STORIES
Carolyne Ikeda, Angela Ming Yang
Carolyne Ikeda, Angela Ming Yang
Tell Me, Grandfather
Carolyne Ikeda
Tell me Grandfather. Tell me your war story.
I know you were born in California. I know that you were abandoned by your country as a young man, cast out by fear and hatred. I know that you fled to a land that was your ancestor’s home. I know you were a forsaken American.
My father tells me you were conscripted into an enemy army. He says that you were beaten and beaten and beaten by your comrades for being tall, awkward, an American spy. I know you hid your English. I imagine you feared death on all sides, by every country and every man. I know I could never convey this kind of fear through my words.
Father says you left the army and volunteered for the Imperial Navy, that you commanded a PT boat along Japan’s shore.
Grandfather, did you know that my other great-grandfathers fought against you? Yes, my mother’s grandfathers were in the American Navy. You were in the Pacific at the same time, in opposing navies narrowly avoiding death.
I’m sure you know that my uncles, your cousins, decided to stay. They were put into camps, Grandfather. They were imprisoned in wastelands. Why, Grandfather, did they see the enemy in us?
Did you know that your wife was in Japan? You were protecting her miles away, but she was broken by the war too. She watched Tokyo burn.
They told me that you ran into Nagasaki after the bomb dropped, that you faced the radiation without hesitation. Uncle says that’s why Grandmother’s first child was a still born and that’s why your heart was so weakened.
I know you returned home years after the war. Your American-ness restored for you and your family.
Grandfather, do you know that I am here in California? I am writing your story. But I know only pieces.
So tell me everything Grandfather. I am listening.
Carolyne Jean Ikeda is a freshman at Stanford University.
Carolyne Ikeda
Tell me Grandfather. Tell me your war story.
I know you were born in California. I know that you were abandoned by your country as a young man, cast out by fear and hatred. I know that you fled to a land that was your ancestor’s home. I know you were a forsaken American.
My father tells me you were conscripted into an enemy army. He says that you were beaten and beaten and beaten by your comrades for being tall, awkward, an American spy. I know you hid your English. I imagine you feared death on all sides, by every country and every man. I know I could never convey this kind of fear through my words.
Father says you left the army and volunteered for the Imperial Navy, that you commanded a PT boat along Japan’s shore.
Grandfather, did you know that my other great-grandfathers fought against you? Yes, my mother’s grandfathers were in the American Navy. You were in the Pacific at the same time, in opposing navies narrowly avoiding death.
I’m sure you know that my uncles, your cousins, decided to stay. They were put into camps, Grandfather. They were imprisoned in wastelands. Why, Grandfather, did they see the enemy in us?
Did you know that your wife was in Japan? You were protecting her miles away, but she was broken by the war too. She watched Tokyo burn.
They told me that you ran into Nagasaki after the bomb dropped, that you faced the radiation without hesitation. Uncle says that’s why Grandmother’s first child was a still born and that’s why your heart was so weakened.
I know you returned home years after the war. Your American-ness restored for you and your family.
Grandfather, do you know that I am here in California? I am writing your story. But I know only pieces.
So tell me everything Grandfather. I am listening.
Carolyne Jean Ikeda is a freshman at Stanford University.
A Brief History of Apologies
Angela Ming Yang
“What is this?”
My father circled the table my mother had lugged home from a yard sale.
“It’s not square and it’s not round.”
The glass tabletop, the curved metal legs, the softened suggestion of edges and corners. They were not so soft. Over the years I would collect countless bruises from walking into this table, stubbing my toe on its base, hitting my head after picking something up.
“I like it,” my mother said. “It’s simple. It makes the room look more spacious.”
_____
Despite everything, the word silence had grown obsolete. SafetyWave was the term taught in schools, flashed across billboards, pasted onto subway train walls alongside the emergency exit instructions.
The mechanism, known for short as the Wave, worked like this: a network of satellites, which surrounded the planet, would detect the production of sound waves. The satellites would immediately produce opposite waves that cancelled out all noise on Earth.
_____
Each evening we fell into place around the table, as did our reflections upon its glass. I watched the reflections like daily installments of a TV show: a family of three eating leftovers heated and reheated, conversations winding and rewinding — weekday politics and weekend reminiscences — pool of light in a dusky house, a ritual and a comeuppance.
