My Father Taught Me About Endurance

There is grief in me, but I have no time for it. There are always more pressing matters at hand then the past to focus my light on. Last night was one of those nights where I shared deep conversation with my mother into the late hour. Things you seldom hear in history books became the topic of our conversation and it left a pit of sorrow in me.

I was never one to pray, but the more I know of this world the more I find myself praying for lost souls. For what else can I do when the weight of realization starts to bruise my shoulders? To hear stories about people I know and their painful histories filled with testimonies of death and sacrifice. It hurts me to know so many of my countryman are victims to an unsympathetic government. It pains me to think of my paternal grandparents starved to death, the countless babies murdered by doctors over a technicality, the provocation of our inheritance.

This makes me think all those fabrications of "what if"? What if we did not leave the country when we did with the secrecy of my mothers pregnancy. Would my sister have been murdered? Would we have made it out of the country? Would I have the luxury of human rights. Still I wonder, what does this mean for generations to come? What kind of unexpected incidents will arise in a lifetime that I can understand? How many more people must suffer at the indignities of such cruel men who call themselves "great leaders"?

I don't know and as of right now, I don't have the time to entertain these decades in history. I neither have the time nor the courage to face these episodes lost in the pages of propaganda.

They were reduced. Harassed. Tortured. Starved. To weak to bury their dead. They littered the landscape while dogs ate their carcasses. They ate paper mulch, grass roots, bark. They ate each other. Entitled During the famine, young child dying in the gutter China MAY [1946]