He said, “Where in Iraq were you stationed?”
I said “In the northeast, in this city called Kirkuk.”
And he paused, and he said, “I’m from Kirkuk.”
And just as soon as the conversation started, it was over.
I knew something was wrong, and I was thinking, What just happened? Did I harm one of his loved ones intentionally or unintentionally? Or maybe he was really antiwar, and if he was, could I blame him?
We sat there in silence, for miles, and I could feel him staring at me in his rearview mirror.
I was trying to avoid eye contact by looking out my own window, and it was in that moment that I saw he had passed our exit.
Now I was terrified.
I told him that he’d missed the exit, but he didn’t respond. He just took the next exit.
When he got off, we went down a few blocks, and he pulled the car over to the side of the road.
Now the red flags were going off!
I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I could see him gripping his steering wheel—working up the guts to do something. What he wanted to do, I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to be there to find out.
So I grabbed my backpack, and I kicked open the door.
But before I could get all the way out of the taxi, he grabbed my leg—and he turned around and said, “Hey, Dylan, Do you remember me? It’s me, Brahim.”
And I looked at him, and I just didn’t understand what was going on.
But he sat a foot taller. His voice was deeper, his English was better. He didn’t have that goofy bowl cut.
Seventy-five hundred miles away from Iraq, there was this kid who had saved my life a lifetime ago.
We got out of the car, and we were hugging and sobbing in the pouring rain, like a scene out of The Notebook.
He explained to me that after I left Iraq, he was an interpreter for four years, and when he finished his contract and got his visa, they asked him where he wanted to resettle. He said he didn’t know, but he wanted to go somewhere where the weather was like Iraq.
So they sent him to Phoenix, Arizona.
I’d learned a lot of things about survival in the military. During POW training one of the things the instructors tell you is that sometimes the pain can be unbearable and the outlook can be pretty grim. But you have to look for these glimmers of hope to keep you going to that next day.
I think that day on the side of the road in Arizona was my glimmer of hope.
I’d lost one brother, and I got another one back.
* * *
DYLAN PARK was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. From 2004 to 2010, he served as a member of a US Air Force unit that deployed to locations all over the world, including Iraq. After returning home, he spent time as a social worker for homeless veterans and as a victims advocate for the Santa Clara County’s District Attorney’s Office. In 2016 Dylan moved to Los Angeles to pursue writing and quickly found work in AMC Network’s scripted development department as a writing fellow. Since then he’s had scripts optioned for both television and film. Currently he writes and directs. Recent projects include a VICE segment covering Alaska’s Muslim community, a music video with acclaimed musician Wyclef Jean, and a short film starring Jonathan Lipnicki (who played the little boy in Jerry Maguire). Dylan is a graduate of Arizona State University, from which he holds degrees in film and media studies, and attended grad school at the University of Southern California. You can always find him with his face buried in a laptop, hiding in a café or a bookstore somewhere in Santa Monica, the city he now calls home.
This story was told on November 5, 2017, at the Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, Colorado. The theme of the evening was Lost and Found. Director: Meg Bowles.
I was six when the Cultural Revolution began in China, and it crushed my dream for college. Everything was shut down: the factory, the store, the school and library. My father was exiled, and my mother was once arrested and later released for teaching Western music. As the oldest daughter, I took on the duty of feeding my family: my grandma, sisters, and brother.
I raised chickens and grew vegetables in the backyard, which had been plowed for me by bombs. Every day I rose at dawn, walking through minefields, checkpoints, bullets, and grenades, to search for food and fuel. My college dream seemed so far away—dangerous and impossible.
Early one morning I took out the stove to light a fire to make breakfast for my family. When I opened the door. I saw Jiajia, the new girl from Beijing. She was reading Mao’s Little Red Book under a streetlight. Her head and shoulders were covered with frost, and she was sobbing.
