ALICE HE

red, gold, and the truths left untold

Alice He | Prose

red is the color of your shirt when you tell me we are moving from the twentieth floor down to the third. i do not ask why, perhaps because summer break reminds me of how restricted our lives become during the other forgotten seasons, monotone and lifeless, like a creature tranquilized with the chemicals of a society that hates liberty with a raging passion. we move and i do not remember packing nor unpacking. it is an uneventful event, filed away into the dusty archives of my memory until something gives me a reason to dig it out again, which only happens on the occasions that a stranger questions me where i am from. and then suddenly, as if a flip has switched inside of me, i remember there is part of me that exists only halfway across the globe, in the country that was once your entire world. but needless to say, there are parts of that life even you wish you could forget. 

the sky burns scarlet, orange, glimmering gold. the sun sets, and tomorrow, a privilege to our very existences, arrives again. 

— 

crimson is the color of my blood when the faceless nurse stabs a needle into the soft folds of skin at the crook of my elbow, withdrawing dark tubes of the fluid that flows, unstopping, through my body like a circuit with no off button. in just a few hours she will send these vials of me extract, as if i am vanilla to be used in a recipe, for examination in case they harbor some invisible microorganism that will kill me silently from the inside out. the pain is difficult to bear but i do not allow myself to speak; for what authority do i have against this figure who surely must know more than i? if wisdom truly comes with age like they say, then what am i but a naive newborn, fresh to the world like a fish just caught from sea? 

you squeeze my arm in attempt to be comforting but i can only think of the way it sends more of my blood into the soul-stealing hands of the laboratories and medical insitutions of this country that convinces us health and vitality are only byproducts of obedience. the nurse removes the needle from my veins, a shimmery crimson pearl forming at the surface of my skin, and i wonder about all the bodies who were left with too few ounces of the life-giving elixir ridden with the blueprint of all that we are and all that we will ever be. then she departs, a gentle breeze following in her wake, no one but us and the tingling scent of summer left in the room, and yet still the tears do not come. 

you wonder why, and i refuse to answer. 

​

— 

ruby red is the color of the jewel studs that adorn the plush flesh of my earlobes, piercings that speak more about the fears that plague my dreams than my eagerness to follow modern fashion trends. you have them, my sister has them, all the pretty girls i know have them. i ask you what kind of gems and treasures you wore on your ears when you were little and if your friends got jealous but you just smile into the faroff distance like something in the clouds has brought you back to the days when school was just for learning and your classmates didn’t know to want anything besides a stable job and a loving family. and suddenly i feel like i have opened a book that does not want to be read, a history that is better left buried in the past, a part of you that was never meant to be shared. so when you finally look back at me, your chestnut eyes like a muddy well of untold secrets, i wonder just how much there is that i still do not know. 

you smooth down the strands of my hair that have fallen out of my braids, a sadness to your complexion i have never seen before. quietly, you whisper, jealousy is for the ungrateful. 

it turns out that a lot happened the year you turned sixteen. 

​

— 

vermilion is the color of the logo of our local grocery store, its trademark symbol of an apple ubiquitous, carving a space for itself in our subconsciouses by force until we are left with no choice but to equate its image with essential subsistence. rarely do we visit other brands of supermarkets unless placed out of our comfort zone, in an unfamiliar location deprived of our usual first choice, and even then we find ourselves drawn to the stores that paint themselves in a familiar shade of red as if we are stubborn children addicted to a certain flavor of candy. cheap marketing tactics like these should be lost on generations as developed and advanced as ours but nevertheless they work like the oldest tricks in the books, obvious and overused yet as effective as they were on day one. 

when i am eleven we embark on a road trip through the midwestern states, driving towards kentucky for my debate tournament, and you stop at various supermarkets and gas stations along the way. every single one of them sports the color red somewhere in its logo, but we are too focused on the receipts that might as well have INFLATION printed on them in giant block letters to notice or care. often, i catch you standing in the middle of the road in front of a store, plastic grocery bags in each hand, oblivious to the line of cars impatiently waiting for you to cross. the only thing you see are the inky black digits printed at the bottom right corner of the thin paper that says “CUSTOMER COPY” in a big bold font, numbers that tell you how many hours, how many lines of code, how many client calls, have just been exchanged for the little stash of items that you now have the right to take home without worrying about shoplifting charges. you do not understand why your life has become so far from the life you dreamed of when you were nothing but a bright-eyed high schooler with good grades and even greater dreams, but you know you will not like the answer. so instead, you square your shoulders, apologize with a hand raised towards the drivers that are a second away from running you over, and sprint towards the parking lot where i am waiting, putting off your thoughts for another time that will never come. 

i find it funny how the human mind thinks itself one of the most intelligent wonders ever to exist yet still remains almost childishly naive to the delusions and false promises of the world. we find safety in the familiar and bliss in ignorance; we believe all that is good must be true and all that is bad can be changed for the better. if only we could cleanse our brains into distilled clarity the way we can wash a car to look nearly brand new with simply some soap, water, and honest work—perhaps, then, we will have something worth talking about. 

​

— 

hex #ee1c25, also known as RGB (238,28,37) or CMYK (0,88,84,7), is the official color of your home country’s flag, though the word home has taken on many different meanings for you over the past twenty years. the color is so distinctly red that it is often referred to as simply red (pigment), the foundation for all other shades, tints, tones, the backbone of the spectrum, the golden image of vitality and life as the Taoists believed the hue symbolized. but for you, it lost all connotations of respect and admiration, of worship even, the moment it bore witness to the unspeakable crimes your government committed against its own people on the fourth of june, nineteen eighty-nine. 

on that day, the gunshots stole the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of students that could not have been much older than you were. your parents tell you they had been protesting—and at the Tiananmen Square, for God’s sake! surely they were out of their minds, rioting at one of the most symbolic locations to your country’s history, just kilometers from the great Forbidden City. you realize that in your parents’ eyes, these students were no longer strong-minded youth barely twenty years old, but instead monsters determined to bring upon their own country’s demise, entitled savages who believed they knew better than their leaders and refused to show gratitude for everything they had been given. 

and although you would never admit it, you saw pieces of yourself in them. 

when the tanks showed up, their ugly green exteriors of steel and titanium looking like the villain to the heroic red coloring the walls of the Tiananmen Square, you began to fear what the communists were capable of, wondered how much of what you had been told about your country since childhood was a lie. the illusions that had been carefully pieced together for you began to crack, winding lines of guttural cries and utter chaos infiltrating the picturesque scenes of peace, shattered apart by such violent acts of oppression from a government that preached protection and safety for all its people. 

the walls of Tiananmen Square may have been painted a color like hex #ee1c25, but you imagine that they must have seemed much darker to the student protestors who stormed the capital on that fateful day, and even darker to those who were shot and murdered by the very government and military they had been told would defend them. as the sweet, sick scent of blood filled the air and corpses were carried away in bags to a place where they would be disposed of like nothing more than ordinary household trash, forgotten and forever unhonored, you do not doubt that the overlords responsible for all this death did the only thing they knew how to do: erase the massacre whose blood now tainted their reputation beyond explanation. 

national newspapers might not have been able to deny the blatant open-fire ordered by the General that day at the capital, but they could twist the story into one of public defense, of suppression of rioters, of a need to preserve national security. anything to uphold the facade of their precious communist party in the face of outrage from around the world that was now merely clicks away from breaking into the strictly controlled networks of their shielded microcosm. you watched as censorship policies tightened even further, so heavily curating the information available to the public the very idea of news lost its purpose. the people were distressed and confused; you could feel the buzzing tension in the hours, days, months after. but perhaps more importantly, you were all also powerless. 

life continued. 

but you knew it didn’t. not for everyone. 

not for the thousands of innocent civilians that died at the hands of their own government on the fourth of june, nineteen eighty-nine. not for them, not for their friends, not for their families. not for any of the living that they left behind. it frustrated you, because you knew that there was so much people weren’t saying, because even the act of grievance had become a punishable crime in this country stained by its own guilty past. the communists were ashamed, but more than that, they were afraid, and fear itself had always been their greatest fear. 

you vowed to never be like them, and you carried the lost souls with you.

now, thirty years later, you entrust them to me. the red dawn breaks again, and we are still here.