The Storm We Made

by Vanessa Chan

The Japanese occupiers killed more people in three years than the British colonizers had in fifty.

But no matter how hard they scrubbed at their skin to get to the lighter layers, no matter how well they formed their vowels around the English language, no matter how loudly they said their surname, no matter how hard they tried to be the right kind of civilized, they remained, in the eyes of their white imperialists—less than.

His vulnerability felt like something stolen, that everything she would do henceforth would be

owed because of this one moment of brokenness he had let her see.

she learned his true affiliation with the Japanese Imperial Army, his dream of an Asia for Asians, a world in which white men didn’t always win.

The truth of it, she thought, was that men lose interest when the veil falls off and they learn the normalcy of a woman—that she urinates and bleeds and cries and snores like everyone else. But women grow fonder when a man feels within reach. Women do not worship gods; they yearn for broken toys they can mold and imprint on. It was so stupid, and she hated herself for it. Yet perhaps this was what a woman’s idealism is: not the reach for a utopia—everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach—but the need to transform one thing into something better.

Though all love was humiliation, in a way, Cecily supposed. All love was someone breaking their soul into smaller pieces and offering the broken pieces of themselves as a puzzle to someone else—help me put myself back together.

Jujube wondered about the ways in which girls and women performed for men by always knowing what it was men wanted and how it was they wished to be comforted, always engaged in the ongoing calculus of figuring out what sides of themselves they should show to a man and which parts of their grief were too unbearable for him.

Isn’t everyone both good and bad?

The mystery of men and the causticity of their charisma really did lose its sheen once you could see the nakedness of their desire and the vulnerability of their physical need that seemed so easy to fulfill. She realized that she had simply wanted to solve Fujiwara, and now that she felt she had, her desire for him was no longer the same. It had morphed into something more. She respected and acknowledged his magnetism. Her body still rose to attention when he entered the room, she still admired the way he drew people to him, but his

desire for her had become its own power. She may

not have had his way of winning people, but she had him, and in solving the puzzle that was him, she had equalize...

Grief sucked everything with it, left holes in the body that nothing, not even music, could fill.

Mr. Takahashi may have been a good man, but a good man who believed in a bad thing was a bad man, and she did not know how she could ever forgive him, or them.