“Does it have to be?”

“I don’t know.” She braided the child’s hair. “But that’s enough for now. There’s only so much a girl can hear.” Just then there was a gunshot in the distance.

Later, when they were down in the reddish sand by the water, she held Lin and said, “I’m sorry.” Crying.

Lin studied her face, to see what she meant. She looked at her fine nose, her cheek that seemed dented, her eyes. Lin said, “I know. You’re sorry about humans.”

Auntie nodded, hiding her face.

The rains began. It was the beginning of the monsoon season. First a light mist, then a rain, then the downpour. Lin had time to think about what was human as the land turned to brown water and the air smelled thick and rich with mud. Clouds gathered darkly in the sky and water covered everything. The roads were filled and people stood with their legs in water as it poured down the hill. One poor man with one leg walked by on crutches. Another tried over and over to catch a fish from a lake now dead, throwing the line in again and again. “Well, at least the rice is happy,” her grandmother said, her grandmother who told Lin a story about the great river and how there were a large number of white animals that had to cross over it and when they reached the other side they had all become black. Lin always thought of the animals crossing the water.

Across an ocean, her father had also changed. No more kites. No more presents. He carried the family’s fading photos in his worn leather wallet and took them out to look at them, fearing the day their images would fade away completely and he would lose everything he had left. Everything he had left. He thought of the irony, the strange double meaning of those words. He could return now if he were able, but it wasn’t a simple matter of human will. That, too, is human.

He remembers the air was quiet. No birds. There was tension unfelt by the food-buyers who had grown attuned to all things left unsaid and would force them to be spoken. He worked in the rice fields. He kept his back to the Others when they passed. After a while he was the only one not questioned by any enemy because he was an ignorant man who neither heard nor spoke nor understood the things happening around him. He wore a band around his head and his blue-black hair was the color of the hair of the others. Only in the way he moved could you tell he was an American; he disguised this by limping as if he’d been wounded. But when they’d gone and the work was done he and Lin sang on the road. They sang a song about the great frogs with golden eyes. She and her father sang and he carried a stick in each hand and beat a rhythm. He lived this life whole and fully, always knowing it could end at any second with a wrong step or movement. She looked up at him when she was too large to be carried on his back. They smiled.