An excerpt from a short story by Kao Kalia Yang ’03
Our families lived in the McDonough Housing Project. We were neighbors and friends. We were seven months apart, Tou and I.
In the summer mornings, before the wash of sunlight crossed the sky, we used to catch common swallows for breakfast. We needed no alarm clock to get up for our morning birding sessions. Somehow our bodies jerked awake in our different beds, beside our different sleeping siblings, and without brushing our teeth or washing our faces, we would meet up outside his townhouse.
I brought my father’s old fishing lines. Tou borrowed the top of his father’s old Weber grill. We found suitable sticks in the dark beneath the tall trees in the communal yards. We tied a long length of fishing line to the middle of the strongest stick we found. We used the stick to prop up the old Weber top. Tou had pieces of white bread from the cupboard. We placed the bread beneath the Weber top. We strung the line through the fine sieve of their kitchen window screen. Inside his kitchen, with the window open, we sat waiting for the birds to come. They always came with the first stretch of gray. Fearlessly, they entered our trap. We waited patiently. We never pulled the line until there were at least two birds crowded around the pieces of bread. We took turns jerking the line, watching the stick fall and the heavy Weber top close on the birds.
We were careful to be quiet even in our excitement. We didn’t want to chance waking up Tou’s parents or siblings. We certainly did not want to scare the little swallows with their puffy morning bodies. We talked in whispers.
“I’m going to open the lid. You are going to cup the birds as quickly as you can with your hands. Once you get them, put them in the old rice bag.”
A good morning generated about seven swallows — enough for all our brothers and sisters to partake in a meal. Once neighbors started moving, front doors opening and people leaving for work, we knew it was time to stop. We suspected that the work of catching swallows for breakfast was illegal, and neither of us wanted our parents to go to jail. We cleaned up our operation, untied the fishing line from the stick, replaced the Weber top on its base, and threw the sticks on the ground. We gathered our bag of swallows and headed for my townhouse.
My mother and father worked the third shift as assemblers in a factory. They didn’t get home until three in the morning. This meant they usually slept, if all went smoothly, until nine. When my siblings woke up, they would be excited to hear about our morning catch. Although Tou and I were only nine, we both knew how to cook. It is a responsibility of the oldest.
I got the rice going in the rice cooker as fast as I could. I filled one of my mother’s thin metal pots from Thailand to the halfway point with water. From our freezer, I grabbed two stalks of lemongrass. I wet the stalks at the sink. I pounded them with the pestle. I put the stalks to boil in the water, watching as they turned the water green. As I prepared the fresh chili, green onion, cilantro, and sliced tomatoes, Tou was busy wringing the necks of the little swallows, dressing them with experienced hands over the trash bin. He used the tip of my father’s big Hmong knife to make a slit beneath their bellies, took out the innards, and rinsed them clean. He chopped off the crooked heads and the dangling feet. Once I told him I was ready, he dropped the bodies of the birds into the water. I seasoned them with pinches of MSG, salt, and black pepper. We sniffed the air in the room — spicy and sweet from the tomatoes and herbs of our swallow stew.
When we were happy with the taste of the broth, we turned off the stove. We got out our big bowls, one for the rice and one for the birds in their broth. When the table was set, Tou went to get his siblings from his home and I went upstairs to wake up mine. It was then that I stopped to brush my teeth and comb my hair.
Around the table, all nine of us stood, with our metal Chinese leaf spoons in our hands. We ate spoonfuls of warm rice and drank deeply from the rich stock of the swallows. We gave our youngest siblings the drumsticks of the swallows. Tou and I sucked the juices from the necks, using our fingers to gather the thin layer of meat from the bone. We knew there would be none for the adults. Afterward, we cleaned the little bare bones of the birds from the table, washed the dishes, and told the younger ones to stay put at our house or they could go to Tou’s, while we adventured some more.
There was a large grove of trees and a wetland to the west of the McDonough Housing Project. Tou and I often wandered through the trees, into the swamp, among the cattails to catch frogs, baby ducks, and other things. We liked to spend our afternoons there. Beneath the tall trees, we shared stories that we had heard from our mothers and fathers. We also talked about life, how hard it was to be the oldest boys in our family, how embarrassing it was that our parents did not speak English, how stupid it was that the police wanted to catch innocent people for everything in this country — from leaving your kids home alone because you have to go to work on the third shift to simple things like catching squirrels and swallows so you can make breakfast for your younger brothers and sisters. It was in that grove of tall trees that Tou shared a story that would change the way I saw Tou’s father and my own forever.
