Lacking Chopsticks

For once in my life I wish I wasn’t from the city. Sure we have art, close
neighbors, people, options, places to go, people to avoid, ways to avoid said people,
and a resounding lack of community as a whole, but we also have the joy of being a
military target. So, when the rolling pieces of go-se invaded the not-so-humble city of
Minneapolis, we were more than a bit confused.
They came in the broad daylight. It was a Saturday in the middle of the summer.
My father grabbed his gun from his closet, my mother stood by, about to brandish a knife about a cubit long. I watched from the upstairs window. Clutching a bible, I stared. It was a large
dark tank, two men with oozies stood on top of the moving vehicle. My father was not
the only one ready to fight. The men of all the houses stood in the doors, ready to fight
with something. I saw cricket bats, guns, knives, baseball bats, crowbars, floor lamps, a
box of records, candlesticks, and an assortment of bottles at one house.
But it wasn’t just tanks. I saw as I looked up, planes. Not uncommon a
sight for me, but they were not commercial planes like I was used to hearing, they were
fighter planes. The men they dropped landed in the parks. All over the city, they landed
in the parks. Minneapolis has a lot of parks. They were the reinforcements. Each of them
helped the ground troops.
I had heard of the takeover of New York, Boston, and LA. I expected that they
would attack DC next. But they took down my town. None of us ended up fighting.
Shuh muh? Sorry, I’m trying to type a document here. No, get out, I don’t really
care about your new Chinese swears. Dong ma?
Anyways, the tanks, after the tanks came, the men came, the paratroopers. Two
men per house, they raided, took what they wanted. I remember them walking into the
room where I hid. The man came near me; his gloved hand grabbed my arm. He forced
me to my feet. I thought he was going to tear of my clothes, and force me to the floor
again. All he did was take my Bible, and then push me to the floor. He pointed a gun at
my head, and said three words in English.
“Forget this book”
They left, taking little of our possessions. That night there was a book burning.
Every night for weeks, there was a book burning. The first three weeks was bible
burning. Then it became any book that didn’t follow the censor. Then it was the text
books.
They burned all the school books, from every school. They replaced all of the
books, with Chinese books and history. The only books they didn’t burn were the history
textbooks.
Then they started burning buildings.
Every church, temple, synagogue, or house of worship they could trace. They
tracked down all of the prayer rugs, and burned those. All the shops selling religious
paraphernalia were sacked, and their contents burned. No religion was excluded in the
Massacre of the Faiths.
The general populace was more than outraged. Even the atheists were outraged.
We were already at war, but all those that rioted and fought back were jailed, tortured,
or massacred. The later being the most common. We as a people eventually stopped, and
the Chinese allowed secular funerals for each of the dead. So many of my friends’ sought
help from me, as I was one of few who actually had both parents left.

The city of Minneapolis has a wireless network for the general population. Give
them your credit card number, and then they can keep dibs on every site you visit. It was
shut down almost immediately. May I just say, the Twin Cities Metro Area was invaded
awful quickly for its size. They came, they saw, they conquered.
The only problem I have with them taking away this cities internet is that they
also may all internet connection impossible. All my friends far away, I now have no
means of contacting them. To add insult to injury, they also took out the cell phone
towers at the airport.
I was one of a very few who did not fight. My parents and brother help the
resistance, but I did not fight. Truth always comes when we don’t want it to, and I
realized that this had been coming for a while. My brother joined the army before they
attacked, and the dominoes fell. My mother worked as a secretary for a retirement
agency. My father worked for a company that sold cooling products. We never talked
about work in the house. I had a decent job as a radio host, and we as a family were
making it just fine.
I never fought because of what they said in that room the day they came. My
Chinese is very sloppy, but there was something about being swai and another thing
about being claimed. They used the word for married. I had on my purity ring at the time
they came; I also had a ring from a dear friend of mine who had given it as a token of
affection.
No, he was not a piece of luh-suh. Will you quit reading over my shoulder? No, I
don’t care that you fell on your pigu. Get up and get back to work, we have propaganda
to advertise. No not in English you pyen juh duh jiou chao rien. Yes! I DID JUST CALL
YOU A STUPID MARTINET! NOW GET BACK TO WORK!
It was about five weeks after they came, school started again. Half of it was just
teaching Chinese to the rebellious students. The first lesson was hilarious. Half the lesson
was teaching the kids to say ni hao, xei-xei, and wo bu zhidao. Chinese, being a tonal
language, is difficult to learn. It is even funnier when you know a little Chinese to begin
with. Some words, when spoken, are more than funny when pronounced incorrectly. Xei-
xei when pronounced incorrectly means vomit.
It happened three months ago. I got in a car accident. I was in the passenger seat;
my father was driving when we were t-boned by a truck. I got the brute force of the blow,
but my father was injured almost as much as me. I remember seeing the truck coming,
then a blinding light, and a horrible sound of metal on metal, metal tearing flesh and
cloth with equal ease, and feeling the hot metal tearing through my skin. I remember the
heat. Then the world was red. I think the truck was red, or that was my blood splattered
all over its hood. I couldn’t breathe. My father said that I spoke, mangled as I was.
“You’ve got red on you.”
My father laughed, and then almost passed out. I watched his eyes flicker. Then I
felt a great weight n my own, I couldn’t fight that weight. Then I saw black.
The next thing I saw was an operating room. I recognized it because it was like
the one at the zoo. I couldn’t feel anything, except cold. I saw the red everywhere, dark in
some places, light in others, all over the man above me, staring down, without looking at
my eyes. He shouted meaningless orders to make the other figures in white close my eyes
again. All I felt was cold. The searing pain was there, but it was the kind when you burn
your finger touching something cold, like leaving your hand on an object just pulled from

