Кен Лю - The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The small alien reached her, deposited something in her hand, and stepped back. Ona looked down and felt the ancient, rough metal against her scaled skin, absorbed its heft. She flipped the spade around and saw a mark that she did not recognize: sharp angles, hooks, reminding her of the markings on the fluttering signs.

A thought came into her mind like a whisper: Remember us, you who treasure the old.

The sun glowed even brighter, and as Ona felt warm again, the creatures around her melted into the blinding, bright light.

Ona sat under the whitewood tree, fingers wrapped around the small bronze spade. White plumes of steam continued to erupt from the hillocks around her, each perhaps another window into a lost world.

The images she had seen went through her mind again and again. Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.

As their world was about to die, the ancient people of Nova Pacifica, in their last days, focused all their energy on leaving behind tributes, memorials of their civilization. Knowing that they themselves would not survive the sun that burnt hotter and hotter, they embedded their six-fold symmetry into every species around them, hoping that some would survive and become living echoes of their cities, their civilization, their selves. In their ruins, they hid a record that would be played when triggered by the detection of something made, aged, layered, still preserved because it was valued, so that they had some reasonable expectation that the owner would have a sense of history, of respect for the past.

Ona thought of the children, frightened and uncomprehending as their world burnt up. She thought of the lovers, poised between regret and acceptance, as the world outside collapsed against the world between them. She thought of a people trying their hardest to leave behind a trace of their existence in this universe, a few signs to mark their passage.

The past, ever recurring, made up the future like layers of patina.

She thought of Ms. Coron and the naked faces of the Teachers, and for the first time, she came to see their expressions in a new light. It was not arrogance that made them look at the children the way they did, but fear. They had been stranded on this new world, where they could not survive, and they clung to their past as fiercely as they did because they knew that they would be yielding their places to a new race, the People of Nova Pacifica, and live on only in their memories.

Parents fear to be forgotten, to not be understood by their children.

Ona lifted the small bronze spade and licked the surface with the tip of her tongue. It tasted bitter and sweet, the fragrance of long-dead incense, of sacrificial offerings, of traces left behind by countless lifetimes. The spot where the steam had blasted away the patina, next to some ancient etched marks, was shaped like a little person, gleamed fresh and new, the future as well as the past.

She got up and pulled off a few pliant branches from nearby whitewood trees. Weaving carefully, she made them into a crown with twelve radiating branches, like tentacles, like hair, like olive branches. She had her costume.

It was but a brief scene glimpsed through the cloud of unknowing, a few images that she could barely comprehend. Perhaps they were idealized, sentimental, constructed; yet was there not a trace of authenticity, an indelible seed of the love of a people whose past meant something? She would show them how she now understood that digging into the past was an act of comprehension, an act of making sense of the universe.

Her body was an amalgam of the biological and technological heritages of two species, and her very existence the culmination of the striving of two peoples. Nested inside her was Earth Ona and Nova Pacifica Ona and Rebellious Ona and Obedient Ona and all the generations that came before her, stretching back into infinity.

Steeped in memories and the beginning of understanding, a child of two worlds picked her way through the woods and among the hillocks towards the Dome, the surprisingly heavy little spade cradled in her palm.

Name: Takako Yamashiro

Question 27: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?

I do not know how to answer this question. I am a woman, ineligible for combat.

Question 28: Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any and all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance to the Japanese Emperor or any other foreign government, power, or organization?

I do not know how to answer this question. I was born in Seattle, Washington. I have never had any form of allegiance to the Japanese Emperor, so there’s nothing to forswear. I will swear unqualified allegiance to my country when my country frees me and my family.

Takako walked down the road, straight as an arrow, towards the cluster of administrative buildings. On both sides of her were blocks of neatly laid out squat barracks, each divided into six rooms, each room housing a family. To the east, she could see the round, columnar figure of Abalone Mountain in the distance. She imagined how the orderly grid of the camp might look from its summit: like those drawings of the balanced regularity of ancient Nara that her father had shown her in a book when she was little.

As she wore a simple white cotton dress, a breeze relieved her of the dry August heat of northern California. But she missed the cool wetness of Seattle, the endless rain of Puget Sound, the laughter of friends back home, and a horizon not bound by watchtowers and barbed wire fences.

She arrived at camp headquarters. She gave her name to the guards and they escorted her through long corridors, through large rooms filled with rows of clattering typewriters and stale cigarette smoke, until they arrived at a small office in the back. They closed the door behind her, muffling the bustle of conversation and office machinery.

She did not know why she was summoned. She stood gazing at the man in uniform sitting across the desk, leaning back comfortably and smoking a cigarette. An electric fan behind him blew the smoke at her.

The assistant director stared at the girl. Pretty Jap, he thought. Nearly pretty enough to make you forget what she is. He almost regretted having to let her go. This one would have provided a fun diversion if she were kept around.

“You are Takako Yamashiro, a no-no girl.”

“No,” she said. “I did not answer ‘no’ to those questions. I qualified my answers.”

“You would have just written ‘yes-yes’ if you were loyal.”

“As I explained on the form, those questions didn’t make sense.”

He gestured for her to sit in the chair across the desk. He did not offer her a drink.

“You Japs are very ungrateful,” he said. “We put you in here for your own protection, and all you do is complain and go on strikes and act suspicious and hostile.” He looked at Takako, daring her to challenge him.

But she said nothing. She was remembering the fear and loathing in the eyes of her neighbors and classmates.

After a moment, he took a deep drag of his cigarette and went on. “Unlike your people, we are not savages. We know there are good Japs and bad ones, but the question is which is which. So we open the door a bit, and ask some questions. The good ones tumble out and the bad ones stay in. Men behave according to their natures, and the loyal and disloyal have a way of sorting themselves out. But then you had to go and make it complicated.”