Assimilation, Through the Ocean Taking Bites from the Moon

Full

When Chin leaves for America, he takes an assortment of my body with him. My heart. My womb. My feet, which I am most sad about. Chin’s brother Lam watches over me in his absence, making sure the wife stays inside while her husband is away. 

Chin was born too late to be a proper Gold Mountain man. Too late to die along the railroads, buried under mountains like the monkey kings of old. In San Francisco, he does not sieve for gold or play with dynamite. He works a laundryroom beneath a pleasure house, and when he grimaces at the women with their faces painted like peacocks, the immigration official at the Six Companies says, “Did you expect something better?” He sleeps slotted beside his fellow laborers, twenty-five to a room. I know this because my heart and womb and feet are with him. 

Waning

Chin is a laundryman, and then a worker in the cigar factory, and when the Workingmen’s Party rallies against coolie labor, he is a houseboy for a vineyard keeper’s city manor. His day is made of cooking and laundry. Cleaning, too. After taking my body, he is never called a man again; it is Chinaman, or houseboy, or slant-eyed heathen—a slow transformation from man to beast. 

Chin marries a girl named Orchid, kidnapped from Kwangtung when she was eight to be trained in English before her tenure at the pleasure houses. She lives with him because he is better than living with the mission home for Saved prostitutes. 

One day, she finds a box beneath their bed. A pearl lock keeps its lips from spilling her husband’s secrets. Over the steam of boiled cabbage soup, she asks him what the box contains. 

“What box?” he asks.

Curiosity gnaws through her. She combs through his belongings, finally finding a pearl key in the pocket of his oldest pants, the ones he wore at Angel Island. She opens the box to find a heart, a womb, and a pair of feet. 

†

Chin and I tried for children before he left. He tries with Orchid. At first, he tries to make it feel good for her. I have never wanted anybody in that way, man or woman, and maybe she does not either; maybe she only tolerates it too. I know the words he uses when the belly does not swell. They made me cry; they make her cry too. 

Then she remembers the box beneath the bed, and the pearl key. 

She eats my womb raw. The tubes snag in her teeth. White tissue dribbles down her chin: like cream, like honey. 

She has three boys and one girl. Chin says they are hers and his, but aren’t they more hers and mine? That is why I hurt too: spectral butchers cleaving my abdomen open, my fingers trembling at the loom. I stuff bandages between my legs, the blood more gushing than any period I have had. I barely sleep; nighttime is for scrubbing scarlet from cloth. 

Half

Orchid was a merchant’s daughter. The tong’s procurer stole and smuggled her for her bound lily feet; Americans pay fortunes to satisfy their exotic tastes. But she cannot sell herself after pregnancy—men don’t like the reminder that she is a used toy. She cannot find honest work either; foremen will not hire women who must toddle to the machines. But she must work, to feed her sons. She opens the chest again. 

†

Auntie Wong steams chicken feet sometimes, and sends the leftovers to us. I enjoy the task of picking the tender meat from the bones. Is it the same for Orchid with my feet? 

Waxing

Pain paints my world white whenever I stand. I crawl to the loom; I crawl to dinner. Agony: bones splintered and liquified, flesh folded into impossibly small glass slippers. Threads snap beneath my fingers like broken blood vessels. 

†

Chin says they are visitors in this land. “Keep the boys Chinese,” he orders Orchid. They must keep familiar with the Old Country.  

Orchid has lived in America twice longer than China. She takes her sons to Sunday school to learn English; talking to the Jesus women strains her tongue-mind connection less than haggling for chickens in pidgin. She knows the festival firecrackers should stir nostalgia, but they just give her a headache. Her friend Ah Lew says, “Old Tom’s white pepper tastes too stale. But I buy anyway. I do the woman’s trick: I put the pepper in my mouth, let my memory flavor it right. Then it tastes like my mama’s.” 

Orchid tries to recall her mother’s cooking and only tastes the inside of a coal barrel. She feels terrible reaching for the heart in the pearl lock box. She does it anyway. She will not deny the children their birthright.  

She dips her fingertips into the throbbing flesh, and her hands soon know the stitches for the children’s New Year clothes. At the family altar, she breaks the aorta between her teeth, and faces sharpen into view, memories retroactively consumed: a mother who tells stories of fisherman trapping crane maidens by stealing their wings, a father who says better to marry the one who dreams of the sea.

New

Lam does not understand what is happening to me. 

It is simple. You cannot live without the blood-pumping organ. 

“What can be done?” he says. 

I do not know. His calloused hands feel salt crusted, sanding over my hands, wiping helplessly at the blood slicking down my calf. 

†

“The paperwork is ready,” Chin tells his wife. “We are returning.”

Orchid looks at him, this beast/man from Old Country, who married her, who wants to return to that place. She wonders if he will put her parts in a pearl lock box, if she insists upon staying herself. She thinks of the meat cleaver in the kitchen, the one she wielded to hack ventricle from ventricle, and imagines a permanent sort of de-winging.

© 2025 Claire Jia-Wen

Claire Jia-Wen is a speculative fiction writer originally from the 626 and has been published in khōréō and Clarkesworld. A Viable Paradise and Clarion alum, she is currently a PhD student studying human-computer interaction.