What the news calls people who protest PACT: Seditious subversives. Traitorous Chinese sympathizers. Tumors on American society. Words he’d had to look up in his father’s dictionary, back then, alongside excise and eradicate. Every time they spotted his mother’s words—in news reports, on someone’s phone—Sadie elbowed Bird as if they’d sighted a celebrity. Evidence of his mother, out there, elsewhere, so worried about somebody else’s children though she’d left her own behind. The irony of it leached into his veins.
