Letters to the Cherry Tree

He sways side-to-side in the candlelit shadows of the cherry tree home. He tries to be precise. His feathers are blacker than the pits of long yan that the girl liked to roll around in her mouth, but even in darkness, he feels exposed. The air is humid. A fan whirls to life behind him, set to thirty-second intervals.

Outside, the night creatures stir. He hops off the ledge of the second-floor window, his claws catching briefly on takeoff. There’s an old oak in Century Park that he likes to rest on. Flying in the summer breeze is easy, especially at night; it’s just him, the moonlight, and the street lamps. In the distance, red lights blink from the corners of skyscrapers. Below him, two tipsy teenagers draw figure-eights with their hoverboards. An unbidden laugh, loud and bright, echoes down the path. It sounds like she’s laughing for a long time, but he isn’t sure; there’s a flock of blackbirds perched in his tree.

“Ha, ha, ha,” they crow, loud and tinny.

“Where are you from? You don’t look like you’re,” the leader pauses for a moment, searching. “Made-in-China.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” they chorus.

He turns his beak to the side, embarrassed. “I am a Chinese Blackbird, like you. I’ve been here my whole life, and you’re in my tree.”

Silence follows. Then, “We’re not dogs. You have some nerve, threatening to kick a whole flock out,” the leader sneers. He bristles at the aggression. In response, he feels the prickling sensation of a hundred eyes on his nape, waiting. He’s tunneling through the wind before his next coherent thought. Coward, he curses. I’ve done it again. Fuck. He’s got nowhere to crash for the night. The rough silhouettes of blackbirds perched on his regular spots drive him further south, farther than he’s ever flown. He flies until the three magenta spheres of the Shanghai Pearl Tower tower above him. There are no night creatures here. Instead, teenagers stumble out of bars, swinging digicams around on their wrists, all pretenses lost when they think no one’s watching.

He likes people. Controversial. They leave wrappers everywhere, half-eaten food peaking out from under the gaudy plastic. He feels like a predator prowling after crumbs, hidden in the shadows of long coats.

Dad,

I’ve never met so many white people in one place. I don’t know how to talk to them. Two days ago, someone asked me if I understood English. They spoke really slowly, like “Doo you speeek Engliiiish?” I was so flustered that I spoke really fast and they were like, “Sorry, what?” and I was too embarrassed so I just left. I think three years of lockdown took away all my social skills. And I miss the QR codes back home. I don’t think I’ve actually spoken to a cashier since 2019…is that bad? Anyways, I’ve just moved into my dorm, but my roommate isn’t here yet. I’m scared. What if she’s messy? You know I can’t deal with the disorganized type.

Also, the watercolor on the front is of the Potomac River and the restaurants on the Wharf. I’ve never seen a superyacht in real life until today when I found this reference pic. Remind me when I’m older to rent a floating house for my high school graduation. Which is, you know, only four long years away. Loooong.

Love,

Emmy

Her legal name is Emily, but she likes the way “I go by Emmy” rolls off her tongue. “Like the award,” she always adds. If people pause, which they usually do, she throws in that her “official name” is Emily, not some Chinese name. “It’s on my passport,” she clarifies, “and I’m actually Canadian.” Secretly, a flower inside her chest blooms at the unbridled wonder of these strangers. Emmy already has the answers to follow-up questions lined up at the tip of her tongue. Yes, I’m fluent in Chinese. No, it’s not hard to switch between languages. Well, I went to an international school, so that’s why I don’t have an accent. She’s proud that her English is flawlessly American, smooth like her hair, raven-black to the ends.

Move-in day was a jumble of chaos and loud noises. Emmy was rushed from table to table, signing off on medical files, smiling at unfamiliar faces, receiving crisp pieces of paper containing information she’d already memorized. At one table, two women decked out in school merch asked Emmy for her phone number. “It’s okay if you don’t have one yet,” they said, but she laid down ten neat numbers next to her name. She grinned up at them, but they had already moved on to the next student. Someone urged her ahead with a sweaty palm on her shoulder blade. Room codes were next: 3-3-4-7-8-2 for her and her roommate, Gracie. San san si qi ba er, she repeated. Good flow, easy to remember. She smiled, clutching the paper slip to her chest.

Gracie’s flight was delayed until Monday morning. “So sorry,” she’d texted. “Newark is such a bitch sometimes.” It’s well past midnight now, but Emmy can still hear the giggles of the girls next door. The steady du-d-du du of a bass passes through the ceiling vents. White light floods in from the crack under the door, glinting off two names scratched into the wooden post of her bunk bed. Audrey + Jasmine, class of ‘19. Emmy’s mind drifts to a girl, brunette and green-eyed, slim and regal. “Hi, my name is Jasmine,” read her name tag, a heart instead of a dot above the “i.” Jasmine smiled, all teeth, when she slid the latte over the counter. She wonders what Gracie’s like, if they’ll carve their names into the soft wood, too.

At dawn, he flies over the Huangpu Bridge. He follows the red taillight of a black Mercedes, looping once before watching the car speed away into the early morning. The streetlamp he lands on is scalding hot, sending him flailing away to a nearby cluster of shikumen houses. The buildings are drooping from weariness. The upturned eaves of the roof have since lost their coating; instead, the tiles are browner than a moldy spot on a spoiled mandarin. Vines zigzag up partially rotten posts like veins. Dew condenses on the serrated tips of dark green leaves. He stretches for a sip—

“That’s one weird-ass looking bird.”

