They really did look like casualties. Was China fighting some clandestine war in its hinterlands? A true conflict in Tibet? Or another suppression of artists and scholars?
Saina knew that her grandparents had fled the Japanese. There were stories of narrow escapes, of running down a road in soft-soled shoes, a Japanese fighter plane strafing the ground. Somehow, Saina had always pictured it in hazy, romantic tones, as if a pair of torn stockings had been the only casualty. And then one day she’d been online, searching for photos for her Look/Look project, feeling slightly ill as she scanned groupings of refugees for a pretty face. She’d started out on the familiar news sites—the New York Times, Newsweek, the BBC. One click had led to another, and gradually she found herself moving through sites full of conspiracy theory and invective, with the photos themselves getting more and more graphic, whole slide shows preceded by flashing titles: THE ISH THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE! or NSFW GRAPHIC.
Before that, it had never occurred to Saina that the photos of war she saw in the paper, the long rows of patients with bandaged stumps like the men before her, the dead bodies in ditches, that those were still censored for the coddled public who would—wouldn’t they?—rise up and demand peace forever if they saw what war really looked like. If they had seen photographs like the ones that crowded into her browser, image after image of men turned into carcasses, butchers’ piles of meat and organs made grotesque by a human hand or head, they could never arm their children and send them overseas to fight other people’s children.
Her grandparents’ escape could not have been some daring, madcap jaunt. The gunfire, in her childhood imagination, had always pinged ineffectually on either side of the golden path, the stupid Japanese never coming close to her daring grandparents. But, of course, that couldn’t be true. It must have hit people, destroyed them, burst open their bodies, and left them twisted and wrecked all over the road. Her grandmother, in her soft-soled shoes, must have run past children with their limbs blown in half, their bloody bones cracked so that the marrow was exposed like joints of lamb, their small bodies sniffed at by mad-eyed dogs.
“They see too much,” her father had said once, when she was doing a report for history class and asked him whether his own parents had ever talked about the war. “They see too much so they have to close their hearts tight. Can’t get them open again.”
She didn’t understand that fear. If she was lucky, she never would.
Saina turned down another corridor. A ward full of babies. New life. Little creatures who hadn’t yet seen the things we could do to one another.
Saina looked at her cell phone. Another text.
917-322-XXXX
Please.
She turned off her phone.
After another ten minutes of wandering around the hospital, light-headed and unsure of herself, down another hallway and then another, she peeked inside a door that had been left ajar and she saw her father. He was asleep. Peacefully, blissfully asleep. The heart-rate monitor attached to him hopped encouragingly. There was an IV drip that worried her, and the black eye he got in the car accident had bloomed, but otherwise he looked decent.
An accordion screen stretched across the middle of the room, blocking off the windows. Whoever was on the other side had the window and the privacy, something that Saina couldn’t imagine her father allowing. What had happened to him? She wanted to sneak in and read his medical charts, but they would be in Chinese, and though she could make her way well enough when trying to speak the language, she really could only read numbers and a handful of words.
Instead, she slid to the floor outside his door and finally, finally, fell asleep.
“Xing lai! Xiao meimei xing lai! Zao an, xiao meimei! Hel-lo! Rise and shi-ine!”
Ugh. Grace’s neck was twisted and sore, and her legs were numb from hanging over the armrest all night.
“Wa! Xiao meimei xing lai le!”
Oh. That noise was being directed at her. A man wearing a red baseball cap popped into view. He peered down at her with a giant smile that stretched from one sparsely whiskered cheek to the other.
“Xing lai! Xing lai! Lai kan baba!”
His teeth were yellowed and uneven, and tiny bits of spittle flung themselves onto his lips as he talked way too close to her face. Why was this man telling her to wake up?
“Ni shi shei?” asked Grace.
“Ha ha ha!” He cocked his hat up and looked around the room, searching for someone to confirm that this was, indeed, the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Wo shi shei?”
“Andrew! Wake up!” She kicked at him.
Her brother startled and opened his eyes. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know. Who is this guy? He keeps telling me to wake up and go see Dad.”
“Maybe he’s a relative?”
The man stood there patiently, still smiling at them. “Lai! Lai kan baba!”
Grace whispered, “Do you think he’s . . . you know.”
“Slow?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”