The first time my best friend stayed for dinner, she watched the machinery of us setting the table and heating dishes and doling food onto each other’s plates, unable to interject. After several years and countless dinners, she grew familiar enough that my parents stopped treating her as a guest and left us to wash dishes as they went to separate rooms to read the evening news.
“You always eat dinner together?” she asked. The kitchen tap ran, drowning her voice.
____
An international poll had found the citizens of the world overwhelmingly in favor of the Wave. In recent years, noise levels had surged as the world metastasized in entropy. Of course, one had to speak louder to drown out the next. The megaphones and sirens, the alarms triggering alarms, drones and motors, raw voices pitted against their own machinery.
Hospitals reported exponential increases in migraines and stress-related mental illnesses. Infinite flocks of birds, believing in a quieter land, migrated until their wings warped and gave. Rodents tunneled until they starved.
____
“You disgust me.”
And then the table was a war zone, the tomatoes nothing short of scarlet massacre and the chicken a mound of corpses. Warm. Our reflections translucent overlords of the battlefields on our plates.
So this was how politics turned into violence.
My father finished his food, one item at a time swallowing the entire battlefield. His chopsticks tinkled against the bottom of his bowl as he scooped up the last grains of rice, an inane, misfitting sound. He stood, chair shrieking against the floor, and gathered his dishes. On the table, his reflection grew smaller as he walked into the kitchen and placed the dishes in the sink, washed them, and walked outside to meet the rain.
The table shuddered as my mother slammed her hand on it. Our reflections wavered on the glass. I imagined it shattering, drawing real blood. I imagined having drawn real blood with three words.
“Why are you sitting there? Go apologize!”
He hadn’t walked far. I stood on the porch in my slippers and chose my apology with care. I’m sorry alluded to a personal regret, but in Chinese, dui bu qi simply acknowledged a disconnection. Literally, I am unable to match up with you.
“Dui bu qi,” I muttered.
Through the window, my mother motioned for me to walk up to him, to say it louder. If I were sorry, I would at least brave the rain. When my father and I returned inside, he was drenched and I was spotless. We sat back down at the table, where he began to chastise me, but stopped mid-sentence to heap cold chicken onto my plate.
“Did you have enough to eat?”
“Yeah.” I slid the plate toward him. “You have it.”
And then the table was an alter.
____
By the time the Wave shored, sign language had taken root in both schools and compulsory community classes. Grade school children learned the fastest. They molded their parents’ hands, young fingers shaping old clay, nails on skin, lips shaping phantoms.
Some sued for infringement of free speech, but no courthouses echoed back. Many avenues remained for communication and, if anything, the Wave leveled the playing field — or flattened the sand, so to say — exterminating shouting matches once and for all.
Grains of sand. Silent beach. The vacuums of rising tides.
____
“You waited.”
The mangled noodles, boated, swelling from their bowls after soaking up soup for too long.
I’d spent the afternoon with friends and eaten dinner with them when it had gotten late.
“Eat.” On the glass, my parents’ skin and eyes and voices had receded into a bitter monochrome. How long of sitting and waiting would it have taken for their reflections to disappear altogether? For them to waste into corpses, and for their corpses to waste into dust?
I wanted to rail at them, that they hadn’t needed to wait, that they could have eaten, that I would have returned anyway. My glowing reflection, breathing reflection, full-bellied, waxy, obtuse reflection.
Despite having just eaten, I ate. The noodles writhed down my throat, continued swelling in my stomach. I ate until I felt nauseous, and continued eating. Repentance at the altar, the punishment of the privileged. I ate until I grew winded and dizzy, explosive.
____
Even with the Wave, it wasn’t as though sound had became inaccessible. They brought back the speakeasies. Some served alcohol, but most served voices. Underground and heavily insulated, they were impenetrable by the satellites. Admission started expensive but lowered with competition.
Few people really went to talk. Most listened, if not to the familiar embrace of ambient conversation, then to those songs they used to hum to, or the escape of their own breaths from their lungs.
____
“Your favorites.”
The final evening before the Wave, my father made what he thought were my favorite dishes. We hovered at the table long after we’d finished eating.
“Let’s not talk politics,” I’d said, but nevertheless the conversation curdled. We yelled to make ourselves audible over the cacophony of the entire world asserting its last utterances — though it was not really the end of speech, but the end of hearing.
By then l’d long stopped arguing my father on his opinions. When I felt a spark of disagreement, I lowered my eyes from his face and forced them instead to his vigorous soundless reflection. Let him speak. Let him spend a final dinner hearing himself.
