Free I, Zombie by Hugh Howey Page B

born in China whereas she had been born in this tiny
microcosm, this span of city blocks made to look like someone else’s home.
    Sure, she got out of Chinatown occasionally, but not often.
Her parents took her to museums and concerts. They stood before large canvases
while her mother showed Chiang how other people made brush strokes, what a hand
both confident and relaxed could produce. Both of her parents stressed hours of
practice. There, look at how that woman in the first chair plays violin, how
her hand lays over to the side with just the edges of her fingers sliding up
and down the strings.
    Chiang complained after one concert that she was only ten,
that it hurt her fingers to twist them that way. And when they got home that
night, Chiang’s mother uncovered her own feet and pointed to them, and Chiang
kept future discomforts to herself.
    Her parents had been born in China and had brought much of
it over with them. But it was a warped version of home, Chiang discovered. The
more she talked to her friends, the more she found that her parents held in
their hearts a fantasy version of their homeland. Chiang was now eleven, and
had only that year discovered that dragons weren’t real. They never had been.
It made her question the dinosaurs from that museum, too.
    At her one-room school over a noisy restaurant, with the
banging of pots and pans in the background, they learned a lot of politics. Her
teacher didn’t know English. She spoke more of the news in China than she did
of the city in which they lived. Chiang learned without meaning to that she was
lucky to be alive. Back home, her parents may have decided to not keep her. But
here, she could have all the brothers and sisters she wanted.
    She didn’t argue with her teacher, didn’t mention her
mother’s feet or the way her father looked at her with sadness. She had only
begged for a little brother once. Her parents had yelled at one another all
night, making it impossible to sleep. So whenever her teacher spoke of such
things, Chiang gazed out the window at something else.
    Usually, it was at the bold stripes on the flags of Little
Italy, which every year her people encroached more and more. When she mentioned
this to her father once—that she felt badly for the Italians—he had shrugged.
Pounding a flank of meat with his wooden hammer, he had explained to her that
some people care more about where they come from than others. He told her to
feel sorry for them about that while he hammered the meat with more
anger.
    Chiang had felt sorry for her father that day, and for the
meat.
    She made another circuit of the shop, her parents‘ shop. She
had never been so hungry in all her life. The days had gotten away from her—not
for lack of counting or so grand a number, but because her mind wandered as it
grew dark and light again outside. Strangers occasionally pressed against the
glass, eying the meat, deciding it wasn’t for them. This much hadn’t changed.
Tourists, turning their noses up at delicacies. Laughing and taking pictures.
Only, they didn’t take pictures anymore. They paused with their horrible
wounds. The disgusting display was in reverse, now. And then they lumbered
onward, these tourists who had become grosser than the things they used to
mock.
    Chiang wondered how long this would last, how long before
everyone died for good. She ran that last day over and over in her head. School
had been cancelled suddenly, parents arriving for their children, people
running in the streets. Only, they hadn’t been screaming. That scared her the
most, the wide eyes and slack jaws of the adults hurrying away with their
children in their arms. In the movies, they were always screaming as loudly as
they could while a Chinese version of Godzilla crushed buildings beneath its
scaly feet. Instead, there had been silence, which was unnerving because it
wasn’t right. The people simply scattered, legs hurrying, no time for screams
at all.
    Or maybe they didn’t want