The Storm We Made

by Vanessa Chan

I wrote about inherited pain, womanhood, mothers, daughters, and sisters, and how the choices we make reverberate through the generations of our families and communities in ways we often can’t predict.

Bad boys, Cecily and her neighbors murmured. Maybe they got what they deserved. But by the middle of the year, sons of people whom Cecily knew also began to disappear.

Gordon and Cecily’s mother had hoped that the whiteness in their blood would supersede the brownness of the skin, that if they waited and served their British masters patiently enough, their European lineage, faint as it was, would be recognized by the white men,

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.

His accent transforming, he spoke in brittle Japanese-accented English, and 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.

But kindness did not excuse mass violence, kindness did not bring Abel back, kindness wouldn’t keep her safe.

“You cannot survive this and live a dead life.”

But her idolatry was not blind. 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.

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.

Was this power, to hold a man’s fate in this way? She didn’t have time to wonder. It was her turn to be the spectacle.

This proclivity for order meant that Cecily did not enjoy yearning; she did not enjoy its lack of solidity.

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.

Absolution, Abel realized, could come in all forms. Brother Luke had taught the boys at school that absolution came only from god. But where was god when Akiro broke him from the inside, where was god when Brother Luke sold little boys to save his own skin, where was god now when his options were to murder or await a fate worse than death?

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.

How dare he, she thought. But to Mr. Takahashi, she performed the rites of the grateful girl, the girl who would listen to a man’s relief and joy, subsuming her own breaking despair.

Here is a man, they seemed to think, who looks like one of them but thinks like one of us. Here is a man who allows us to give voice to the things we know we should be ashamed of but don’t want to be ashamed of. Cecily wondered at the damage that would do to one’s soul, to allow others to chip away at you, past the layers of defense, to gain acceptance.

Cecily wondered if the only reason to endure frustrating men was to become friends with their better wives.

Without the burden of inscrutability, the women’s friendship bloomed, easy and bright.

What a strange and wonderful way to live, Cecily thought, to find the sun in all things. In Cecily, discontent was a constant state of being. She lived with a persistent gurgle of want, of longing for more of everything she could see but did not yet have. To be just content, Cecily thought. How simple it must be.

She’d read about peaceful rains that happened in English novels, light drizzles in the countryside of Jane Austen, damp, misty air from the ocean breeze in Enid Blyton’s Cornish boarding school landscapes. But in Malaya, the rains shouted as though releasing rage, and it was a terrible inconvenience.

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 may not have had his way of winning people, but she had him, and in solving the puzzle that was him, she had equalized the planes on which they stood.

This, she thought, was what she was fighting for: to stand side by side with a man, to have her ideas mean something, to effect change.

To what end?

When Abel was young, his mother had taught him that in history, leaders emerged in vacuums and chaos. She said it was because at the end of the day, men just wanted someone to tell them what to do.

Yuki felt like half of her; when they were together, Jasmin felt complete, and when they were apart, she felt like she was less, pages flying loose and unbound in the wind.

She didn’t know how to tell them that her anger was not at the things they did but at what she herself had done to make everything the way it was.

It dawned on Cecily that once again, as she had seven years ago with Lina, she would wait for an innocent to unknowingly cede his life to a cause that she saw now held no more meaning.

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.

She had thought him transformative, a man who had given her ideals, a purpose, made her bigger, but she saw that the problem was he thought so too: believed he had made her, and Lina, and the world around them, better. His delusion—that he was a good man, an idealistic man who simply did what was right—was what had broken them all.

Abel sang, Freddie’s favorite song. He chewed the inside of his cheek to stop a telltale quiver from entering his voice. Absolution came in different forms. It was his turn to give it.

Perhaps for the first time, Cecily understood him, a man who had taken everything but had nothing left.

He saw Rama being led by two others, limping, each with a forearm under Rama’s armpits, to hold up his heft. The soldiers lined the boys up together, rubbed a rag over some of their faces. “Now come on and smile!” they shouted. “We’ve liberated you! God save the king! Don’t you heathens know freedom when you see it?” The cameras clicked and clicked.

Of course the girls had run away, Cecily thought. How many times had adults disappointed them, left them to fester in their own confusion, while selfishly chasing their grown-up highs—rage and lust and everything else that poorly masked the deep sadness of their lives?

His mother stumbles out of the room. He has noticed how they both carry anguish in their body. It crushes his mother so she no longer stands straight, her shoulders sloped as though the slightest weight would knock her over. It presses into Jujube’s face so her eyes are puffy and half closed with sadness.

She relives the crack of pain that incapacitated her when she realized the price of this war was innocence, and the girls had paid, without knowing why.