A History of Killing Sparrows
Illustration by Anne le Guern After the invasion my grandfather was the quietest thing. He ate the egg at the mooncake’s center and felt so sad for its loss. Every night he listened to the owl sing. He wanted to cut down a tree; he wanted to cut down a forest. He wanted that movement, that wild and red arc crushing the heart of something soft. Its white bone splintered in his hair, a grief that could itself be killed.
Under General Yu Hanmou, the Fourth Route Army had fought and died. My grandfather was still a boy so he cried for these men. It hurt much more than having living heroes, but idols were never chosen. It wasn’t so simple. Instead parts of your heart roughly dislodged and clung to someone, dead or alive, soldier or bean curd seller, sometimes without you even knowing, unaware of your own devotion, of where in time and space those parts of your heart lie.
Yes, my grandfather was a boy when the dragonflies flew low under the sun, skimming past his round face like a pond’s. A storm was coming into Guangzhou. He saw ripples at the surface. My grandfather and his sisters and brothers ran from the fields into the village as the wind blew hot behind them and the sky bruised dark like something pressing on the wall of this world from the other side. That was the summer the Imperial Japanese Army cut open everyone he knew.
Storm coming into Guangzhou. It was monsoon season and water flooded the streets into canals. My grandfather was a teenager who swam to school in the morning, shirt stuck to his skin and eyes stinging, quivering as he gasped breaths between each slice of each arm into the heaving water. A sort of contained violence.
My grandfather was nearly grown when he moved north to Harbin, a city on the border between China and the Soviet Union.
