death of an ant. a fly. humankind. or something

I grew up alongside ants. My sister and I sometimes left our snacks carelessly on the floor of our first-floor apartment. The next day the ants would find them—cracks between carpet fluff blooming with moving clusters of brown. At Mom and Grandmother’s orders, we hunted them down, coating the bottoms of our slippers in brown sugar. They always came back. There were always more to kill.

It was a thrill to be so colossal—so powerful, gargantuan. In the summer of first grade, my sister, our neighbor Tony and I created an Anti-Ant Club to purge our neighborhood clean. We poured water into the anthills, swollen brown blisters in sidewalk cracks, watching them deflate and darken like punctured balloons. Our list of crimes went on. The balcony teemed with tiny, restless footsteps. Tape dispenser in hand, lure them onto the adhesive quicksand, where the small black bodies stuck like sesame seeds between teeth. A newspaper sheet of wriggling fine print. Prepare the scissors, the surgeons.

Cut.

Head and torso, severed clean through.

Now, I can’t stand to think about it—hard black flesh ripped open, clean at the edges. I was too young to understand the words “brutalization,” “dehumanization,” or even “torture,” but back then it was nothing more than numb, emotionless fun. I was six when I began to fear the Anti-Ant Club, watching from the balcony as Tony and my sister huddled in the front yard. I am not religious, but never again did I think I could play the hand of God. In high school, I learned that “dehumanization,” “brutalization” and “severance” were called zombie nouns—abstractions killing the active verb, that made writing limp and lifeless. Too many joints and tendons in the mouth, like tough meat—the syllables trip over each other. But all I hear is the clean snip of scissors—then silence.

*

I have outgrown my sociopathic tendencies. But I wonder what changed; I wonder what had fostered my cruelty in the first place. In her chronicle of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, a major Nazi organizer of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt conceptualized “the banality of evil”—how evil is often committed by those following orders, conforming or failing to think critically, rather than outright monsters. My Chinese teacher taught us about the ancient Chinese thinker Han Feizi’s philosophy—that everyone is born evil. To the scoffs of disbelief, he introduced Meng Zi, who believed that human nature was good.

“Who agrees?” Almost everyone raised their hands.

“Really?” Mr. Zhou gave a small tut. “So if you put a human baby in a box all their life, when you took them back out, would they be good, or evil?” He wrote a Chinese phrase on the blackboard—dao de, morals. “Is human nature inherent or is it learned?”

Wandering through my school library, I found a book, black and heavy and solemn, about genocides throughout human history. Crimes against humanity that were enough to fill a book. Enough to be ranked, to be categorized, enough for pages of footnotes and references for further reading. The movie trailer asks: “Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?”

*

The ad appears, interrupting the stream of video. A girl’s voice speaks in broken English. One day she was studying to become a doctor and the next day a bomb had struck her sisters dead. The background behind her was a mess of noise, disorder, screaming. I am just like you. I could almost see her breath warm against my laptop glass, the yellow ad bar trickling slowly across the bottom of the screen, a ticking time bomb.

Just five dollars.

Five dollars. A news subscription, a school fundraiser. The man with a cardboard sign at the corner that my parents drove by, eyes fixed on the road. An iced coffee. A hot meal.

Every sixty seconds in Africa, a minute passes. Every minute, sixty seconds pass in Africa, in Afghanistan, Palestine, Beverly Hills.

Five dollars. I have no money.

The video loops. Plays again, and again.

*

There was a girl, five years old, who in February of last year died trapped in a car with her relatives in a war two thousand miles away. The CNN headline is just a blip on my laptop screen, in a current of hundreds of others, new stories piling like rubble and stale by the minute.

Warning: this video contains images that may be disturbing to some.

In AP English at school, we write an essay about the viewing of violent images. The synthesis source had stated, matter-of-factly: “The fact is, however, that people die.”

My own words flash back to me—black and white, as they had been, on the essay paper.

You cannot avoid violent images, and you cannot possibly predict whether or not viewing will lead to action or knowledge. But until we see for ourselves the scope and truth of the violence that exists in the world, there is not much that can be said about our motivation to learn and change.

The girl in the video wears a pink dress, a tiara, one hand holding the phone to her face, the other waving playfully at the camera.

I cannot watch past the first ten seconds.

