperses like a black halo. Her arm scatters through my fingers and onto the porch in a pile of sand. Her dress diffracts into a rainbow.
In just a moment, I stand before a litter of dust on the porch of a dilapidated house.
After the lab confirms the identities of the bones and their living relatives are found (some distant cousins in Taoyuan), the government pays for a quiet burial. Our crew goes, along with a few reporters and some of the long-lost cousins. There is one surviving cousin who remembers them—she is in her 90s, and she speaks carefully about her aunt, her uncle, her cousin. How their disappearance meant an assumption of death in those days, how they came to search for them and found the home occupied by the KMT. She holds a photograph of them, Kiyo and her parents, uncanny in sepia.
The day before my flight home, I visit the house for the final time. I slip between the roots of the banyan and find my mother’s name. With a pocketknife, I carve my name below hers.
At the bottom of the hill, I call my mom.
“You were right, Mom.” I confirm. “It’s ours. The house belongs to us.”
