The Anatomy of a Firework

Renee Chen

Lore has it that your great-grandfather was a firework master. All his life, he toiled in a miniscule factory separated from the nearest city by a mountain-clefting gorge. By the time the light of dawn had floated down to the factory’s tinplate gables, he had arrived at its muddy roadside, ready to mill powder and collect it into round pellets called stars, heaving them onto a spinning metal barrel that spread the powder evenly across the stars’ fringes. Before the stars could be splayed out to dry on brass trays under the sun, his hands were already fog-gray with powder, the calluses sodden with ash.

Every once in a while, when my mother retold the story of his sky-labors, I’d picture a middle-aged man in a soot-stained rampart, stooped before a churning barrel. I would think about the contractors of your own time, steering into his mountains, the polyethylene pipes puncturing into his muddy gutters and ravines, and wonder whether his factory—its moss-frosted smokestacks and latticed walls—was as short-lived as the kaleidoscope of fireworks its workers built. Or it has somehow managed to persist, and that if we stumbled upon the village now, we could still walk its cheese-holed lanes.

—

A week ago, a doctor holding a cyclone of yellow binders diagnosed me with Alzheimer’s, though I was shipshape on the linoleum, tie ironed, hair tar-black, my fifties lurking. Permanent memory loss, she pronounced.

Days later, I am writing this to you, to salvage the last petering lore, folktale, and epics scattered across my hippocampus, the billion atoms of light left of a waning firework, hoping that like your great-grandfather, I can at least be a conduit for something greater, something extraordinary.

In the Han Dynasty, before the existence of fireworks, families knitted bamboo stems into symmetrical strands, cocoons of hollow air pockets that exploded when flung into fire. People called them bianpao, firecrackers loud enough to puncture cumulus-stained skies, pass a thousand gables to the ears of the nian beast as it haunts scores of children, roams rice paddies for food.

When the turn of centuries reached the Song Dynasty, alchemists poured charcoal into paper tubes, sprinkling fistfuls of sulfur and saltpeter in. At first, they were aiming to create elixirs of immortality, but ended up with fireworks—the most evanescent art there is.

Chinese flowers, visiting Arab merchants called them.

—

Before she withered, crumbling onto herself like the kaolin tea that fell from your palm in your ninth summer, my mother kept a retail store that brimmed with romanticism. Its four shelves, camped in jars of jelly sticks and marble chocolates, loomed over the terrazzo floor, descending in height from left to right like Russian dolls.

She had an eye for colors, she liked to say. Could distinguish russet from sepia chocolate bars, the intensity of light in a monochrome photograph. She had a dream where she would turn the world around her into a coloring book and fill her favorite shades in. There would be matcha tea in seafoam green, light strewn with dust motes rolling in across the counter, and her beige, calloused hands—all in picture-perfect gradient.

A decade later, I walked her contrail and kept the store open. Its facsimile machine and dust-decked shelves witnessed your maelstrom of firsts, infant tongue and threadbare school bag. In the afternoons, while I sat at the counter, folding cranes and balloons out of week-old newspapers, you riffled through manga trilogies, and stenciled masked villains and caped heroes onto the peeling walls.

Then two years ago, against the cubic freezer where you, in crinkled overalls, once hoarded brass buttons and bottle lids under a cavalcade of soda popsicles, you set up an IBM NetVista for me and pointed at my fax machine, asking what it was.

—

In 1915, twenty years past the Treaty of Shimonoseki, former prisoner Yu Qingfang led a revolt against Japanese rule in Taiwan. Qingfang declared himself the heaven-mandated emperor, designated to rally the righteous and drive out the Japanese. Japanese police stations were stormed by Aboriginal and Han Chinese fighters. Your great-granduncle joined the effort.

“Zhìzhàng,” your great-grandfather called him. Moron. They were frog-legged on the tatami mattress in the living room, a cacophony of cicadas shrouding the evening.

“What else should we do? Let the Japanese rule us forever?” Your grand-granduncle asked. He was three years younger than his brother, bird-boned; when he spoke, anthems paraded through his skull, a thousand chants for freedom stirring his pulse to life.

“Taiwan will be freed eventually,” your great-grandfather answered. He primed the cigar above his lighter, spinning it until the end was evenly burnt, a uniform glow rousing. “Why hurry?” He asked.

Your great-granduncle smoothed his hands against the khaki linen of his trousers, back and forth, again and again. “When people only believe in the eventualities,” he said, “we’ll never be free.”

Five days into the demonstration in Tainan, thirty thousand protestors were executed. When your great-granduncle didn’t return home that night, your great-grandfather slept on the bamboo corridor, watching as moonlight ticked down the spigot, a papier mâché of gravel and rain forming beside his chin. A week later, he primed a fire in the yard and flung all photos of his brother into the scarlet reef, the folio of black-and-white vestiges, a boy with a buzz cut in a sleeveless white pulverizing, the scullery behind him pots-vined.

“Bèn dàn,” your great-grandfather said. “He deserved this.”

—

Two weeks after my diagnosis, I plucked the front door key for the retail store from my bedside drawer and walked over to Bo Yuán’s house. He was clad in a white tank top, his man bun dark against the cloud-marbled sky.

“Help me clean up?” I asked him.

That afternoon, we interred tiers of mold-stained manga books and calendars, and lacquered the ground in our Wellington boots. He asked me about you, where you are now, and whether you’re still studying history. I told him about your apartment in New Haven but avoided mentioning your boyfriend.

“I always thought that Xiǎo Xuán was too good for me,” he said nonetheless.

When the sun had set, I handed him the key, along with a vestige of my memories. He studied the hasp as he locked it, the rust snowballing across the black iron. “Remember when you taught us how to fix our bike chains here?” He asked me, pointing at the vending machine ahead of us.

