Haibun for a War That Was Never Mine

Zhong nan qing nu¹ is the proverb my mother mouths to me to explain the way nainai²  holds my brother. Cradled by rivers of folded skin, my brother breathes victory into the crease above Grandma’s elbow, and her eyes are mirrors to the battles she’s fought. Her eyes are not mirrors for me, I frown. (Nainai loves you too, my mother reminds me the day after my brother is born.) Seven years later, I shout to my brother that he should go kill himself (he stepped on my toe). The patch of skin between my grandmother’s brows is creased like a tourniquet knotted too many times, and now I’m holding crumpled tissues to wipe my brother’s tears, because my grandmother knows the meaning of death more intimately than I ever will and she’s not pleased with the way I’ve used the word. My grandmother has died four times over already and rewritten herself effortlessly the next morning. Now, I don’t mean it anymore, of course, and it’s almost the same as my father not meaning the way his face fell when the ultrasound revealed that his firstborn was a girl. Almost the same as my grandmother’s parents only ever giving her the bony remnants of steamed fish while her brothers devoured the succulent underbelly first. She was just unlucky enough to be born a girl. Almost the same I didn’t mean it my grandmother must have felt when she told my mother that my education was money down the drain because I’d just go off and get married eventually, so what was the point of me ever going to a good school? 

But my nainai is a strong woman, having first scarred herself over so many times with the same proverbs that her parents stamped into her skull, and then holding her only granddaughter, dressing her own wounds, and funding the private school education that allowed her granddaughter to turn this prose poem into a haibun. 

My fingers collapse 

from knotting baby brother’s 

un-creased tourniquet.