Mahlia had eaten ice a couple of times. Her father had taken her to a peacekeepers’ officers’ club, which had solar generators and power to spare to make luxuries. In exchange for Mahlia’s promising to speak Chinese like a civilized person and keeping herself polite, her father had given her ice cream while he’d sipped cold whiskey, diamond cubes of ice floating in alcohol amber.

Ever after, the clink and freeze of ice was something that Mahlia associated with China. A fairy-tale luxury from a fairy-tale land. According to her father, China had ice for drinking and electric bicycles for traveling; they had cities with towers a thousand feet high, all because they were civilized. Chinese people didn’t war amongst themselves. They planned and built. When the sea levels rose, they built huge dikes to protect their coastlines, and floated their greatest cities on the waves, like they did with Island Shanghai.

“You wenhua,” he’d said. China had culture. It was civilized. Chinese people knew how to hezuo—“cooperate.” Work together.

Not like the Drowned Cities. Drowned Cities people were like animals. They didn’t plan. They fought all the time, and blamed each other for being poor and broken, instead of standing tall. Drowned Cities people were less than animals, really, because they had reason, but didn’t use it.

“It’s hard to believe this country was ever strong,” her father had said, more than once, as he gazed out at the place he had been posted.

The difference was obvious to Mahlia when she sailed through the canals of the Drowned Cities. All the Drowned Cities people were poor and raggedy, while the peacekeepers were tall and healthy. The pictures of Island Shanghai that were printed on the Chinese paper money showed a similar difference: Island Shanghai, tall and gleaming, surrounded by blue ocean, in comparison to the Drowned Cities, where muddy, brackish water swamped every street and ate away at the foundations of buildings.

Mahlia had been glad she was Chinese then, all the way up until her father took a toy wooden horse away from her and she bit him for it. He slapped her then, and said she had too much Drowned Cities in her.

“No respect,” he said. “Drowned Cities, through and through. Just like your mother. Animals.”

Mahlia’s mother fought with him over that, and then he called them both Drowned Cities, and suddenly Mahlia was afraid. Her father hated the Drowned Cities more than anything. And now she discovered she was the same as the people he fought every day.

Mahlia hid under her bed and bit herself for her stupidity. “Mei wenhua,” she said. “No culture.” She bit herself again and again, driving the lesson home. But when she showed her father her bleeding hand, proving that she’d punished herself, he’d only looked at her with more disappointment.