I thought about him a decade ago, shirtless, crouched before a cornerstone in the store, welding frayed electrical leads with his pudgy fingers. Do you remember your childhood dream? I wanted to ask him. To be a white-robed scientist, an inventor, working in antiseptic-strewn labs?

But when I opened my mouth, all I managed was an inhalation. “You were really impressed when I cut that chainline,” I told him. He laughed.

—

Mentioning the February 28 massacre remained a taboo until the 1990s.

Following the surrender of Japan in World War II, the administration of Taiwan was passed to the Chinese government. The people soon grew resentful of the corruption and misconduct of the Kuomintang party, its seizures of private properties and economic mismanagement.

On February 27, 1947, a police officer fired into a group of angry bystanders in Taipei after he struck a woman suspected of selling contraband cigarettes. Demonstrators stormed a radio station and broadcast news of the protest across the country. Uprisings were suppressed by the National Revolutionary Army, killing more than eighteen thousand civilians. Taiwan was placed under martial law and descended into the White Terror.

For forty years, the government enforced mass surveillance of people through the Taiwan Garrison Command—the secret police.

After I graduated from high school, I became a writer for the Tainan county newspaper, choosing my words with caution on the office’s checkerboard floor, knees crammed within its jelly-green walls. With a pocketful of train fare, I traversed the Alishan Mountain of Chiayi, where the Tsou people resided before their ancestors migrated into the band of land between the Chianan Plain and Yushan. I hitchhiked to Fort Santo Domingo in Tamsui, the small Spanish colony once plagued by disease and local hostilities.

In the port city of Keelung, I quit my job back in Tainan and became a freelance reporter, to stir buried stories to life, the paperworks of memories waiting to be salvaged. For a while, I couldn’t help wondering whether, like your great-granduncle, an obstinate chant for freedom also veined my body, and whether I too was a revolutionary.

—

Before his brother’s funeral, your great-grandfather was approached by a girl with black-samite hair, slim in a teal kimono with zigzags stenciled onto the crude cotton. He had seen the same girl with your great-granduncle at the thoroughfare, hand-in-hand a week ago.

She placed a photograph into his palm. From it, his brother stared back at him, a boy with a cumulus of tousled hair, his face still doughy with baby fat. On his brother’s back was the same girl, her black irises like tidbits of caviar.

As she walked away, your great-grandfather slipped the photo into his breast pocket and tried to picture his brother in his khaki shirt, fists balled on the dais before Xilai Temple, him and three thousand protestors. He wondered whether the picture of his brother and a girl whose name he never knew could fill this lacuna.

—

You never told me when you fell in love with history, the whitecaps of chariots and thrones inching past ebbs, the flow of time, but I like to think that you fell for it on the winter evenings, when the sky glimmered milk-white and we were cozied up on your bed; when I plucked stories from my mind, tales that came from as far away as Mongolia, tragedies dating back to the Xia dynasty.

For nights, I would splay my hands out in the middle of stories, humming what I claimed to be the work songs of Qin laborers crenelating the Great Wall. You would float in my pool of tales, tracing my skeleton fingers as they glided across rubbles of newspapers and cotton quilts, begging me for another story when I called it late night. Any story, you would say—phantoms, monsters, the rabbit on the moon, two peacocks flying southeast.

—

My mother and I took you and Bo Yuán to your first fireworks years ago, your eyes puffy from the late evening. We wheeled down crowded streets, the night hot with the drizzling of oil on teppan, clanks of spatulas in the air. By the time we had retreated to the outskirts of the night market and found ourselves standing among the weeds in your schoolyard, all of us were sweating.

I took my shoes off and climbed up the monkey bars, and you followed behind me, our bare soles against the tarnish. When we reached the top, we looked out onto the aging city, the slumbering earthquake-eroded apartments. Suddenly, the first shots of fireworks rang out.

A thousand colors flared into the night; a single line of light spiraled into a pinecone of brightening sequins. I stared at the sky, your breath purring against my arm. “Are those fireworks?” You asked.

I nodded.

A white fireball leapt into the air, exploding into shreds of glass. Nine pink beams disintegrated, and shoals of angelfish swam out six leagues above our heads, the light a millimeter from our touch. Your jacket rustled against my eggshell skin. I sat down on the ledge of the monkey bars.

“Who invented fireworks?” You asked me.

I spread out my arms, conjuring a tale from the uncharted marshes in my memories. “Would you believe me,” I asked, “if I tell you that fireworks are older than paper?”

“They are?”

“They are.”

Above us, the saltpeter islands of stars faded into mist.

Somewhere, the grotto of a tin-roofed factory remained, and a man was dusting flecks of gunpowder off a carton-lined windowsill. In their ash coats, his hands scrabbled the sash, the scouring pad gliding down like rain. Before the land was wrapped in tin and the sugar cane mills were built, a Siraya woman danced with others in a circle, arms-linked, singing about an ancestral famine that had lasted for seven years.

Climbing down the creaking monkey bar, I told you about the printer Gong Xuanyi and his jade block, Song dynasty woodblocks, and rows of scholars inside a one-window cell, hands galloping across geometric waves of words. In a fallen citadel, monks recited lines from a mildew-choked scripture in a monotone. Somewhere, a moth-eaten manuscript came alive on the milk-warm skin of an arbalist.

Published in Issue No. 5, Aeternum Scriptor, February 1st, 2025.

Renee Chen is an Asian-American writer currently residing in Taipei, Taiwan. She has written short stories for trampset, JMWW, and Cosmic Double, the latter of which nominated her for Best Small Fictions. Her short story collection, The Un-Inquired, is published by Querencia Press.