Y.Y

Mr. P asked us for our family history. Because A's were my only currency and history teachers the only loves of my life, I did what he said. Then chopsticks got waved, chairs pushed against linoleum, rice burned. Most things get lost in translation, especially if that translation involves a Twinkie who never went to Chinese school, but this much is true: this historiography never made it into Mr. P's hands. Four decades after the official end of the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution and three decades after Mao's death, we were naturalized citizens living in Southern California, churchgoing Christians who believed in Jesus and George W's ability to be a cowboy when we needed him. We had American Ph.D.s and US-born children; the NSA was still a Great Unknown and Snowden's stories were still a figment of the conspiracy-minded foresight. Still, we were terrified.

My folks weren't the only ones either. We had a UCLA friend whose father I talked to about what he went through in postbellum China.

Ye Ye, what did you see?

He stopped as soon as he found out this was something I was writing down. He had two grown sons who live far away, as sons are in the custom of doing these days, a dead wife, no grandchildren, and a hoarder-style studio outside Westwood. He was old. I would've said he had little to lose.

"You don't know nothin' about Mao Zhe Dong."

"He's dead."

"When did that ever change anything?"

"What are you afraid of?"

"You don't know shit." (And that was the last I heard from him.)

The Dominicans, they have their Junot Díaz and fukú, their Curse of the New World. The Russians have their glasnost and the Germans have their German guilt. They've got names for the gifts history dumped on them, a common thread upon which to string their hauntings. Leave it to the Chinese to have nothing but our fond silence that has made us such spectacular and tame students with nothing to say and everything to gain, except maybe inclusion in affirmative action or partner status at the firm or tenure.

We don't talk about it, but when we must, it comes out in pieces, like peanut brittle, or teeth.

Zhou Y.Y. didn't know how rich he had it, until he did, but by then it was too late. In those glory days before the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution, Y.Y. had an afternoon snack at 3 every day. He lived along a courtyard hedged by a string of arched wooden doors, and though they led to different-sized abodes you could not tell by looking whose houses were bigger. What you could tell—the most obvious and devastating social marker—was who ate what, and Y.Y. was never visiting the neighbors or meandering towards the market or silently scribbling his name at 3 p.m. He was always inside, and if you shushed your children and paused your chopping and boiling and sweeping, you would be able to hear the soft grinding of teeth on cookie, in a land where butter wouldn't be a household term for another four decades. Sometimes they were quartered persimmons and you could hear his gums squeak against the slippery orange skins. Other times they were flakey crackers and if you closed your eyes you could see the starchy crumbs falling from his crimson tongue like manna from heaven. When times were real thin you couldn't hear chewing at all, and you knew it was haw flakes silently held between soft gums, and you were both ashamed and happy.

So Y.Y. ate his snacks at mid-afternoon while the rest of the country watched and waited for dinner. On Sundays his neighbors would stir-fry something green and stalky and the smell of ginger would pickle his nose. He would be jealous, as only privileged children can afford to be, because his grandmother forced him to eat meat, and he was born a vegetarian.

Only on New Year...