My mother noticed. “Any final words from you?” she asked.
“Uh… no.” I’d wanted to save my final words for the solitude of my room, the minutes before midnight. I was still deciding what they would be when I realized all of a sudden that I hadn’t made a single sincere apology in my entire life. The words stung like tears in my throat.
Somebody had placed the last shrimp on my plate — scrawny and a cooked-through shade of orange, eyes bulging as though it had missed its final breath of air.
It was getting too late and too loud. We stood, and the plates rattled on the table for the last time.
____
After comprehensive research, we conclude that SafetyWave has proven a success. It has eradicated millions of migraines, restored peace to our neighborhoods, and preserved global communication through our sophisticated, high technology system.
Indeed, people found new ways to speak: in the delicate, ambiguous waters of their eyes, in various levels of vehemence as they signed, in pushes and shoves on rush-hour sidewalks. In the crystals of shattered windows falling like snow. In poetry and curses blooming on pavement. In banners at silent marches shown on silent screens. In the abandonment of words altogether. In slow days spent alone. In quiet exits.
____
You’re home.
My mother brought her fingers together like a beak and touched her own face, first close to the mouth, then near her ear. The sign for home looked like two kisses on the cheek.
When I’d returned for break after my first quarter of college, I was surprised to find that the show still ran. The glass was scratched, chipped in places. And often the set was missing its third plate. But the actors remained — thinning hair, clouding eyes, hands that had learned their scripts well. What loyal actors who remained.
Angela Ming Yang
“What is this?”
My father circled the table my mother had lugged home from a yard sale.
“It’s not square and it’s not round.”
The glass tabletop, the curved metal legs, the softened suggestion of edges and corners. They were not so soft. Over the years I would collect countless bruises from walking into this table, stubbing my toe on its base, hitting my head after picking something up.
“I like it,” my mother said. “It’s simple. It makes the room look more spacious.”
_____
Despite everything, the word silence had grown obsolete. SafetyWave was the term taught in schools, flashed across billboards, pasted onto subway train walls alongside the emergency exit instructions.
The mechanism, known for short as the Wave, worked like this: a network of satellites, which surrounded the planet, would detect the production of sound waves. The satellites would immediately produce opposite waves that cancelled out all noise on Earth.
_____
Each evening we fell into place around the table, as did our reflections upon its glass. I watched the reflections like daily installments of a TV show: a family of three eating leftovers heated and reheated, conversations winding and rewinding — weekday politics and weekend reminiscences — pool of light in a dusky house, a ritual and a comeuppance.
The first time my best friend stayed for dinner, she watched the machinery of us setting the table and heating dishes and doling food onto each other’s plates, unable to interject. After several years and countless dinners, she grew familiar enough that my parents stopped treating her as a guest and left us to wash dishes as they went to separate rooms to read the evening news.
“You always eat dinner together?” she asked. The kitchen tap ran, drowning her voice.
____
An international poll had found the citizens of the world overwhelmingly in favor of the Wave. In recent years, noise levels had surged as the world metastasized in entropy. Of course, one had to speak louder to drown out the next. The megaphones and sirens, the alarms triggering alarms, drones and motors, raw voices pitted against their own machinery.
Hospitals reported exponential increases in migraines and stress-related mental illnesses. Infinite flocks of birds, believing in a quieter land, migrated until their wings warped and gave. Rodents tunneled until they starved.
____
“You disgust me.”
And then the table was a war zone, the tomatoes nothing short of scarlet massacre and the chicken a mound of corpses. Warm. Our reflections translucent overlords of the battlefields on our plates.
So this was how politics turned into violence.
My father finished his food, one item at a time swallowing the entire battlefield. His chopsticks tinkled against the bottom of his bowl as he scooped up the last grains of rice, an inane, misfitting sound. He stood, chair shrieking against the floor, and gathered his dishes. On the table, his reflection grew smaller as he walked into the kitchen and placed the dishes in the sink, washed them, and walked outside to meet the rain.
The table shuddered as my mother slammed her hand on it. Our reflections wavered on the glass. I imagined it shattering, drawing real blood. I imagined having drawn real blood with three words.
“Why are you sitting there? Go apologize!”
He hadn’t walked far. I stood on the porch in my slippers and chose my apology with care. I’m sorry alluded to a personal regret, but in Chinese, dui bu qi simply acknowledged a disconnection. Literally, I am unable to match up with you.