*

People die every day, says Wikipedia. Says the United Nations. Says my mother. Two per second, one hundred and twenty a minute. From researching school shootings, I learn that humans become desensitized to death as the number increases. It becomes too much to conceptualize. Becomes a survival mechanism. I convert the numbers into seconds, or grains of sand, trying to find a metaphor for a pain that my body and my brain refuse to carry.

*

I used to run past a cemetery every day for cross country practice; almost a mile long, stretching to the skyline shadows in the distance, sprawling green and scattered with headstones. Even now it is my best visual representation for death—the scale of it. Those runs should have been when I felt most alive—oxygen fizzling in my lungs, my limbs on fire. But only when I am running do I feel like nothing more than a chemical reaction, something purely biological, physical, clinical; I am a corpse, as well, only decomposing in a different way.

The other time I had been to a cemetery was at a writing camp, where we were herded outside to write a poem. I remember not knowing where to put my feet. I tried to read every headstone, memorize each of their names and reincarnate them in my mind. But in the end, all I could see was life; pockets of moss between stones, a tree with roots like a walnut bumping out of the ground, a ladybug shining like a ruby in the sunlight. In the past, cemeteries were common places to picnic or stroll; now, thanks in part to horror culture, they are morbid and solemn. From celebrating life to mourning death.

Instead of burying or cremation, now science has made it possible to grow trees out of the remains of the deceased. Cutting down on the real estate needed to dig graves. But I also like to think of it as a symbol—another shore where life and death connect.

Never kill an ant, TikTok tells me. Its death will release pheromones that will alert other ants as a signal. More will come to retrieve the body. Hire a professional exterminator, Peachtree Control suggests. They will know how to eliminate them all without attracting more.

*

From a poet before me—the only difference between graveyard and garden is what you put into the ground.

I am not sure I agree—only because a garden, to me, is a place of absolute tyranny. An enclosure of human hubris—all that pulsing life to be trimmed and colonized.

Last year at summer camp, a botanical anthropologist led us through a tour of the university gardens. A maze of green, cornered in boxes and leashed off with neat signs.

Yerba Buena cures headaches. Bethany snapped off a leaf, passing it around to the group. The plant curled limp in my hand, open like a palm.

In the wild, they grew on the Oregon coastside in planes, small white flowers like beads of stars. For a headache, a cold—amputate from the body. Squeeze its sap dry. We would do it in a heartbeat. Leave the rest of the plant sagging, drained, lifeless. It is nothing to the human.

“Here are the injurious plants,” Bethany pointed to us, “But we might want to rethink what we mean by 'injurious.'"

Poison ivy, did you know, was only ‘poison’ to human skin? Hostile to no other animal, no other organism in the world. And what was poison? Two pesticides people consumed on a daily basis: caffeine and capsaicin. And we had whole farms, whole industries of them, to take and take.

*

One summer I went to a tourist town in Xinjiang. Western media was adamant about the genocide that occurred there; but in China, it is a popular tourist destination. I searched for signs of abuse in the eyes of the residents. Stared down highways for concentration camps. All I saw were whirlwind crowds of tourists; dust trails kicked up from travel buses. The sky was a vast, blue, gaping wound. Mountains pressed in green and brown velvet. There were fields of rapeseed flowers so endless I felt like choking, as if my body craved a physical reaction to match the violence of yellow wildfire ravaging the pastures. It hovered at the cusp of civilization, where the only evidence of human presence was a few makeshift shacks poking between valleys. I had never seen such beauty—I don’t know if I ever will again.

One trail pressed right against the mountains along the seams where they met the earth. The rivers between the valleys were electric blue, so clear that you could see the dark teeth of moss gripping the stones where the water stripped them naked. The rocks jut out in large, flat planes between tangles of branches. The riverbanks were slanted from years of current uprooting the pine trees. The closer you approached, the louder the water roared.

I crouched to the edge, soiling the edges of my shoes, laying down on one, sun-soaked rock: flat as a palm, in the middle of the torrent.

There could be anything around, or under me, in this vein of cold blue. For the first time since I knelt heedlessly at the shore to feel the water did I feel afraid.

My mother says, whenever I can’t stop thinking about it, that life will go on. There is death and hunger and climate change; but the human race had weathered it for thousands of years, and the Earth longer than that. It was not just unnecessary, but conceited, to imagine that we would even leave a dent.

