Every child is a shadow. Like any mother who is a sun, she
cast her children from her until one, then two, and finally five shadows lined the
earth beside her against the sky, as time furrowed nine years of days into her
forehead.
Shadows have neither mouths nor gender. They make no sound
and never leave the earth. But if a shadow does leave, it becomes a shade, and
only visits at night, or behind closed eyes. The mother of a shadow? She bleeds
and cries and when there isn’t food or a roof or shoes, if bombs fall and
barren earth disputes with a loud sky over who, who is to rise, who is to be
left behind when the guns shut their spitting maws: the mother of a shadow
gives her shadows mouths and ears and empty tummies and feet to run with, and
beds beneath someone else’s roof.
That is where she ended up keeping three of her shadows: beneath
someone else’s roof.
They grew names. They grew into real boys: no escaping, like
Peter Pan’s tried. They had sisters who stayed up nights, sometimes, wondering
what it must be like to go to sleep in a dorm every night. They had a father
who may as well have been a shade; every bit of daylight they saw, he saw just
night, since he lived on the dark side of the planet. They were shades to him, still
ripples, cast like stones into a pond. They sunk when they walked up the
gangplank to the ocean liner destined for Los Angeles, and he never had to look
or listen again because, as shadows, they had no mouths, no ears. He didn’t
have to fear them: hunger pangs, eyes silent as night fell, the clutch of small
fingers into his palm. They had a father with nothing at all to fear from them.
What are their names? Does it matter? They are no longer
boys; one is now a shade himself. They have names and voices and eyebrows and
pent-up memories, like a locked chest with the key dropped down a well. If they
speak their own names, or their brother’s, it’s only because silence so long
can only be interrupted by a bellow. Raise fist against the sky, father: where
were your ears when our mouths asked for food? Where was your shoulder and
strong back? Where are you buried, now, still silent?
Joe was his father: extra women, strapping children, until
he rebuked the name and reclaimed the initials of his grandfather, in the
Chinese tradition. Joe could pass as white, though, and married a white, and
his white children with the Chinese surname must surely still surprise any who
cross paths: the blond Wangs. His own guilt must be strong to so tightly claim
the mantle of Christ; isn’t it said those who protest the most, are the most
defensive, have the greatest fear? What were those nights like, the oldest
foreign boy who might have just passed if it weren’t for his name and his
foreign looking brothers?
