PANSPERMIA

I. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

I was always taught to be proud of my lineage, and there was no reason to be ashamed of it for a time. My father was a respected general for the Kuomintang, and my mother was a professor. I grew up in blissful ignorance then; my only worry was to do well in school. Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Even though we weren’t wealthy, we were labeled as the bourgeoise: my grandfather had been a landowner. When the Cultural Revolution began almost two decades later, there was a reason to be ashamed of my lineage. I was twenty-four then, the yellow glow of my childhood innocence banished from my face. My father had been dismissed from his post many years before, and although my mother avoided the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution, her students refused to listen to her, choosing instead to deface her classroom with red banners proclaiming sayings of Chairman Mao. When the professor who taught the class next door was dragged onto the streets, neck yolked by a sign proclaiming his wrongs, she resigned.

A memory. My father lifting my infant hand to the skies, whispering to me the old legend of Niulang, how he crossed, with his cowhide, the yawning migration between Altair and Vega to be with his wife. You see, he says, what is space to love. Nothing, he answers, nothing at all.

II. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me

It is only two years after the Cultural Revolution has begun when my mother tells me to leave. Mao Zedong has just declared that “educated youth” will be sent to the countryside to work among the peasants. Already, many of my friends have been sent away; my time to go is inevitable. I have always been a sickly child. I know I will not survive the hard labor. Leaving is a quick thing, not like living, which requires effort and is slow. Within a week of her declaration, my mother has already found and paid a smuggler for my safe travels. When I hear my destination, I am surprised. The United States is a world away. I am nervous, terrified, but I think of what my father has said to me, rubbing it obsessively as to confirm its existence.

What is space to love?

The smuggler is a balding man. His eyes wrinkle when he tells us what we are to do. We must sit in a cargo container and be silent. We will be smuggled in on a ship.

Evan Li

If we are caught any time before we get to the United States, they will send us back. He does not tell us what we are to do when we get to the United States. He probably does not know and does not care. We get into a large metal cargo container. I am stuck shoulder to shoulder with ten other boys who have been sent away. The one to my left is sniffling. Glasses skewed on his face, he keeps his head down, but I can see the tears. It is a day after the man has shut the cargo container, when the storm begins. We are violently shook in our metal tomb. There is crying, shouting, voices that engrave themselves on the metal. Appearances have been long cast away. We are terrified. I am terrified. And in the dark, I reach out to him. Because tossed in the turbulent waves of the ocean, I sought comfort. Because I want to live, and he is proof that I am alive. The boy with crooked glasses embraces me. We are two stars; we are two boys. Bridging the yawning darkness in the metal container, Altair and Vega crossing the cold void of space to warm each other.

Nothing, nothing at all.

III. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Time has lost its meaning when we arrive in America. I awake to a foghorn announcing our presence. When the workers open our container, there are shouts. We are shuttled out, brought to a building. Where, I do not know. They separate me from the group, sit me down in a room with a stern looking man. He speaks. I do not know what he says, but he sounds angry. He says something again, narrows his eyes, and then calls someone into the room. They rush out, and when they return, they have a translator. She asks me my name, and I tell them. She asks where I am from, and I tell them. She asks about my parents, and I tell them they are dead. The smuggler told me to say that. I must tell them I am a refugee of political violence, that my parents have been killed by the Communist Party. There is a sliver in me that resists. The part that tells me I must not forsake my lineage, but I quash it. I must live. The questioning ends.

A future. I lift my hand to the sky, tracing the constellations until I find the stars. Altair and Vega. My father is not with me, and I whisper to myself a new myth. A legend of how a boy of not yet thirty travelled across the great ocean to survive. Astronomically far apart, the distance between Altair and Vega is crossed and connected by this new tale I tell. What is that space to me? I can almost hear my father whisper. Nothing, nothing at all.