小燕子
by Lucy Zhang
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In the lullaby, the swallow visits every spring wearing a coat of flowers. When asked why it visits, the swallow answers, “Because there’s nowhere more beautiful.” When asked what makes it beautiful, the swallow says, “The big factories, the new machines.” At this point, I ask my husband what’s wrong with this lullaby. When were big factories associated with spring and flowers and beauty? He shrugs and claims he doesn’t remember this part of the lyrics. “Probably because we were too poor back then.” We have never been poor—not while in grade school wearing evenly stitched Nikes and not at home where our parents enrolled us in classes after regularly programmed schooling. The “we” he refers to is the sweat and blood of our ancestors spent baking under the sun, herding chickens and pigs, balancing precious, freshly laid eggs that you could trade the neighbor for not one but five sacks of soybeans because, in terms of value, eggs bowed to none (except cow’s milk, which no one had); they buried siblings with dogs infected by tuberculosis until ten brothers and sisters became five became two. I imagine a swallow sitting on a robotic arm soldering a smartphone display connector, the bird warbling and whirring as the arm swings from left to right along a conveyor belt, twelve hours a day, six days a week. “That’s what turns humans into vegetables,” my husband says of the Foxconn factories. “But it’s beautiful?” I want to verify. My husband doesn’t remember the song lyrics word-for-word anymore, especially not the verses about building machines. Instead, he croons my name repeatedly to the same melody like a panicked computer boot looping on and off and on again. The kind of machine that glimmers through smog to a city fresh off starvation.
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Lucy Zhang writes, codes, and watches anime. Her work has appeared in Split Lip Magazine, CRAFT, The Spectacle, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbooks HOLLOWED (Thirty West Publishing) and ABSORPTION (Harbor Review). Find her at https://lucyzhang.tech or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
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