Who would be weeping like this reading Mao’s words these days? I wondered, let alone Jiajia, the very uppity girl who had just moved to our navy compound on an island in the East China Sea? She dressed like us—the ugly gray Mao suit—but she wore it as if it were a ballet outfit, and she walked like a ballet dancer.
I tiptoed closer and peeked over her shoulders.
I gasped.
The book she was reading was not Mao’s book. It was Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, the very story that had fired my imagination and my dream of college. I had begged my mother to let me start school a year early so I could start reading on my own. My mother agreed and even promised that she would buy me Andersen’s fairy tales if I got straight A’s.
But the Cultural Revolution broke out before I finished the first grade. Students became Chairman Mao’s little Red Guards. They rounded up all the books, condemned them as poison, and made the teachers kneel in front of the bonfires, watching their treasures burn.
I had raked through piles of books on the streets before the burning, hoping to find my mermaid, but no luck. Here she was, wrapped in Mao’s Little Red Book in Jiajia’s hand. Jiajia was so deep in her story she didn’t realize I was standing right behind her until she heard me weeping loudly with her.
She jumped, clutching her book to her chest. Her face told me if I dared to report her, she would fight me to the death. We stared at each other for an eternity.
Suddenly she burst out laughing, pointing at my face wet with tears. She knew I was a kindred spirit and her mermaid was safe.
I begged Jiajia to loan me her book just for three hours. I would read in the fields on my way to the food market.
She refused. I knew she didn’t trust me.
“Oh, please, please, don’t go away. Just give me a minute. I have something to trade with you,” I said.
I ran to the chicken coop and pulled down The Arabian Nights from the roof.
I had found this in the book pile outside a tuberculosis patient’s apartment. He was dying from coughing up blood and pus, so the Red Guards wouldn’t touch his books. It had been yellowed by the sun, rained upon, and was missing many pages, but I didn’t care. I hid it in the chicken coop and read the stories whenever I could.
Jiajia squealed with delight and snatched the book from my hand. We agreed that we would meet tomorrow to return each other’s books. If we couldn’t finish reading them by then, we would renegotiate our terms.
It took us more than two weeks to finish the books. My problem was finding a place to read. I shared my bed with my two sisters and my brother. My grandma also had her bed in the same room.
Jiajia had her own bedroom, but her apartment was watched by soldiers day and night. Fortunately, her father liked to take long walks, followed by the soldiers. So whenever he went out, I would sneak into her room and we would roll around in her big bed, reading and daydreaming about a possible underground book club so we could have more books to read besides The Arabian Nights and The Little Mermaid.
My daily chore was to feed the chickens. I had ten hens and a rooster. My favorite was Silky. She had long white silky feathers, black feet, and a black face.
Silky was brooding. She would need twenty-one days to hatch the babies. So that day I was going
to dig a hole to make a nest for her behind the chicken coop in the woods to keep her safe—away from foxes and weasels and my mother, who all wanted her meat.
I was digging, and my pickax hit a wooden box. I pulled it out, pried it open, and found Shakespeare, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and my mother’s music scores of Beethoven and Schubert! And in the bottom The Complete Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen—hardcover, gilded title.
On the first page, my mother’s words: “To my stubborn girl. May you be as beautiful and courageous as the Little Mermaid. Your mother.”
I screamed with joy and ran to Jiajia and brought her to the treasure. We cried in each other’s arms. Our dream for a book club would finally come true. We each found a bunch of kids who also had a cache of banned books. We went into the woods, cut our wrists, and mixed our blood together as a pledge to guard our books and each other with our lives.
So while everyone else was busy killing each other, we read poetry, drama, philosophy, medicine, military training manuals. Our days were filled with joy and hope.
Jiajia got ambitious. She wanted to expand the club to a hundred members.
I begged her, “Please wait.”
Something bad was coming. I could feel it.
That night I dreamed of a monster yanking me up by my hair and throwing me down into a fire pit.
I opened my eyes, and my mother was thumping my head with Andersen’s fairy tales.