a freezer. But, instead of just being around by belly, it was in my belly, in my every cell.
I saw the darkness again.
I awoke in a room, my dear friend grasping my hand. I realize now, I woke up
because I had to use the loo. My brother was standing next to my bed. My mother and
father were not in the room. But the room was lined with color. Friends from school had
sent flowers and cards and candies and pictures.
“Ni hao Nati, how long have I been out?”
“A week mei-mei, a very long week.”
“What happened?”
My brother, whose nickname is Nati, explained to me that a drunk Chinese
teenager had t-boned the car. I was too scared to ask what had happened to my broken
body.
“The kid is still here too. He wants to talk to you.”
“I will see him.”
My dear friend gripped my hand a bit tighter. As if afraid to let me go, and I
never will blame him.
“Ni hao, my name is Ling.” A young man walked in, with minor injuries, but still
limping. “I am very sorry. For my part in all this, I was wrong in my actions.”
Ling looked down sheepishly and with great sorrow in his eyes. “Can you forgive
my mistake?”
“I am on to many drugs to give you an honest answer. Ask me when I can think.”
Is what apparently I said, or tried to say.

Two weeks later, I was home, still recuperating, but home. The doorbell rang, as
it often did. I was editing a friend’s story while watching “Beauty and the Beast”. Nati
answered. Lo and behold, it was Ling. He had come to apologize, and to deliver money
to pay for my hospital bill. I told him to come in and tell me his story, and this is what I
remember from that, I was still on drugs, which is why they invented spell check.

My name as you know, is Ling. I was born in a small village in Tibet, where the
tourists go to see the monks. I do not know who my father is. When I was still a young
boy, my mother sent me to a school run by the government. There I was raised in the
ways of our country. I received word my mother was dead after an earthquake hit the
area. So, I began to avidly follow the ways of my homeland. I was sent to this country to
help claim the unoccupied houses in the city. I live there with my roommates.
“Friends?”
“Friends? Friends? Hardly more than acquaintances.”
“I see, please continue.”
“There is nothing more to say. I shall be going now.”
So he left. And I never saw Ling again.

I went back to the doctor for a check-up on my condition. They took an x-ray.
There was a complication in surgery, and I had developed a cancerous tumor. At this
point is when I started fighting. The insurance provided by the Chinese government, was
less than helpful. We didn’t have the money to take care of my body. This check-up was
three days ago. By now the cancer will be stage four. I refuse to die from a disease. I will

die fighting.
As I write this, the riot of the century is about to start. We will begin as a peaceful
flash mob all over the city. Not in one area, we have multiple areas, the mall will be
infested, the steps to the overtaken capitol, and throughout the streets in downtown
Minneapolis and St. Paul. The combined Twin Cities Metro Area has over three million
inhabitants, not including the occupiers. Each suburb will have two major flash mob
sites, and there are two in the Minneapolis and two in St. Paul. We will be dancing to a
play list of songs, turning more into riots with each song. It will be starting
with “Freedom” by Wynonna, then “The Star Spangled Banner” by Jimi Hendrix,
then “God Bless America”, then “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, then “We Shall
Overcome” and then it goes to a shuffle of patriotic songs.
I will die, dancing and fighting for my country. I don’t care if they kill me. I want
to die defending a cause. They took my bible, burned my church, destroyed my hopes of
school, and are willing to let me rot and die. They wiped their go-se in my life, and I will
not tolerate it any more. They aught to realize what they have done.
No, this is not my suicide note; one of those pieces of luh-suh has a bullet waiting
for me. So, I will not be killing myself, someone else has carried that bullet for me a long
time. I will not be preparing to come home.
Good bye. I ain’t talking in that horrid tonal language ever again.
The American people, is a people with hope. We will not bend to the will of others. We
are strong, and there are enough of us. If we were all to take up arms for one final stand,
we shall overcome our oppressors, and know the truth. Freedom is never free.

Epilogue:
The narrator of this story was shot and killed during the “Flash-Riot” as it
will be called for the rest of history. The man responsible was trampled and beaten to
death by the rioters. Later reports confirm that it was Ling Wong, a Chinese federal,
who was charged for drunk driving and the near murder of a teenage girl. The family
of the narrator lived on, and helped the underground resistance by providing food and
shelter. The narrator played a crucial part in the “Flash-Riot”, using her own music, and
encouraging people using her job as a radio DJ. She manipulated the propaganda, and helped
with all the resistance efforts, while playing nice-nice to the occupiers. Her funeral was
held at the Excel Energy Center, with public broadcast on the television.
This final essay of hers was recorded to a live audience and when the Police came
in she fled to the “Flash-Riot” but the recorder was left on, and the general public heard
what the Chinese almost did, and were about to do. Thousands more joined the “flash-
riot” than originally contacted. Through the power of word of mouth, over three fourths
of the Twin Cities Metro participated.

Post:
The Twin Cities was wiped off the face of the earth by a Chinese nuclear bomb
two weeks after the “Flash-Riot”