“Dui bu qi,” I muttered.
Through the window, my mother motioned for me to walk up to him, to say it louder. If I were sorry, I would at least brave the rain. When my father and I returned inside, he was drenched and I was spotless. We sat back down at the table, where he began to chastise me, but stopped mid-sentence to heap cold chicken onto my plate.
“Did you have enough to eat?”
“Yeah.” I slid the plate toward him. “You have it.”
And then the table was an alter.
____
By the time the Wave shored, sign language had taken root in both schools and compulsory community classes. Grade school children learned the fastest. They molded their parents’ hands, young fingers shaping old clay, nails on skin, lips shaping phantoms.
Some sued for infringement of free speech, but no courthouses echoed back. Many avenues remained for communication and, if anything, the Wave leveled the playing field — or flattened the sand, so to say — exterminating shouting matches once and for all.
Grains of sand. Silent beach. The vacuums of rising tides.
____
“You waited.”
The mangled noodles, boated, swelling from their bowls after soaking up soup for too long.
I’d spent the afternoon with friends and eaten dinner with them when it had gotten late.
“Eat.” On the glass, my parents’ skin and eyes and voices had receded into a bitter monochrome. How long of sitting and waiting would it have taken for their reflections to disappear altogether? For them to waste into corpses, and for their corpses to waste into dust?
I wanted to rail at them, that they hadn’t needed to wait, that they could have eaten, that I would have returned anyway. My glowing reflection, breathing reflection, full-bellied, waxy, obtuse reflection.
Despite having just eaten, I ate. The noodles writhed down my throat, continued swelling in my stomach. I ate until I felt nauseous, and continued eating. Repentance at the altar, the punishment of the privileged. I ate until I grew winded and dizzy, explosive.
____
Even with the Wave, it wasn’t as though sound had became inaccessible. They brought back the speakeasies. Some served alcohol, but most served voices. Underground and heavily insulated, they were impenetrable by the satellites. Admission started expensive but lowered with competition.
Few people really went to talk. Most listened, if not to the familiar embrace of ambient conversation, then to those songs they used to hum to, or the escape of their own breaths from their lungs.
____
“Your favorites.”
The final evening before the Wave, my father made what he thought were my favorite dishes. We hovered at the table long after we’d finished eating.
“Let’s not talk politics,” I’d said, but nevertheless the conversation curdled. We yelled to make ourselves audible over the cacophony of the entire world asserting its last utterances — though it was not really the end of speech, but the end of hearing.
By then l’d long stopped arguing my father on his opinions. When I felt a spark of disagreement, I lowered my eyes from his face and forced them instead to his vigorous soundless reflection. Let him speak. Let him spend a final dinner hearing himself.
My mother noticed. “Any final words from you?” she asked.
“Uh… no.” I’d wanted to save my final words for the solitude of my room, the minutes before midnight. I was still deciding what they would be when I realized all of a sudden that I hadn’t made a single sincere apology in my entire life. The words stung like tears in my throat.
Somebody had placed the last shrimp on my plate — scrawny and a cooked-through shade of orange, eyes bulging as though it had missed its final breath of air.
It was getting too late and too loud. We stood, and the plates rattled on the table for the last time.
____
After comprehensive research, we conclude that SafetyWave has proven a success. It has eradicated millions of migraines, restored peace to our neighborhoods, and preserved global communication through our sophisticated, high technology system.
Indeed, people found new ways to speak: in the delicate, ambiguous waters of their eyes, in various levels of vehemence as they signed, in pushes and shoves on rush-hour sidewalks. In the crystals of shattered windows falling like snow. In poetry and curses blooming on pavement. In banners at silent marches shown on silent screens. In the abandonment of words altogether. In slow days spent alone. In quiet exits.
____
You’re home.
My mother brought her fingers together like a beak and touched her own face, first close to the mouth, then near her ear. The sign for home looked like two kisses on the cheek.
When I’d returned for break after my first quarter of college, I was surprised to find that the show still ran. The glass was scratched, chipped in places. And often the set was missing its third plate. But the actors remained — thinning hair, clouding eyes, hands that had learned their scripts well. What loyal actors who remained.
Forget about the Stars - A Meditation for Melancholics
Angela Ming Yang
The Google Maps navigator has long fallen silent. My mother extinguishes the blue glow of her cell phone and the outline of her face it illuminated.
“No more service, but no matter. This is the only road from here on out.”