“Where did you get this book?” she hissed. “How?”
I looked at her. She knew where I got this book. I wanted to know how she found it. I had hidden it under my grandma’s mattress, the last place she would check.
She slapped my face with the book and took out a bamboo whip.
“You want to kill me and your father? I’m going to kill you first.”
She whipped and whipped me until the whip broke. I covered my head with my arms. The pain was unbearable—not from the whipping but from my bleeding heart. I knew this was the last time I would see my Little Mermaid. My mother was going to burn it.
“Where are the rest of the books?” she asked.
I remained silent. I understood she must find all the books from the box and destroy them before they destroyed us, but I had sworn I would guard the books with my life.
She threw down the whip and started searching. I listened to her pulling up every floorboard, turning over the mattresses and drawers.
My heart shriveled. I knew she was going to find all the books, because she was my mother. Soon she had a huge pile by the window.
She sat down, ordered me to bring the stove, and tear up everything, page by page, book by book. My face was covered in blood, I listened to my Little Mermaid scream in the fire as she turned into ashes.
When every book was gone, my mother went back to bed.
I walked out to sit by the chicken coop. Everything was so quiet and peaceful, as if nothing had happened. I looked up; no star in the sky. The night had entered its darkest moment. I thought of tomorrow: What was tomorrow without books or hope?
I was choking with tears when Silky came to me, along with her chicks, their soft feathers rubbing against my feet and hands as they begged for food.
I sat with them till the dawn came. I got up and did my chores as usual, but in silence, feeding the chickens, my family, cleaning up.
When night fell again, I went into the woods with Jiajia, empty-handed this time. Nobody asked what had happened. The cuts and bruises on my face and limbs said it all.
I stood in silence for a long time. Then I started talking, words coming out of my mouth like seas and stars, forming a constellation of the Little Mermaid—her courage to go after her dream at any cost, which had become mine.
Everyone listened as if it were the first time. My Little Mermaid had come alive again through my mouth, more beautiful than ever.
So I started telling stories to the members in the woods, then my siblings and neighbors. When the indoors became too small, we moved to the yard. Night after night under the stars we gathered—children, parents, grandparents—from spring to summer to fall.
When the winter came we brought our own wood to make fires. I told stories of Romeo and Juliet, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Ali Baba, and Jiajia told her stories of Swan Lake, the Red Shoes, Lady Macbeth.
We were hungry and cold. Our future was bleak, without jobs or college. But we had our stories.
One night I was telling the mermaid story again for my best friend, Jiajia. She was leaving the island with her father to go to Mongolia, and I knew I might never see her again. Across the blazing fire, I saw my mother in the crowd. She had tears in her eyes, shining like stars in the night sky.
My voice quivered with joy. I might have lost my book battle with her, but I had won the war. We had won the war.
* * *
WANG PING was born in China and came to the United States in 1986. Her publications of poetry and prose include American Visa, Foreign Devil, Of Flesh and Spirit, New Generation: Poetry from China Today, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, The Magic Whip, The Dragon Emperor, The Last Communist Virgin, Flashcards: Poems by Yu Jian, and Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi. Her books have been translated into Japanese, German, Danish, and other languages. She’s also a photographer, a filmmaker, a public-performance and installation artist. Her multimedia exhibitions include Behind the Gate: After the Flood of the Three Gorges, All Roads to Lhasa, We Are Water: Kinship of Rivers at schools, colleges, galleries, museums, locks and dams, and confluences along the Mississippi River and the Yangtze. She’s the recipient of NEA, Bush, McKnight, and Lannan fellowships and book awards including the Kayden Award for Best Book in the Humanities, the Minnesota Book Award, and others. She is professor of English at Macalester College, founder and director of the Kinship of Rivers project, which you can learn more about by visiting kinshipofrivers.org. Her own website is at wangping.com. She would like to dedicate this story to all the children fleeing from war, violence, and injustice, children separated from their parents and detained on US soil. May this story bring some light to their dreams.
