When Chickens Hatch

Helen Young Chang on remembered racism, both explicit and subtle, and what her parents brought from Taiwan to Southern California.

A response to the Atlanta massacre on March 16, 2021

Tonight I am thinking of the chickens I had as a child. They ran free in the Southern California backyard my parents somehow managed to transform into a tropical paradise. Kumquats dangled from branches as high as the electric cables overhead; spindly pomegranate boughs covered the brick walls behind them. My mother seemed to have a mystic connection to her orange trees, titrating their waterings to produce fruits ineffably exquisite, and the apricot and nectarine trees, goaded by an unlimited sun, grew too fast for their own good.

We found the chickens at a garden-supply store. The plan was to buy birdseed to serve as distraction from my mother’s fruit, but we got distracted instead. A crate of baby chicks chirped and swirled in an unending chorus that my sisters and I, aged between five and ten, couldn’t resist, and it didn’t take long for my mother to give in.

We just didn’t know that one of them was a rooster.

I was proud of our chickens. I thought they were beautiful. They weren’t like the anonymous chickens I saw at Knott’s Berry Farm, those frightened, ragged birds that stalked off if I came too close. Our chickens loved being in our arms. We would cradle them like warm loaves of bread, feed them from our palms. They came to us when we called. They were Reddie, Brownie, Roostie, and Hennie, the loveliest of them all.

We pretended that they could fly, a pretense they enjoyed as far as we could tell. We put them on the handlebars of our bikes, and as we rode, they would spread their wings as if they were coursing through the air alone, as if their wings could bear the weight of their heavy bodies. I was convinced that they carried the memory of flight in their bones, long before their domestication, by the way they tilted their wings when we rode in curves. The neighborhood kids loved them too.

We just didn’t know that one of them was a rooster.

These chickens were coddled. If it began to rain, my mother would shout, “The chickens!” Then we would run out and collect them into their boxes in the garage, where they slept at night. Years later, a friend looked at me in surprise when I said chickens couldn’t overnight outside. Perhaps they weren’t as fragile as I had been made to believe.

At seven, I wasn’t surprised that my mother knew anything about chickens, but now I am. My mother is a city girl. She was born in Palembang, Indonesia, already then a metropolis, despite the monkeys that rapped on her windows at night. When school-aged, she moved to Kaohsiung, Taiwan, into a neighborhood of tenements stacked one on top of another, the streets quiet only in the few short hours before early morning vendors replaced late-night markets.

As our chicks grew, feathers replaced fluff; scales appeared on their gumby legs, now stiffening and lengthening; and the rooster began to crow. My mother wondered whether our neighbors could hear him from inside the garage, and sure enough, our neighbor across the street called to complain. He began issuing regular warnings to my mother, threatening to report her to the city. Secure in my own world, however, I didn’t even think to consider possible solutions; my mother certainly didn’t look worried, and it didn’t occur to me that anything would change.

Of course, city ordinance banned roosters for obvious reasons. We lived in Huntington Beach, a magnet for congregating Methodists in the early twentieth century. Later the population boomed upon white flight from Los Angeles, mostly families fearing inner-city-school desegregation. It was a miracle we lived there at all. After we bought our house, my parents learned that realtors weren’t supposed to sell to Asians in our tract. But Bonnie, the real estate agent with whom my father remained friendly over the years, had made it possible. That she took my father on as a client was a wonder itself, and I thanked her by throwing up in her car.

*

For reasons that are unclear to me, I have always understood that for my parents, rules are arbitrary, their application necessarily specific. They grew up under martial law in Taiwan. As schoolchildren, they wrote essays their teachers then combed through to ensure correct thought under the authoritarian regime. To survive, my parents learned to obscure their instincts, hide stray desires.

Before my father’s family fled to Taiwan in 1949, at the end of the Chinese Civil War, my grandfather served as a general on the side of the Nationalists in China. He was the right-hand man of the Christian warlord Feng Yuxiang, who baptised his troops with fire hoses before sending them into battle against the Communists. As a young man in Taiwan, however, my father’s sympathies lay with the Communists (a difference that made an indelible line between them long after the dictatorship concluded).

My parents were taught to never mention their motherland of China, including family members who had been left behind. To pretend that Taiwan was the real China, and that soon, the mainland would be returned to them as the true, rightful rulers. That delusion, my father said, took a long time to fade, whereas the pretending was automatic. While there was constant talk of recapturing the mainland—in his youth, my father served in the Taiwanese military—they could not acknowledge the other side, nor what they had lost.

Growing up in the States, my parents passed these precepts along to me. Don’t talk about the past. Don’t let others know your politics. Don’t let them know who you are.

*

My world didn’t include the long boxed-up histories of my parents’ pasts, and yet their lessons seeped out in countless ways that I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why my mother never came to my school events, why she never watched my cross-country races.