We’re driving through Death Valley, where the sun cowers behind the surrounding mountains even before the the dashboard clock reads five. Outside our car, the Earth perpetuates in all its unseen magnitude. But the world dilates and contracts at the whim of our headlights.
The three of us — we are nuclear, neat to pack, easy to shove along the highways and into the dumplands of infinity. And sometimes that is all I want.
Oblivious Earth, amnesiac Earth, forget that we had ever passed through.
I suppose they’d been city kids — my parents — who’d peered at the stars through looming apartments and the muggy light of windows and street lamps.
They were driving here for the stars. All eight hours. My father’s nails dug into the steering wheel, a habit I’d inherited. When he finally agreed to rest and I took the wheel, I could feel the crescent scars we’d left on the faux leather, longer crescents from his nails, shorter ones from mine.
May we leave none more than shadows and exhaust.
After it gets dark, my father reclaims the driver’s seat. The car smells of takeout, the disappointment of counterfeit fried rice. Our breaths fog the glass, removing what’s left of mountain silhouettes and the starved forms of desert trees.
How much can we lose before we lose the world?
Subtraction. Of topography, of voice, of thought. Of gravity.
The world swerves.
My father jerks back into consciousness, straining against the darkness that persists despite his reopened eyes.
After we pull onto the shoulder of the road, my mother steps from the passenger seat, motions for him to switch places.
“You need to rest. I’m driving the rest of the way.”
But first, my mother tells us to climb out, her voice disembodied by the dark, by the daggered wind rushing into the car.
“Look up.”
Because it’s surrounded by mountains that block the light pollution from Las Vegas, nighttime Death Valley is one of the darkest places in the country and one of the best places for stargazing. I had read this in my fifth grade science book, begged to visit Death Valley. A long-forgotten entreaty.
Nine years later, we crawled from the shell of our world into the velvet of the Earthly night, into the stars, myriad and distant with all their scintillating coldness.
Forget about the stars.
Angela Yang is a psychology major, Asian American studies minor, and creative writing enthusiast at Stanford University. Her fiction can be found at Glass Mountain: Shards.
Angela Ming Yang
The Google Maps navigator has long fallen silent. My mother extinguishes the blue glow of her cell phone and the outline of her face it illuminated.
“No more service, but no matter. This is the only road from here on out.”
We’re driving through Death Valley, where the sun cowers behind the surrounding mountains even before the the dashboard clock reads five. Outside our car, the Earth perpetuates in all its unseen magnitude. But the world dilates and contracts at the whim of our headlights.
The three of us — we are nuclear, neat to pack, easy to shove along the highways and into the dumplands of infinity. And sometimes that is all I want.
Oblivious Earth, amnesiac Earth, forget that we had ever passed through.
I suppose they’d been city kids — my parents — who’d peered at the stars through looming apartments and the muggy light of windows and street lamps.
They were driving here for the stars. All eight hours. My father’s nails dug into the steering wheel, a habit I’d inherited. When he finally agreed to rest and I took the wheel, I could feel the crescent scars we’d left on the faux leather, longer crescents from his nails, shorter ones from mine.
May we leave none more than shadows and exhaust.
After it gets dark, my father reclaims the driver’s seat. The car smells of takeout, the disappointment of counterfeit fried rice. Our breaths fog the glass, removing what’s left of mountain silhouettes and the starved forms of desert trees.
How much can we lose before we lose the world?
Subtraction. Of topography, of voice, of thought. Of gravity.
The world swerves.
My father jerks back into consciousness, straining against the darkness that persists despite his reopened eyes.
After we pull onto the shoulder of the road, my mother steps from the passenger seat, motions for him to switch places.
“You need to rest. I’m driving the rest of the way.”
But first, my mother tells us to climb out, her voice disembodied by the dark, by the daggered wind rushing into the car.
“Look up.”
Because it’s surrounded by mountains that block the light pollution from Las Vegas, nighttime Death Valley is one of the darkest places in the country and one of the best places for stargazing. I had read this in my fifth grade science book, begged to visit Death Valley. A long-forgotten entreaty.
Nine years later, we crawled from the shell of our world into the velvet of the Earthly night, into the stars, myriad and distant with all their scintillating coldness.
Forget about the stars.
Angela Yang is a psychology major, Asian American studies minor, and creative writing enthusiast at Stanford University. Her fiction can be found at Glass Mountain: Shards.