This story was told on November 14, 2015, at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota. The theme of the evening was Into the Wild. Director: Meg Bowles.
The storytellers featured in this book developed and shaped their stories for the stage with The Moth’s team of directors:
MEG BOWLES is a Senior Director and one of the hosts of the Peabody Award–winning The Moth Radio Hour. Like many of the Moth staff, Meg started as a volunteer in 1997, helping to curate early Mainstage events and teaching storytelling workshops. In 2002 she was pulled away by Discovery Communications, mainly because she needed the paycheck, but when Moth founder George Dawes Green asked her to return to help curate the Mainstage in 2005, she found it impossible to say no. While directing stories for the Mainstage, Meg has had the privilege of working with a NASA astronaut who commanded the first shuttle mission after the loss of Challenger, a doctor who saved Mother Teresa’s life, a member of Churchill’s Secret Army who trained spies during WWII, an innocent man who spent eighteen years on death row, a Nobel Laureate, a lobster fisherman, neuroscientists, veterans, musicians, chefs, fugitives, mothers, fathers, and countless people who have found themselves in sometimes ordinary but often unique situations and have generously shared their experiences and emotions, exposing their imperfections—the very thing that makes us human and ultimately connects us to one another.
CATHERINE BURNS is The Moth’s longtime Artistic Director and one of the hosts of The Moth Radio Hour. As a lead director on the Mainstage since 2003, she has helped hundreds of people craft their stories, including a retired New York City detective, a jaguar tracker, and an exonerated prisoner. She is the editor of the two bestselling books, The Moth: 50 True Stories and All These Wonders. She is the director of the solo shows The Gates, written by and starring Adam Gopnik
, and Helen & Edgar, written by and starring Edgar Oliver, which was called “utterly absorbing and unexpectedly moving” by Ben Brantley of the New York Times. Prior to coming to The Moth, she directed and produced television and independent films, interviewing such diverse talent as Ozzy Osbourne, Martha Stewart, and Howard Stern. She attended her first Moth back in 2000, fell in love with the show, and was in turn a GrandSLAM contestant and a volunteer in The Moth Community Program before joining the staff full-time. Born and raised in Alabama, she now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and young son.
MAGGIE CINO is an award-winning director and playwright living in Brooklyn. Her plays were published by Indie Theater Now, and excerpts appear in the Smith & Krause Best Men’s and Best Women’s Monologue series. The Villager called her “A writer of extraordinary versatility and imagination” and Time Out New York says, “Cino has a gift.” A former Senior Producer for The Moth, she directed storytelling shows nationally and internationally at venues including BAM, Lincoln Center, and the main stage of the Sydney Opera House.
JENIFER HIXSON is a Senior Director and one of the hosts of The Moth Radio Hour. Each year she asks hundreds of people to identify significant turning points in their lives—fumbles and triumphs, leaps of faith, darkest hours—and then helps them shape those experiences into story form for the stage. She falls a little bit in love with each storyteller and hopes you will, too. In 2000 she launched The Moth StorySLAM, which now has a full-time presence in twenty-nine cities in the United States, the UK, and Australia and provides more than six thousand individual storytelling opportunities for storytelling daredevils and loquacious wallflowers alike. Jenifer’s story “Where There’s Smoke” has been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and This American Life and was a part of The Moth’s first book, The Moth: 50 True Stories.
SARAH AUSTIN JENNESS joined the staff at The Moth in 2005, and as Executive Producer she has worked with hundreds of people to craft and hone their personal stories. She is one of the hosts of the Peabody Award–winning The Moth Radio Hour and launched The Moth’s Global Community Program—coaching storytelling workshops in the US and Africa to highlight world issues, including family homelessness and public health. Moth stories she has directed in the past decade have been told before the UN General Assembly and as far afield as the Kenya National Theatre. She believes that stories have power and can change the world by creating connection.
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