Red August, 1966

Claire Yang, United States

When Gonggong was twenty, he spent the first half of

the revolution in a classroom. Whatever kind of belief

it is that makes us want to help others kept him

teaching until his students learned the beauty of life.

Slowly he watched their faces harden, saw how

revolution turned people cruel. Still, he believed they

would be kind. They would remember mercy. Even

after the vice principal was beaten to death with

baseball bats and table legs. Even after they marked

his colleagues’ names with red X’s on blackboards.

The chemistry teacher three doors down lasted until

winter—they found him at the base of the school

chimney. Still, Gonggong stayed. He taught his

students while copper-buckled belts split flesh. And

when his own mother—my great-grandmother—read

that the Red Guards were going after teachers, she

scraped together coins, begged for him to come home.

Just so he was safe. Just so he was safe. He left the

barricaded classrooms & bought his ticket & squeezed

himself onto the train & sat for hours—

red walls stretching long across the lands, the clouds a

still, raw bruise—thinking he would never see his

students again.

When I am myself in this dream, I wonder if I would

have stayed. What I mean is that lately I’ve been

trying to love the foolishly kind nature of things: the

way strangers hold doors open too long, how subway

riders wake each other at the last stop. I think there’s

strength in that. There is, within me, an overripe

softness touched with an old wound—a feeling that

everything I carry I owe to his survival. So many

things I have wanted have been lost to me, yet still I

feel them. I want so badly for there to be a way to hold

all this care without breaking. In this dream my hands

stay steady, nothing slips through my disjointed limbs.

In this dream, I am beside him on the dusty road and

he is holding my hand, and we walk together, toward

something that resembles an end.

HOW WE LIVE

Claire Yang, United States

for Jiejie

Last summer next to

my apartment there

was a man who sold pigeons

in a wire-frame pen.

He would sit behind

his motorcycle cart,

cross-legged and bright-eyed.

He named them

as like his flesh children.

He knew their colors like

his own heartbeat.

Each morning for weeks

I passed him.

I never saw him

catch a sale. Some days

I wish I had known

you when we were younger.

That we had discovered

the seasons together.

The summer the heat

was so relentless, so

fierce that the air shimmered

like water. The man still

sat unwavering. Above the

birds, an indigo sunhat.

On those days, it

replaced the color of the sky.

Whenever I tell

the story of

the man and the

pigeons and their

wire-frame home

I am always the pigeons and

and their wire-frame home,

all these things loved in

in their own way.

How there is beauty

in that. These days

the air is thick and you

send me dreams and I

fold them and pocket

them in my grey

jacket, the old tattered one

where my thumb has fallen

through. By morning they

have taken flight. You

send them to me

again. I want to tell

you this is already

something, the two

of us beating our

wings in our own

wire-frame worlds.

The sky between us,

close enough to

touch.

Claire Yang is a writer from Westfield, New Jersey. She edits for Polyphony Lit and has been recognized nationally by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She is, as always, grateful to have her words take up space.