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.

Cecily found that she too could envision a world taken back from the British, a future in which she, and her children, and their children, could be more than just unnoticed, bland, ornamentation.

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.