But the weight of it—that was the first time I felt it. Not in the quiet reverence of a graveyard; not in the cold silence of a vast, glittering night sky. There needed to be clamor. The water never stopped. Always pushing, raging forward. I imagined what would happen if I reached out. If I could pluck memory and history straight from the current. If this now was a metaphor for time, or nature, or civilization.

The rock parted the river, before it swallowed into itself back to its course. We could only ever thrust into those gaps.

The water thundered white noise all around me.

*

Being human is learning to press skip. Being human is living one long, drawn-out breath. We bury the bodies. We carry on.

I visit museums. Give me the cathedral ceilings and the Renaissance paintings and the rotting-paper anthologies; let me run my hands over just how deep our roots go. Where history burned and rebirthed itself. Give me human grandeur in its irrevocable, archaeological proof. All its fragile, cyclical, heaping glory.

*

I visit memorials. I see names carved into onyx-black stone. A never-ending book. My mirror reflection.

In China’s Nanjing Massacre Memorial, there is a statue of a pregnant woman with her stomach cut open, holding her dead, unborn baby; her head drawn back, she screams, and screams.

Memorials—I wrote a blog post in AP English about it, “The Performative Memorial”:

I have nothing against memorials, but everything against the unfortunate fact that in our current world, remembering the past is more of a slogan than a lesson taken to heart, and too often separated from the present and the future, as we repeat the same mistakes from history and create more memorials in a vicious cycle of stagnation.

I am Chinese. My history teaches me of the Nanjing massacre and Japanese atrocities that killed 300,000 Chinese civilians; buried alive and used for target practice and mass experiments: the human body is 60% water, 40% dried remains of Chinese prisoners of war.

I am Chinese-American. In my veins runs the red blood of the yellow peril. I am made of the same flesh and bone as Vincent Chin, beaten to death in 1982 by anti-Asian racists. My blood is in all of the eleven Asian seniors killed when a shooter opened fire in Los Angeles during Lunar New Year in 2023.

But I am also human. History is not just “other peoples.” The Great Chinese Famine in Communist China was my history, but so was the Holocaust. When 20,000 Haitian natives were killed for their pronunciation of “parsley,” I had both my tongue stuck in my teeth and a gun in my hands. I share the history of both colonized and colonizer—built China’s Great Wall and the Berlin Wall and kissed the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I am wrapped in the ropes of history—the tears that fall are made of water drank by dinosaurs, and before that closed in asteroid fists from the universe. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Everything that ever was will be corroded. Everything that ever was still stands.

*

Alice Walker says:

My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you can't miss it.

It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be.

*

The fish, large as my whole arm, turns idly in the pink wash basin. It survived however many years of swamp life, then the truck ride into the old village house for our Chinese New Year’s dinner, and now the poking and chatter of my six-year-old cousin, the stray cat that had wandered in from the street sitting still in the corner. Its eyes, glassy and lidless, rotate around the cage of pink, its mouth gasping shallow water.

With sudden, breathless fear, I reach out my hand. My fingertips touch the trembling life below—pulsing, slimy scales, silver as my grandmother’s hair.

My great-aunt once brought us a live rooster from her rural village to the Chinese high-speed train to dinner at my grandparents’ apartment. Its feathers matted, scrawny meat clinging to bare bones, yet there was something regal in every step, the layers of plumage washed in deep plum and scarlet. Three days later, its mutilated body came to the dinner table in a pot of bubbling soup, and I realized I could not look at it.

I learned to be afraid of bugs. To watch where I step. Fear can be learned, and so I learn to hesitate, let old habits rot and rust. Every day, soldiers are shipped to the battlefield only to find that they cannot shoot at another person even to save their own life. If human nature is a razor-sharp edge of self-centeredness, then I know that my weakness is a luxury.

*

The fly buzzes around my laptop screen. Humming its old, mindless melody.

On my hand, it is no bigger than a freckle. A splotch of ink. I could destroy it. As easy as popping a pimple, itching a scratch.

My hand stops inches away, and the fly is airborne, as easy as breathing. Four hundred million years before the Wright Brothers, they had taken to the sky. Easy as instinct. How could such a small body even function? And yet at the most fundamental level, we were both just coordinated webs of carbon molecules.

The window opens. I let it live, and I let myself live. The window opens, and I am free.