Endpaper: Back Home in Manchuria

I first encountered murder face-to-face when my grandmother smashed a squirrel to death with a brick. A little too clever and determined, the rodent vaulted the netting my grandmother had woven around her tomatoes and green beans. That barrier was the penultimate step of an arms race that had begun months before: my grandmother versus bugs, birds, heat, gravity, and overly inquisitive Chinese neighbors (“I think the old Liu woman might have taken one of my tomatoes,” she confided); waged using repellent sprays, hoses, trellises constructed from fallen tree branches, and vigilant patrolling of the dirt plot in front of our building.

My grandmother didn’t clean up the squirrel quickly enough to prevent my mother and me from nearly stepping on it on our way to the car. I don’t think she considered the clean-up necessary. The body would serve as her spoils of war, an example to any other potential horticultural terrorists.

My mother was aghast. “Grandma killed it,” she whispered, as if saying it too loudly would irreparably disturb me.

My grandmother grew up in Liaoning, a province in the region of what English-speakers recognize as Manchuria. People in China just call it “Dongbei,” the Northeast, a regional marker instantly capturing a distinct set of characteristics. The landscape is austere and inhospitable; its people are big, sailor-mouthed, drunken, hardy, and honest. We speak too loudly, with an accent that thickens consonants and ungracefully mates words.

“Dongbei people are cu,” I’ve heard—“thick,” unrefined. I liked to fancy we were a little Visigothic, or akin to the Wildlings in “Game of Thrones.” Or maybe I should say they were akin to us: The Great Wall built to keep us out predated both Hadrian’s and George R.R. Martin’s.

Whenever we ate at Chinese restaurants, my father inevitably struck up a conversation with the proprietress about our family origins.

“We’re Dongbei people,” he always said proudly, his teeth broad and white, his face still tan from two decades working on a farm, his appetite grotesquely engorged after a childhood eked hand to mouth. The proprietress—usually, my father told me conspiratorially, from Guangzhou, because all restaurant owners were—would nod and scan our faces.

“You’re not from Dongbei, are you?” my mother was often asked. She’s from Heilongjiang, which is even farther northeast than Liaoning. You couldn’t blame anyone, though, for seeing her sitting there, fine-boned and soft-skinned, and thinking she hailed from a more hospitable place. Since my father highly valued physical hardiness, my brother and I were always tan and sturdy from outdoor sports he encouraged us to play. To this day, running outside feels like an honorary ritual, a return to an idyllic past.

I liked to think all those restaurant owners would have been able to guess where my ancestors were from, even without my father’s declaration. Sitting there in front of a cup of loose leaf tea and a plate of roast eggplants and potatoes, speaking fluent Mandarin, I could have been back home in Manchuria.

“I can’t believe it,” sighed my mother, rehashing the squirrel incident years later. It’s remained a sore point for years. “She actually killed it. I hope none of the neighbors saw.”

“The squirrels have a right to live, too,” my brother said philosophically.

“Oh, they have a right to live too,” said my grandma. “They’re eating my plants. What about my plants’ right to live? What about my right to grow plants?”

“You didn’t need to kill it,” my mother said. “We’re not growing those vegetables for survival anymore.”

“Right, right, I shouldn’t have killed it,” my grandma laughed.

I will always be able to remember the image of squirrel sprawled cleanly against the beige concrete. I didn’t feel particularly bad then, and I never have. I imagine picking up a brick, feeling its texture and heft, hard on palm and wrist. Looking the squirrel in its eye like a daub of rich tar. I don’t think I could have done it, but I find myself wishing for the breed of conviction that could bring that brick down with the logical force my grandma had surely used.

I think that was the first moment in which I consciously tried on the identity of a big-boned, uncouth barbarian girl from Dongbei. A buoying rush, like wearing an article of clothing that not only fits well, but changes your body into its better self.

Sometimes, my mind involuntarily connects brash behaviors or character flaws back to the hinterlands I never needed to survive. My real home is the Midwestern heartland of the United States, not the harsher outskirts of mainland China. But just as ancient people felt deep camaraderie with their gods in the sky, the distance and improbability make my personal myth all the more alluring—through affectionate faith, truer.

The thought always evokes an unwarranted smirk. I think of the squirrel, laid out more like a felled warrior than a poignant casualty. Another dynasty fallen to the Manchus.

Through the sun-frosted windows, I watched my grandmother squat in front of her chives, their shoots an optimistic green against the soil. She’d taken the steel netting down; the squirrel corpse seemed to have served its purpose.

The chives would later appear in our dumplings, which we ate for dinner about once every other week. In my father and grandma’s Liaoning, they had been a luxury saved only for the New Year.

My grandmother reached forward with one sun-beaten hand and stroked a chive plant’s pale chartreuse tip—tentatively, tenderly, as if astonished, even after all these years, by the miracle of finding it quivering, breathing, ever-so-slightly against her skin.