I was surprised when I came home from school one day and was greeted by a group of seven extremely thin men and women in our living room, where they proceeded to stay for the next week. My mother had found them in the Chinese grocery store, overhearing their conversation in one of the four Mandarin dialects she speaks. Newly arrived, they had nowhere to go, but instead of contacting an immigrant-help organization, she invited them home. I didn’t understand the devastation my father, an aerospace engineer, felt when he was passed over for a position at work which would have required security clearance in China; his mostly white superiors worried about the possibility of split loyalties. I didn’t understand that this portended the end of his career at a company where he had spent more than two decades, and where he insisted that he spoke American, the language of immigrants, and not English.

As a child, I was frustrated that my family couldn’t accept the world as it presented itself to me. Instead they saw a shadow version with its own rules and reasons. Even after decades in the US, my parents trusted only what they could verify for themselves or within their own circles. Only recently have I found empathy for these attitudes and practices. I have begun drawing a short line between their life under authoritarianism versus racism, how one prepared them for the other, so that they ended up greeting both the same way.

The neighbor who threatened my mother about Roostie now told her, “Go back to China.” Never mind that she had never been. Dressed year-round in the same white tee and shorts, Rick always seemed to be watching the street from his front porch. His truck stuck out among the minivans and family sedans plentiful on our street.

*

Roostie kept growing, his crowing now articulated like a real rooster. Neither covering the garage windows nor draping a black cloth over his box sapped his enthusiasm for his new skill. Soon after, my grandmother visited from San Francisco, along with my aunt and cousins from New York. One morning, she caught Roostie, slit his throat, and bled him out in preparation for a stew. His flesh was tough and gamey. I don’t know how my mother forced us to eat him, and I have since forgiven her. My youngest cousin refused, crying until my aunt relented.

The neighbor who threatened my mother about Roostie now told her, “Go back to China.” Never mind that she had never been.

At seven, I did not want to eat my pet chicken. I could barely stomach their eggs. I was sure that sooner or later we would have found Roostie another home. I dreamed of slipping him unnoticed into the sanctuary of Knott’s Berry Farm, where he could be among his own kind.

Now every time I saw Rick, his hand raised in silent greeting, I heard the words he said to my mother. Before heading out to play, I would first peer through our stained glass windows to his porch. Or I would listen for the rattle his truck made as he coasted into his driveway. Then I would know that outside playtime was over for the day.

Twenty years later, long after my parents separated, and years after my sisters and I left home, Rick was the one who helped my mother change the fluorescent light bulbs in the kitchen ceiling, who carried the heavier groceries from her car into the house and pruned the tree branches that were out of her reach.

*

It’s the first time I’ve thought of my chickens in years, and now, without warning, a more fragile, unexpected memory shows up: Lifu, the watchful shepherd mix my father bought when my older sister was born. In Connecticut, where we lived before California, Lifu had the habit of taking off and roaming for days before returning home thin and matted, his eyes mellowed and content. No one knew where he went, and he would sleep for days before assuming the role of a loyal family member again, our guardian on walks through the dark woods behind our house. Then weeks would pass and he would perform this feat all over again, surprising us each time he ran back into our arms.

This cycle stopped when we moved to California near San Diego. My parents kept him in our new fenced-in backyard, which opened downward to a steeply sloping canyon which we explored single file along its narrow paths, Lifu jostling between the front and back of our pack to make sure of each one of us. My parents didn’t trust him to explore his new habitat alone, there were too many freeways nearby, and without his old freedoms, Lifu began to bark. Perhaps he found the adjustment to California as difficult as I did, especially the heat wafting up from the bottom of the canyon with its spiky and fleshy plants, all of it untouchable. To me, even Lifu’s heavy black-and-gold coat looked out of place in Serra Mesa; his panting tongue now hung permanently outside his mouth.

It wasn’t long before our new next-door neighbor complained about Lifu to my mother, and the next thing our mother did was unthinkable. She said she didn’t know what else to do. Without warning, she gave Lifu away.

This last memory seems to give the past another name, and perhaps the truth is that we weren’t much wanted where we lived, much less our pets. Perhaps our neighbor couldn’t tolerate difference, nor my parents’ disinclination to fitting in. Perhaps it explains my intermittent agoraphobia and my inclination to interior spaces as a writer.

Were our chickens and my mother’s tropical fruit trees her attempt to imagine the ancestral countryside she might have known, had her parents not emigrated from their village in Canton when they were still almost children themselves?

It took the memory of my chickens to bring me back to Lifu, mourning I had long buried as ancient history, but I would say it is not too late. Proper mourning is never too late, especially if its arrival points to one’s survival in the meantime, if it reconnects us to our past and to one another.