“So he entered his heritage. He ate its bitter fruit”. - William Faulkner

They came at once. They - an entanglement of limbs, a conflagration of faces stained and defiled with soot and dirt that filled the road around them. They came with eyes, hard and cold, tainted too with the things they had seen, with their lips pleading, calling, yelling as if they could with the power of their cries, stop the bus in its very tracks, with their hands holding the plastic bottles that held their existences, existences that were measured by bottles, bottles that they would later fill up with water and resell in the hopes of making some money. They needed this plastic, this plastic from them- the foreigners, the money owners, the water drinkers - who came in buses, buses that would enable them to survive, to thrive or as close to thrive as a group of young, unwanted children could. As the hunk of metal traveled on, leaving in its wake a stream of gray smoke, soon they would be no more to the young girl.

She left in a bus, retreating farther and farther from the children as they became smaller and smaller, as if their size were growing exponentially smaller as her shame grew exponentially larger and withdrawn inward, in an almost perfect proportion, until she could look no more. The feeling was bitter to her. As the night drew closer, she lay in her seat, tired and sleepless. She was eight then, not much older than the children themselves. She thought, They are Chinese like me. She would tell herself that she did no wrong in ignoring them, that ignorance would be her way out. The buses would come again, filled with the man and his offspring, his wives with bottles in tow, only to be met by more children, who in the same hopes, would plead and plead till they could plead no more, as their feet bled while the chased after the bus, that steaming piece of metal.

It seemed to her as if these thoughts now began to merge into the same trajectory as the image she saw outside the window: the rich land of which she came, not directly, but inherited through the blood of her parents and her parents’ parents, a blood which was borne from this land, this- a flurry of colors that seemed to flow into one stream of being - the rich land, which the millionaire had not reached, a land taintless and blameless under God. She watched it unfurl, free, unconquered, hills and river and time seeping into one, transforming into a past time when farmers plowed fields, hoe and axe seemingly one, the man the master of the ox, taming the field as if it were an undisciplined child, a child who would, because of the love of his father, grow to be a man of distinct honor and purity, crafted into the pride of his father’s eye. It was not destruction but coexistence, a harmonious relationship between man and nature, one in which nature was untamable and tamable at the same time. She thought, Maybe this is what Eden was like, thinking that this land, untouched, uncorrupted, pure, was the land in which her ancestors thrived, a land which they called home. I could have been one of them. Poor, pure, uncorrupted. Yes, maybe I would have been one of them. It will only have been a matter of time and luck and misfortune. And she thought about how her life was shaped by the choices, choices which spawned generations and which escaped her because she knew nothing, nothing of their struggles except through stories, stories passed on through their generations, stories which had been modified and changed in order to preserve one ounce of dignity and pride, that among the pain, they were still human and would be because....

They left at a time of rebellion, a rebellion of red shirts and red blood spilled on the ground. This was the time when men and women stripped of their freedom, freedom taken in a day without hesitation, fear of repercussion, by men dressed in the red regalia whose objective was to take, veiled under the thin disguise that equality needs a path which must require the farmer, and the general, and the common man to take arms and to fight because they had something which all men want and all men need: hope, albeit, one that was falsely promised in order to create a utopia or to create a dystopia in which one race would rule another, but both in which one blood ran and flowed. The sons of the bakers of the Hunan region and the factory workers of Shanghai and the fighters of Beijing all fought with the tenacity for battles which they did not understand and that they themselves could never understand, and with blind faith they fought to protect and keep something that was actually nothing but the lies propagated by the God whom they knew as Mao.

Her family would seek comfort in the promises of the land of the west, that holy place to many - America - that blessed land which God had put his hand upon, which was perhaps just as tainted as they land from which they came with sins unwashed, staining the ground upon which they walked, a ground where men lay with bullet holes in their skulls, where the woman had to move to the back of the bus, where the names of the dead Indians were merely whispers in the wind, forgotten and faded because this was an America for the white and the dreamers, but not the ones left behind. But the promise remained because the idea of living in some place that they could dream, establish a life in which their children did not thrive on the desperation and degradation was bigger than anything that she could ever comprehend....
And so they built railroads and opened shops, the yellow men, not black nor white, foreigners, alien to even the aliens themselves, who had alien blood to the ones who had the alien blood, and in doing so learned suffering and humility, much like the suffering and humility of the ones who had come before them and this would carry them and their children and their children’s children to success, success which was paved by the way of the epithets that were thrown at them, the yellings of chink, the sweat that fell on their brow, the shame that beheld them because each man with the yellow skin had to inherit a new country in which they were not and would never be accepted because they were the communists, the perfidious men who had no right to be free in this new country because freedom had to be earned and apparently they had not been entitled to it.

This, all this, was all embodied in the way her grandfather spit out the name of Mao and dream and America and hope like a curse of spite, of hatred, of images of a man and woman whose hope lay in the safety of a country which they could not even pronounce, which shunned the immigrant and killed the black man - this was hers, this was her inheritance, an inheritance from her parents and her parents’ parents, and she was scared, scared that she would never understand this. It seemed to her removed, like a distant dream which she had once dreamt, perhaps on a summer’s day when it was a bit hazy and foggy and the heat seemed to trap her, absorb her, consume her - this which she did not understand until now. Once she had asked her mother, “Who am I?” But the answer - Chinese - meant nothing in her mind then, because Chinese was not synonymous with struggle and pain and communism and exile before this moment and in this moment it became this for her, a this derived from not a singular event, but a history, a history which she one day hoped to understand because when she looked in the mirror that night in the small room in which she resided, she would see not her face, but the faces of the children, the children with the water bottles - inescapable and haunting, faces of the could have beens and the should have beens - looking back.