Before this point, I had known Tou’s father only as a quiet man with a broken smile. When he spoke, the few times I heard him, his words were blurry, hard to hear. I never asked why because Tou was my friend and he was Tou’s father and I assumed he had been born that way, with no front teeth, twisted lips, and what appeared to be only part of a tongue.
Tou and I were on different branches of the same tall tree. He was lying back on a large limb, his hand cradling his head. I was seated, my feet dangling in the air, a hand on either side. The heavy canopy of the summer leaves hid us from the world.
We were in a haven of sweet-smelling green leaves. The sky was little more than blue patches that filled in the holes among the leaves. The wind rustled gently.
Tou said, “Did you realize that when our fathers were in the war they were our age? Just boys?”
I said, “Yeah, I guess they were.”
He said, “Can you imagine us being soldiers, carrying guns, defending our families, killing people, seeing people die?”
I said, “I guess you just do what you need to do in times like that.”
He said, “I asked my mom if my dad had been born with his mouth handicap yesterday. She told me his story.”
I said, “What is his story?”
Tou said, “It was 1975. My father was my age now. He was carrying his little sister on his back. They had gone to the river to fetch water for the family. All was quiet. He was not expecting anything to happen. He had gotten the pail of water. It was in his hands. He was scrambling up the climb from the river when his little sister, who had been quiet on his back, began crying. He jostled her softly to quiet her. She was only a baby, you know. She continued to cry. All of a sudden he heard a voice call, ‘We have to shoot. The baby is going to notify the villagers of our position!’
“The bullets started coming. My father fell down the incline. The pail of water went tumbling back to the river. He didn’t care. He tried to maneuver the baby underneath his body, but she was tied up with the carrying cloth. He heard a bullet pass by his ear. He felt the baby’s head drop on his shoulder. Hot liquid began seeping from her head. The bullets were going left and right. He scrambled toward the river’s edge. He had no choice. He jumped into the cold currents. Bullets fell around him. He went underwater, but he couldn’t stay there for long. He needed to breathe. He surfaced. A bullet hit him in the mouth, went through his lip, destroying his two front teeth. He could feel it lodged in his throat. My father thought he was going to die for sure. He heard more bullets, more yelling.
“When my father woke up, he was home, resting on a mat beside the family fire ring. The house was full of people. His mouth was swollen. He couldn’t ask what all the people were doing there, but two of the villagers shifted, and my father saw that his baby sister was dead, lying on a makeshift platform beside their east wall.
“When my mother met my father, she thought that he had been born with the broken lip, the missing teeth. She married him because she had lost her family in the jungle and needed another family to take care of her. She never asked and he never said. It wasn’t until right before my grandma died in Thailand that she told my mother about what happened to my father. My mother tried asking my father about it once, but he just shook his head and then said it was hard enough getting the necessary words out into the world; there was no need to spend the time and energy bringing up old wounds. She told me the story but asked me never to ask him about it.”
I couldn’t see Tou’s face as he was telling me the story. He was looking at the leaves and the pockets of sky overhead.
I said, “That’s a sad story, Tou.”
He said, “It is.”
He asked, “Does your father come from sad stories, too?”
I said, “I don’t know.”
My father and I talked often about the war and life in Laos, but never about the actual killing or the sadness of it. I know that he had a prized buffalo before the war. I know that he lived in a village surrounded by flowering trees that bloomed and covered the mountains in scented white. I know that he grew up by a river, catching small fish and cooking them for himself and the village children. I know that he had been to school and that he had been a good student before the war entered their village and his education stopped. I know that he met my mother in the refugee camps of Thailand. I know that I was born there. I know only the things that my father has chosen to tell me, mostly the things he believes I need to know in order to make good decisions regarding our lives in America.
I guess my father, like me, doesn’t like to talk about the hard things. For example, I tell my father about my grades and scores on math tests. I talk to him about how the younger children are behaving on the school bus and with their friends. I interpret the things we see on the news, tell him what the weather forecast looks like for the next day. But I don’t talk to my father about the boys and girls who point to my short pants, at my bare ankles, and laugh, or the teacher who is always frustrated because I can’t say her name right. “Roberta.” The “r” always comes out as an “l” in my throat — despite how much I try, so I have stopped calling her by name. I don’t talk to my dad about the money I need for the field trip to the zoo. I know he doesn’t have any money. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t be able to give it to me. My father and I know the sadness in our lives, but we don’t choose to be sad together.
“We Were Boys Together” was published by the University of Minnesota Press in the collection Sky Blue Water: Great Stories for Young Readers edited by Jay D. Peterson and Collette A. Morgan. Copyright 2016 by Kao Kalia Yang. Used by permission.