K-Ming Chang

I bought my mother her first smartphone. It had a four-inch touchscreen and one of those cameras that’s actually three camera lenses clustered together. Why do I need three cameras, she asked me, and I said it was for getting the widest shot. You think I’m so wide I need that? she asked, swatting at me with her phone. I showed her how to call home, how to download music, but she said she didn’t listen to anything anymore, not even her own name. And never ever music, she said. That’s how she got married, listening to music: she danced to He Will Break Your Heart with my father in a GI bar in Taipei and it saddled her with three sons and me too. There was an app my mother found and downloaded that told you your past lives based on the digits of your birthday and where you were birthed. According to the app, my mother was an emperor in her past life, my oldest brother was a gangster’s wife, and I was a fortuneteller. I knew it, my mother said, I was meant to rule something. She told me that as a child, she was the first kid in all her classes to memorize the railroad maps. According to the teachers, it was every kid’s duty to memorize the railroad routes on the mainland in case they ever had to invade it and bomb the tracks. Later, my mother found out that those maps were outdated, that none of those railroads existed anymore, but by then she couldn’t forget them. She tried to unknot them from her mind, but they looped around her memories like necklaces. It’s always harder to forget things than to remember them, she told me, like this: your Agong used to raise pigeons on the roof of his military housing unit. He raised them for pigeon races. That’s what all the men used to do in those days, watch the sky for their pigeons. All the pigeons got stuffed into crates and loaded onto boats and then they were released in the middle of the Strait. Whichever birds made it back to the island first were the winners, but sometimes they flew in the opposite direction, toward the mainland, or most likely they died, feathers frosting the surface of the sea, their bodies snowing down onto the shore. They died of exhaustion or typhoon winds. There were so many dead pigeons floating in the water that you could walk across the surface of the sea, all the way to the mainland, or that’s what the radio claimed. The beaches stank for weeks. Seagulls decapitated the pigeons and swallowed their skulls like jewels. I asked my mother if Agong’s pigeons ever won, and she laughed and said they never even made it home. His pigeons were weak, a wild breed, fed only what he could find. He’d rather feed his pigeons than me, my mother laughed, but I loved those birds. I crept them into my palms and blew on their baby feathers and dusted the sky with their wings. Every pigeon was marked by its breeder with a loop around its foot, a family crest or charm, but all Agong did was tie a red thread around each of their feet. It’s ironic, my mother said, because those birds, if they didn’t die, probably flew to the mainland by accident. It was forbidden for Agong to go home, but maybe the pigeons flew there for him. That’s what my mother said might have happened, but I like to think those pigeons quit the race early and went nowhere. Imagine: looping yourself. Nothing to sway you to either sky. They must have decided to dive down and become fish. My mother laughed and said it was easy to believe anything. Agong used to live in the apartment below us, but then he got tricked into a reverse mortgage and died. The apartment got repossessed. He hated it anyway, my mother said: it was too close to the ground. Agong liked height, liked to be close to all crows. In his past life, I asked her, what would he be? But my mother said she didn’t know his birthday, since he changed it to join the military underage, and she didn’t know the name of where he was born or what kind of sky had been there to lid him. She didn’t know where to bury his ashes. I bet he was an emperor too, I said, and she laughed at me. No, she said, he couldn’t care for a country. He only loved what he could make a fist around. A pigeon egg, she said, is about the size of a human eye. What hatches is the sky.

I’d decided to buy my mother the smartphone after she disappeared for three weeks and we circled all of downtown looking for her, only to find her asleep on a bench in St. James Park. Pigeons shied off the pavement as we ran toward her. When she woke up and saw me crying, she shushed me and said don’t let the trees hear you, or else you’ll trigger a winter. My brother asked if she was on her pills again, and I said shut up. Embedded in my mother’s palm-meat were white shards, but we couldn’t tell if they were paint or flakes of glass or something else. Shells, my mother said, lifting her hands to me. She said she found them on the sidewalk, eggshells empty as eye sockets, but she couldn’t figure out which tree they’d fallen from. So she scoured the park’s trees for days, prying apart the branches, thumbing the trunks. I just wanted to know where they’d been born, she said. I just wanted to know how they broke.

K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her debut novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020) was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Her micro-chapbook Bone House, a queer retelling of Wuthering Heights, is forthcoming from Bull City Press in 2021, and her short story collection, Resident Aliens, is forthcoming from One World. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.