THE BLADES

EMILY JUNGMIN YOON

You cut down on the gopher in a single, crisp stroke in the garden. In it also, your mother’s prized orange tree. A blue jay your family feeds and has trained.

I picture the gopher, no longer struggling in the trap inside the water pipe for the sprinkler throbbing over grass and stones. Ten, you must have slid open the door to the dining room, leaned the shovel on the tree.

I heard this story years ago in California. In the time of pandemic, alone together, I read too much news: “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’

Label,” “Woman assaulted in Manhattan, blamed for COVID-19,” “Racism is a Virus.” I obsess, knowing

our place as Asians in this country, the exemplar minority with advanced degrees and gadgets, a superior meekness. Knowing, our desirability was built to reassert Western centrality. Tat, too, a type of technology.

To keep us in check, a Texas man took it to himself and stabbed an Asian father and two sons, cutting their faces open. One of the children has a gash pointing to his eye, the damage itself in the shape of a blade. A delta. Wanting to breach another opening.

Watch. Watch the wild turkeys roam the neighborhood, unconcerned, banal, and ugly.

Yet you love these animals. When our friend’s old cat died, you had cried. He was eighteen, had a good, adored life. You had mourned so, for someone else’s animal. So when your mother told me at the dining table about the gopher, I was shocked.

But that, too, was kindness, your shovel. For the slowly dying animal, injured beyond saving for entering the human world in the shape of a pipe, a wet reach to a diorama of the natural world.

Embarrassed and ashamed, you looked away. As we sat, in that moment, two Koreans in a white world, I wanted to marry you. To protect the person who loves like no other, whose kindness is unlike anyone’s I’ve known.

Foolish and naïve, yes. Every day someone leans the shovel and knife, real and not, against a gentler thing, after striking another that looks like us. For crawling too close, out of the technology they built.

Yet today, feeling momentarily safe in our room, I can ask what you did to the gopher. You buried the animal, you say. In the same earth it came from.

Wendy Red Star, Catalogue Number 1935.33.a,b, 2019, pigment print on archival paper, 18 x 28 inches. Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters.