PodCastle 861: A Most Lovely Song

Show Notes

Rated PG-13


A Most Lovely Song

by Albert Chu

 

It’s 1939, and the drone of piston engines fills the sky over Chungking. The G3M bombers are right overhead, close enough for people to see the red hinomaru emblazoned beneath their wings. They release their bombs, one by one, and the explosions rattle the earth, and they flatten the buildings, and in their wake, they leave behind the dead.

Now, a boy cries, “Baba! Baba!”

He’s crouched by a pile of rubble, trying in vain to pull a lifeless arm out from under it. Nobody’s around; only the shattered buildings witness his struggle.

He doesn’t notice the straggling G3M until its shadow passes over him. As he looks up in alarm, he hears the whistle of the falling bomb. He’s stuck staring, frozen, at the sky.

But this time, there’s no explosion. There’s a flash of light — a rush of air — and then, the opening trill of a song. The melody is like clockwork, intricately choreographed and precisely engineered. The notes fly up and down, astounding the boy. In a flash of copper plumage, a bird sweeps out of the sky.

It dashes past his right ear and cries, “How sad!” It comes around in a tight circle, darts past his left ear, and cries again, “How sad, how sad!”

Finally, it alights on a piece of rubble by his foot. It cocks its head, and the sun catches the white markings that ring each eye. “What’s your name?” it asks.

He takes a while to answer. Finally, he says, “Teng Ch‘eng-nan.”

“What are you doing here, Little Teng? It’s dangerous.”

“Baba.” Ch‘eng-nan looks down. “He’s dead.”

“Yes, and how sad that is! But if you stay here with your father, you will surely join him. Come, let’s go!”

His eyes linger on the pile and the arm beneath it. Then, after a second, he stands and follows the bird, which is flying away.

Shattered glass and splintered wood litter the street; Ch‘eng-nan is careful to pick his way over these dangers. As the bird flies above and ahead, he calls out, “What are you?”

The wind carries the bird’s sing-song reply: “A friend! From high above, I saw the plight of the Chinese people, and I flew down to help, Little Teng.”

“You came to help?”

“Of course! I’m leading you to safety right now, aren’t I?”

Ch‘eng-nan doesn’t actually know where they’re going — he can’t recognize Chungking anymore. The sky is an alien swirl of black smoke, and the rubble forms a dizzying maze. He can’t find his own way home, let alone the path to a bomb shelter. So he has to follow the bird.

It’s bouncing up and down in the sky. “This war is such a shame. How destructive! Do you know why this fighting is happening?”

Ch‘eng-nan doesn’t say anything. He’s only ten years old, and while he knows that China is at war, he’s never seen a Japanese soldier in his life. He’s trying to grasp a newly discovered truth — that this invading army can reach out, unseen as ghosts, and snatch his father’s life away. That even Chungking, nestled deep within China’s interior, is not safe.

How can he say why this is happening?

The bird twirls around and, with a flutter of its wings, lands on his shoulder. He flinches, but he doesn’t shoo it away.

“How sad,” it says into his ear. “If only there were peace, you wouldn’t have lost your father.”

“How can there be peace? The Japanese invaded us.”

“Yes,” the bird says, “but the situation is quite complicated. Do you think that this corrupt Nationalist government truly cares about you? How many Chinese have they sacrificed for their own political goals? You see, if only they would make peace with Japan, the bombs would stop, and this suffering would end!”

Ch‘eng-nan stops and stares at the bird. “What do you mean?”

“It’s simple! Japan cannot allow these rogue Nationalists to remain in power, so they have no choice but to fight. To end this war, China must follow the lead of a principled leader like Wang Ching-wei, who is striving for peace with the Japanese. They need —”

“Shut up!” Ch‘eng-nan waves his arms wildly about his head, and the bird, shrill with alarm, flies off. But it doesn’t leave — it whirls in the sky above him, and though he jumps up and swings his fists at it, it’s out of his reach. Eventually, he can do nothing but stand, tethered to the ground, and glare at the bird in anger.

And then, now that he has allowed himself to feel anger, other emotions burst through the dam obstructing his swollen heart. He sinks to his feet, buries his head in his hands, and sobs. It’s an ugly, hideous sound: the panicked gasps of reality breaking over a small boy.

But the bird starts to sing again.

The sound flows like a river over stone, the notes blending one into another. As Ch‘eng-nan kneels on the ground, consumed with hatred for this bird — this bird that told him that the Japanese murdered his father for complex reasons — he can’t help but realize that the song is lovely. His gasps begin to slow. The song overtakes him, and everything fades. The ruined city, the G3M bombers overhead, the Japanese invaders, his father’s limp arm — they’re all gone. There’s only the song.

He stands, the bird flies ahead, and they resume their walk to the nearest shelter.

This shelter is in the subterranean floor of a bookstore, one of many that were hastily dug into Chungking’s sandstone foundations. In one of the storage rooms, a door opens to a tunnel shaft. Ladder rungs are drilled into the side.

Ch‘eng-nan plants his foot on the first rung. The bird is perched on the lip of the shaft, watching him, and he realizes that he has a decision. If he sends the bird away, it won’t return, and he can go down this shaft alone.

But if the bird goes, what else will he have?

In Chungking, which people then called the most bombed city in the world, he climbs down the ladder, and the bird follows him.


It’s 1951, and the boy, now a man, stands ready to board a gleaming DC-4 passenger plane. He’s a proud member of the Chinese nation, which resisted and defeated Japanese aggression, and he’s proud of his country, the Republic of China. For the first time since he arrived on this island two years ago, he will leave Taiwan for Korea, to perform a Nationalist soldier’s duty.

But though he will help the Americans fight the Communist Chinese in Korea — the bandits who stole the mainland to plunder its people and wealth — he won’t carry a rifle. The United Nations Command is in need of Mandarin interpreters, and Ch‘eng-nan, with his experience interpreting for the Americans in Burma, meets the job’s stringent qualifications. His new wife and son will stay behind in Taiwan, provided for by the job’s high pay.

Before Ch‘eng-nan climbs the airstair, he looks up. The bird is flying overhead, silhouetted against the sky. Its song is high and bright, and his heart rises to meet it.

In Chungking, Burma, and now Taiwan, the bird and its beautiful song have stayed.

Some of the interpreters remain in the Americans’ Tokyo headquarters, but Ch‘eng-nan goes to Korea, to the front lines. Here he meets the first Chinese prisoners, interpreting for them during interrogation sessions with the Americans. Many weren’t captured — they’re anti-Communist defectors, looking to switch sides.

During a smoke break between sessions, the bird chirps in his ear: “Such brave men!” It stays on Ch‘eng-nan’s shoulder, wreathed in cigarette smoke, which it doesn’t seem to mind. “To risk their lives escaping the Communists — truly, these Nationalist comrades know the meaning of freedom!”

He’s long grown used to how the bird speaks — how it always loves its own words. It sings of Nationalist China and freedom now, not the Japanese, and he’s glad of it.

In the middle of the year, the Chinese launch a disastrous offensive against UNC lines, and the number of Chinese prisoners swells to twenty thousand. Now Ch‘eng-nan is sent to Koje Island, where the POW camps are located.

There, he finds a complicated situation.

During a morning tour of the camps, he sees how the prisoners sleep: tessellated, each man’s head pressed against his neighbor’s feet. Later, one sweltering day, he passes by the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the camp. The prisoners, bare-chested, are digging a latrine, but when they notice him, they stop their work. Here he is, a Chinese man on the other side of the fence. They stare at him, and then they start digging again.

At night, the screaming starts. Anti-Communist POW trusties run the camps, and if they want revenge against their former Communist tormentors, who are the Americans to stop them? That’s what Ch‘eng-nan tells himself, even when the reports of torture come out, and even when some men, who weren’t even members of the Communist Party, turn up dead.

One day, he’s brought in to the camp hospital to talk to a victim of the anti-Communists.

He walks through the hospital doors, dressed in crisp khakis and a button-up shirt. Here, among the bustle of nurses, the clatter of gurneys rolling from room to room, and the stifling whiteness of the sheets and the walls, he’s at home. It’s familiar from his time in Burma. He enters the room with the prisoner and shuts the door behind him.

The American military intelligence officer, a man named Mercer, is already inside. The two men greet each other with brisk nods and a handshake; they’ve worked together before.

Mercer gestures at the prisoner and addresses Ch‘eng-nan in English: “This one tried passing himself off as a cook, but the trusties fingered him as a Commie officer last night. They did their work and turned him over this morning.”

The prisoner is in terrible shape. One of his arms is broken, and one eye is swollen shut. On the arm that isn’t broken, the skin is red and inflamed. He’s sporting a fresh, crooked tattoo: the word “fangong”. Anti-Communist. Two characters, carved into his flesh to commemorate the trusties’ victory over him. A mark to carry back to China.

Ch‘eng-nan tries to meet the prisoner’s one open eye, but he’s staring into the corner of the room. He doesn’t react.

“The thing is,” Mercer says, “he says he wants to cooperate. Give us information.”

Ch‘eng-nan looks away from the prisoner. “All right,” he says. “Let’s get started, then.”

The first part of the interview goes smoothly. They get the prisoner’s name, rank, and family history: he’s the son of peasant farmers from Shandong. Quietly, the prisoner admits that he’s disillusioned with communism, and he’s willing to give the ideology up. He wants to learn about democracy from the Americans.

“But I have,” the prisoner says, still looking at nothing, “one condition.”

Mercer snorts when he hears the translation. “He wants to impose conditions? Fine — ask him what he wants.”

So Ch‘eng-nan asks. The prisoner shifts about in his hospital bed — as much as he’s able, anyway. Then, lightly, he says, “I want to know why the Americans bombed Nampo and Hamhung and Pyongyang.”

Ch‘eng-nan blinks. In Mandarin, he tells the prisoner, “Be serious. I won’t ask the officer that.”

There’s no response.

“Are you wasting my time? If you don’t have an actual condition, further discussion is pointless.”

Finally, the prisoner turns to look at Ch‘eng-nan, whose breathing slows. Something crawls out from that single eye, out from the shame of defeat, the humiliation of captivity, and the agony of torture. Now it stares straight at him.

Something is buzzing in his ear.

“I want to know,” the prisoner says, “why the Americans bombed Nampo and Hamhung and Pyongyang.”

“You Communists started the war. We’re fighting communism.”

“Do you know what we saw when we marched through the north? The B-29s drop their bombs at will. Nothing is standing anymore. Did the Americans need to flatten those villages to fight communism? The babies I saw, blown to bits, were they communist babies?”

The prisoner’s gaze doesn’t move. Mercer, who can’t even understand them, might as well be gone. “I’m telling the truth,” the prisoner says. “I don’t want to be tortured anymore. I don’t have any honor left . . . I don’t want to keep fighting. I just need to know why the Americans dropped those bombs.”

Ch‘eng-nan closes his eyes. He came to this camp to serve his country and protect his Nationalist comrades. What is this prisoner saying? Why is he asking him these questions? Why won’t this buzzing in his ear go away?

He knows all the answers. He knows why the bombs are falling.

But before he can say anything, the bird, watching silently from its perch on the bedside table, begins to sing.

The song is as beautiful as ever. When Ch‘eng-nan hears it, he remembers why it was so important to keep the bird with him. He remembers how valuable the bird has been for all these years. And he forgets everything else.

“The prisoner isn’t cooperating,” he says to Mercer. “After he’s done recovering, I recommend that you give him back to the trusties.”

The two men and the bird leave the room together. Three hundred miles away, on the other side of the battle lines, the B-29s continue their bombing runs. Like the prisoner saw, nothing remains standing, but it doesn’t matter — the bombs still rain down, scattering rubble upon rubble. Soon, the warring parties will begin armistice negotiations at Panmunjom. The Americans will speak of democracy and peace, and all the while — two whole years, can you feel their weight — their bombs will fall on Korea.


It’s 1970, and Teng Liang-P‘ing is still trying to understand his new life in America.

He’d made the decision to study at Columbia University with high expectations. After all, he was going to America — that shining example of liberalism and democracy, a model which Chinese people had striven to emulate for the better part of a century.

He always thought that Chinese democracy had failed because democracy was too advanced for China’s stunted social development. He’s beginning to wonder if the same can’t be said for the Americans, too.

After half a decade of anti-war protests, Manhattan has boiled over. Every week, people flood the streets in one packed, furious mass, placards held aloft like battle standards. They scream of an unjust war, the murder of children, and the bombing that America unleashes on Vietnam and Cambodia. ROTC buildings across the country have been set aflame. The war is halfway around the world, but it’s clear that for these demonstrators, its continuation is a personal affront. A personal wound.

The protesters are unavoidable. They target public spaces — the subway stations, the streets and the sidewalks, the entrances to every government building and every bank. They relish disruption; if Liang-P‘ing even acknowledges them, he’ll be playing into their hands.

Thankfully, his father’s bird helps him ignore the protests.

It flutters close by his ear as he walks, head down, between classes. There’s another demonstration on the lawn today. “Don’t pay attention to them, Little Teng,” it says. “They’re drunk off their own idealism. Just like the Communist students in China — young and stupid.”

When, another day, class is cancelled because the protesters have picketed the lecture hall, the bird consoles him. “Don’t believe that these delinquents represent America. Like you, most Americans want to live in peace and enjoy the fruits of their great country. You see, Little Teng? There is still a place for you here.”

Liang-P‘ing needs to hear that last part. There are few other students from Taiwan at Columbia, and of course there are none from China. Almost all the inhabitants of Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown are Cantonese-speakers from Kwangtung, with their own community formed over generations — he can’t break in, and they have little in common anyway.

But despite everything, his dream is still to live in America. Taiwan was his home, but it’s small; here, opportunity will be limitless. Even if the circumstances here are difficult, he will still become American on his own terms.

That’s what he’s thinking when, walking home after a late-night study session, he finds two people in t-shirts spray-painting the school’s administrative building.

He’s used to ignoring the demonstrations, but this time, resentment grips him. This is his campus too, isn’t it? He yells out, “Hey!” and runs forward. The vandals look up, startled. Before Liang-P‘ing can catch them, they’ve disappeared into the night, leaving behind only the clatter of a discarded spray-paint can.

He slows before the vandalized wall, his breathing heavy. A streetlight glares against the side of the building, capturing Liang-P‘ing, the can, and the graffiti all in its harsh white gaze. He squints in the distance, trying to see if he can still make out the culprits, but they’re long gone. Then he turns and reads the graffiti:

STOP BOMBING VIETNAM NOW

STOP BOMBING CAMBODIA NOW

NO MORE ORPHANS!

He hears buzzing.

For a second, the sound pins him in place. He can’t hear anything else, save for another, fainter noise. It’s a high-pitched cry, and he can almost make out the words.

The bird flies before the streetlight, beating its wings; its shadow cuts across the graffiti. Liang-P‘ing, startled, spins around. Then he notices the policeman, the one who has been walking towards him the whole time, who says, “Are you lost, kid?”

He freezes. There’s the can of spray paint by his feet. The graffiti is still fresh, wet lines spidering down the wall. The policeman’s eyes are hard, and his lips curl in disgust. He doesn’t say anything. His hand just moves to the baton at his waist.

“Wait,” Liang-P‘ing says. “I didn’t do this. I chased off the people who did.”

The policeman pauses. “Really,” he says.

“Look — look, my hands.” He thrusts them out. “They’re clean. If I’d done this, I’d have paint on them.”

The policeman looks down at Liang-P‘ing’s hands, then up at his face. He studies him for a moment. “Where are you from?”

“Taiwan,” he says. His breathing begins to slow. He knows perfectly well that he’s not the kind of person to commit this act of vandalism — not a would-be revolutionary, not a Communist, not anti-American. He just needs to show it. “My family is from China, though; we are Nationalists. I came here two years ago to attend university.”

“Your English is good. I’ve never heard a Chinese speak like this before.”

“Thank you, sir.” He bobs his head in gratitude. “My father was actually an interpreter for the United Nations, in Korea. He taught me to speak English from an early age.”

There’s a few seconds of silence as the policeman considers Liang-P‘ing’s story, and then he relaxes. “You should be careful out here at night. City’s crazy, lately.”

“I completely understand, sir. I’ll stay out of trouble.”

“Good. You never know when some gook-lovers” — he gestures at the graffiti — ”will start a riot. Get back to your dorm safely.”

“Of course. Good night, sir.”

The two men go their separate ways. The policeman said gook-lovers so freely, but it doesn’t bother Liang-P‘ing. After all, he knows that he’s not a gook.

And you know what’s happening as this conversation concludes, don’t you? Surely you haven’t allowed yourself to forget? As the bird follows Liang-P‘ing back home, twittering about what a shame it is that someone would deface the university, and how it’s awful that he ever came under suspicion, American B-52s drop their bombs on Vietnam and Cambodia. What can be said about a bombing campaign, designed to kill and kill until the survivors submit, that hasn’t been said before?

The bombs fall in Liang-P‘ing’s name, and they fall in yours, too.


It’s 2024.

You live in Flushing, the same neighborhood where you were born. You have a family — a wife and a son, who’s almost three years old. And you have the bird, of course. Since you were a child, it’s told you stories of your family’s immigrant history and your yeye’s brave service with the Nationalists. After school, you practiced your Mandarin with it. Ever since that day of sudden violence in Chongqing, the bird has remained.

Now, you live in comfort, using your degree in journalism to earn a living. As you do so, your country arms and funds a genocidal bombing campaign against Palestine.

In those first days, as the images of horror roll down your social media feeds, the bird tries performing some familiar lines:

“How sad, how sad for the people of Gaza! If only their terrorist leaders cared for them, none of them would have died.”

“Little Teng, don’t be fooled. Can’t you see that if the bombing stops, it would play right into the hands of the terrorists?”

“It’s such a shame that America and Israel were forced into this war. But you must remember that the terrorists started the fight, and the blood is on their hands, not —”

“Mine?” you answer.

The bird’s first attempts at seduction fail.

You’ve always been split, a cut down your self as clean as the quarter moon. After all, you have two names, and only one is on your birth certificate. Now, as the weeks pass and the killing of Palestinians mounts, the split deepens. The “you” which witnesses the atrocities cannot be the same “you” which silently rides the subway lines, nods amicably at coworkers in the hallway, and offers helpful suggestions in work meetings.

You’re forcing the two selves apart, but they’re like opposite magnetic poles. They want to crash together.

At home, you try desperately to be the same husband and father as before, but the act isn’t convincing. Your wife notices the change.

“I know you’re upset,” she says. She understands colonialism and genocide as well as you do. “But I don’t get why you have to withdraw.”

How to explain that you don’t know which of your two selves she signed up to marry? What if it’s best for the family that you remain split in half?

The bird changes tactics.

“You’re right to care about your family, Little Teng. You know where the road to radicalism leads, and it isn’t right for them.”

“You’re just one person. As much as you can’t change the world, you can damage your son’s future.”

“Think of what your father and grandfather did to win this prosperous life for you. Will you squander their efforts?”

This song works.

Weeks pass. As the bombs fall in Gaza, Palestinians stand against the killing and ask if anyone will join them. In America, people answer. You see them on the highway, inside train stations, blockading airports. You see them carry the flag of Palestine.

You watch.

The starvation and bombing of Gaza continue, and Palestinians refuse to surrender. In America, the cops start cracking down, and demonstrators get hauled into police vans in handcuffs.

You watch.

The publication you work for doesn’t bother with passive voice and euphemisms for murder anymore. Palestine simply disappears from the reporting —

— and you watch.

Your performance at work suffers, but you keep your job — unlike your colleagues, who are fired for speaking out. Your wife grows increasingly concerned. She says, “If work makes you feel this way, then wouldn’t it be better to quit? We can figure things out.”

But it’s not about your feelings, exactly.

One night, after you’ve put your son to bed, you’re in the bathroom with your wife. You’re both trying to be quiet, so you don’t wake your son. She’s brushing her teeth, flecks of toothpaste foam coating her lips. You stand behind her, looking at your reflections in the mirror.

She spits out her toothpaste and rinses her mouth. When she looks up, she catches your eye in the mirror. “What’s on your mind?” she asks.

The bird is on your shoulder. Its feet grip your skin.

“You know how my yeye was from Sichuan?” you say.

“Yeah?”

The bird cocks its head and studies you with its white-rimmed eyes.

“For some reason, my dad only told me this after yeye died. His dad — my great-grandfather — died during World War Two, when yeye was ten.”

“Oh.” Your wife lays her dirty toothbrush on the porcelain sink. “Do you know how?”

“Yeah. The Japanese killed him during a bombing run. I didn’t know this until my dad told me, but apparently they bombed Chongqing for five years. An early run killed my great-grandfather.”

She turns around now, so that you’re facing each other. “And your dad never told you?”

You shake your head. “No. He said that yeye didn’t talk about it very much.”

For some time, you stand together inside that cramped bathroom. You’re both silent. Teng Ch‘eng-nan’s father died a century ago and a continent away. What could his death mean today?

You say, “I think I need to go for a walk.”

She understands. You lean in together, grip each other’s hands and squeeze, exchange kisses on the forehead —

— then you’re walking out of your brownstone apartment building. It’s a moonless night, and the clouds are thick. You head south, walking down Flushing Chinatown’s wide, glass-lined streets. Color and sound from the restaurant storefronts leak onto the sidewalk. They’ve got everything — dumplings, handmade thin noodles, handmade wide noodles, dim sum, barbeque, seafood. A piece of China, swimming inside America’s gut.

You glance upwards. The bird is high overhead, following you. It’s completely silent.

Once you’re out of Chinatown, you hang a right and head west, towards Flushing Meadows. The crowds thin out. Finally, you reach your destination — a low pedestrian underpass beneath the Van Wyck. The sounds of the city behind you fade. You’re the only one here.

From out of the sky, the bird sweeps into the underpass. In the darkness, you can’t make out its rich copper plumage. It’s just a shadow.

“Little Teng,” it sings, the melody echoing. “Little Teng.”

You close your eyes, and the total darkness soothes your racing thoughts. When you open them, you say, “I’m going to resign.”

“Oh, Little Teng. Didn’t you listen to anything that I said?”

You’ve listened to it your whole life.

Whenever the world was painful or confusing — when, during high school, the ones they called terrorists attacked the World Trade Center — when you started to question what a War on Terror meant, exactly — when people packed Wall Street and demanded equality — when ambulance sirens sounded for months on end — when people packed the streets again, this time for Black Lives Matter, and then helmeted cops smashed the people with their bikes — when you wondered if you were brave enough to stop listening —

The bird sang for you.

“I won’t be two people anymore,” you say. “I can’t take it.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous! You’ve lived your entire life this way. This newest conflict, this newest obsession of the radicals — it upsets you so?”

“Yeah. It does.” And it does.

Maybe you might have stumbled, lost and confused, through the rest of your life. But Palestine has taught you a lesson, as painful as it is precious: a boy cannot remain the victim of bombs forever. He grows up, becomes a man, and then he has a choice.

Either he uses whatever means he has to bring the bombers down — he marches, he screams, and if he can do nothing else, he jumps in the air and waves his fists at them —

Or else he drops the bombs himself.

The bird has landed on an abandoned car, and it’s watching you. You turn to face it.

“I want you gone,” you say. “My son won’t know you, and I will forget you. Leave.”

There’s a tense silence. You expect that the bird will begin to sing. But instead, it just chirps, “Very well, Little Teng!”

And then, with a hideous cry, it launches itself at your face.

Its talons rip at your flesh; its beak drives towards your eyes. You’re too surprised to even scream — as you throw up your arms to defend your face, you only grunt in shock. Its assault is relentless, and it keeps making that ear-splitting sound. Your head is on fire. Your neck feels wet.

Instinct takes over.

With a strangled roar, you lash out with your fists. You manage to clip a wing, and with a squawk, the bird goes tumbling. You don’t give it a chance to recover. You dart forwards and scoop it up, pinning its wings so it can’t struggle. It shrieks and shrieks. You start to run, picking up speed, and by the time you make it out of the underpass you’re at a full sprint —

You rear back and, with both hands, hurl the bird into the air.

It sails across the night, and it’s almost completely out of sight when it stops tumbling. You think that it might turn around, and you’re ready to teach it another lesson — but then, with a final cry, it disappears into the sky.

It’s gone, but something’s wrong. You only heard its parting with your right ear.

Slowly, you cup one hand against each side of your head. You hold them there for a few seconds, and then you lower them. Your right hand is clean. Your left hand is coated in blood.

With your right ear, you hear the distant rush of traffic and the alarmed calls of pedestrians who’ve noticed you. With your left ear, you hear buzzing. As the seconds pass, you hear something else, too — a high-pitched wail of grief and terror.

Understanding settles in your heart. You know what these sounds are.

Bombers fly overhead. Beneath the drone of their engines, a boy cries, “Baba! Baba!”

Why should you listen to anything else?

 


Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “A Most Lovely Song” by Albert Chu, and if you were as impacted by that as I was then he has a website at albertchuwrites.com with 4 other stories on that are freely available to read online, and a link to purchase the latest issue of F&SF with his novelette Another Such Victory.

Albert sent us these notes on “A Most Lovely Song”: This story was conceived of and written in early 2024, several months into the most recent and most deadly escalation of genocide against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1947-1948. If you’ve listened to this story, I invite you to resist this ongoing genocide. You can speak out against propaganda which justifies the genocide, act to hold powerful institutions and companies accountable for their complicity in the genocide, and materially support Palestinians in Gaza who are seeking funds to survive the genocide. Free Palestine.

Thank you, Albert, in every possible way. As I record this, Israel is telling people in Lebanon–a separate and sovereign state–to leave their homes before they bomb them. I dare not think what is happening by the time you hear this outro. There is, it seems, little other than the utter eradication of the Arabs that will slake Netanyahu’s bloodthirst. The only peace he will ever achieve will be the wind over bones. He has no desire to end this war, only to expand it, only to take his opportunity once and for all to obliterate the Palestinian people–if not all Arabs–and steal their lands for himself.

But he cannot stand alone. He is, indeed, not doing this alone–he is doing this with weapons provided by the US, Britain and other allies, allies who have, thus far, declined to offer little more than a gentle scolding to their good friend Bibi for his indiscretions in the region. “We are concerned!” they cry, desperately trying to balance on a fence that tilts ever more dangerously from the growing pile of corpses leaning against it.

It seems impossible that we might stop this. The geopolitical machinations of the contemporary military-industrial complex are so large, so beyond us that they seem inevitable and unstoppable. But we have stopped them before: protests finally, and excruciatingly, made the Vietnam war untenable, and brought it to a close. The powers that be rely on us becoming exhausted and distracted, distanced from horrors half a world away and inured by their repetition and growth into statistics so large as to be incomprehensible.

This is the first part of how we must resist: we must resist the drive to normalise it. We must resist the temptation to move on and forget and let it continue out of sight, out of mind. We must remember that it continues, and that it continues thanks to the permissiveness of our own governments, and that “government” is ultimately nothing more than “other people” and other people can be influenced, and they can be swayed.

It is not as much as I wish we could do. It is not enough for the Palestinians dying today. If you can do more, please do more–you can donate to the UN Crisis Relief Fund[1], or the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund[2], or Islamic Relief[3], or dozens of others. But at the very least, do not let those who we allow to decide for us–because they do serve at our pleasure and for our convenience, though they may lose sight of it–to forget what awful things they are allowing in this world. Resist their most lovely song. Hear the wails of grief and terror.

[1] https://crisisrelief.un.org/opt-crisis
[2] https://www.pcrf.net/
[3] https://islamic-relief.org/appeals/palestine-emergency-appeal/

About the Author

Albert Chu

Albert Chu’s writing has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Inner Worlds, Small Wonders, and other venues. This is his first appearance in PodCastle.

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About the Narrator

Curtis C. Chen

Picture of Narrator Curtis C. Chen

Once a Silicon Valley software engineer, Curtis C. Chen (陳致宇) now writes speculative fiction and runs puzzle games near Portland, Oregon. His debut novel Waypoint Kangaroo (a 2017 Locus Awards Finalist) is a science fiction spy thriller about a superpowered secret agent facing his toughest mission yet: vacation. Curtis’ short stories have appeared in Playboy Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Oregon Reads Aloud. He is a graduate of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise writers’ workshops. You can find Curtis at Puzzled Pint on the second Tuesday of most every month. Visit him online www.curtiscchen.com.

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