He searches wildly for the owner of the drawl. Stepping back from the eave, he inches around the corner, shivering from a combination of anticipation and fear. Two yellow eyes meet his. Its fur is a matted black and crusted with thin twigs, nothing like the glossy sheen of his feathers. Crooked whiskers sprout haphazardly from its nose. “You’re one ugly cat,” he parrots. Nothing on the cat’s face reveals its surprise. Its eyes remain lazy, now focused on something behind him. He almost scoffs at the blatant display of indifference. Interspecies communication is rare, even for urban-dwellers like him; most Shanghainese birds don’t speak to anything outside the flock.

Suddenly, he’s hacking up a storm, trying desperately to dislodge the ball of something that rides high up in his throat. It seizes the hollow behind his tongue, forcing his trachea shut. For a brief moment, his head is on the verge of exploding. The cat stays silent as he thrusts his head forward, again and again.

It isn’t until the familiar scent of golden sugar from vendors opening shop drifts up that the cat talks. “Your name. Mister Hat,” it says. “In honor of your gigantanormous forehead.”

Instinctively, he blurts, “That’s not a real word.” The cat crows with laughter, hearty and musical. He feels a familiar shame wash down his feathers. Shaking abruptly, he accuses halfheartedly, “What kind of name is—” Mister Hat, he repeats to himself. Mister Hat, like some nobleman. There's an unexpected warmth in being gifted a name for the first time. It makes him giddy, like he’s been given a bite of a forbidden fruit. “Okay,” he relents. The cat grins cheekily and scampers off to the next roof, tail pointing skyward. An invitation to follow, if Mister Hat has ever seen one.

Gracie arrives in a whirlwind of suitcases, stuffed animals, and bitten-off apologies. She stands in the doorway, backlit by the hallway’s clinical white glare and heaving from exertion. Gracie has straight brown hair and large, curious eyes that dart across the half-finished room before landing on Emmy’s face. Emmy’s not sure what kind of dumb expression she’s wearing. Gracie smiles widely without hesitation, eyes crinkling like she’s lived for decades—the kind of girl that makes you think, god, she’s unreal. “I’m gonna grab the rest of my stuff,” Gracie says, breathless. She swings back out the doorway, hair tinged golden in the sunlight. Emmy lets herself inhale once, shuddering on the four counts out. She slings her backpack over one shoulder and leaves for orientation through the back door.

She drafts the next letter on her phone during the fire safety assembly.

Dad,

I know it’s only been a day (I’m not saying that I want to go home), but I finally met my roommate! Her name’s Gracie, and she’s from New Jersey. She is so pretty. I haven’t really talked to her yet, but there’s only thirty minutes left in this godawful meeting. We have two hours of free time before we have an ice cream social on the New Quad at eight. You just “eat ice cream and mingle,” according to Google. I know you said that friends take time, but I’m starting to

“Watchu doing?” the girl next to Emmy whispers. “Nothing,”  Emmy replies, and shoves her phone under her thigh. She spends the next thirty minutes replaying the exact angle of the girl’s eyes, spiraling about how much she might’ve seen.

Gracie is talking to a pigeon when Emmy keys into her dorm room. “Look at this lil’ guy,” she says in lieu of a greeting. “He was sitting on the windowsill when I got back, all sad and shit.” Gracie purses her lips at the pigeon and beckons Emmy over. “He has a shiny green belt around his neck, see?” Suddenly, Emmy is faced with Gracie’s eyes up close, rich, swirling auburn in the afternoon rays. Gracie’s eyes, they’re so…not blue. Neither the green irises nor the layered brown look. Gracie simply doesn’t exist on her curated Pinterest board. Emmy swallows. “Let’s name him Scarf,” she tries, a little off kilter. Gracie grabs her hands, palm to palm, and breathes, “That’s so perfect.”

They spent the next hour introducing their stuffed animals to each other. Emmy didn’t bring any, so she told Gracie long-winded tales of the blackbird she once knew. How it looked a little different and always ate the ripest cherries first, perched by her desk as she worked on Macbeth. They set up love interests and drew a love pentagon (it doesn’t have to be a triangle, Emmy), and Emmy wasn’t frightened by how juvenile all of it was, but rather by how much she enjoyed being a child again. She had come to the States alone, armed with nothing but a good vocabulary, a Bank of America credit card, and a dream school—Harvard. So what if you’re a romantic, Gracie had said, pancaked on the cold floor. Who cares? You can be anyone here. You think? Emmy had asked, so quietly she almost wished Gracie didn’t hear her. Yes, Gracie said, turning to look at Emmy, her face squashed into her elbow. They were only inches apart. Emmy smiled, all crooked teeth and chapped lips, for the first time since she’d landed at IAD. Dad, I have a friend now. Her name’s Gracie.

At nine, she’s tipsy from social interaction, one arm hanging off Gracie’s shoulder and the other gesticulating wildly. Gracie laughs at every joke she makes and gets her references. If I had a boyfriend, I’d want it to feel like this, Emmy thinks. Her laughter slips out too loudly, then dies halfway, like a firework that fizzles halfway through its launch. She pauses, mid-step. “I want a boyfriend,” she calls out to the darkness ahead. Gracie giggles. “It’s been one day, Emmy.” She pushes Emmy’s hand off her shoulder and does a couple of twirls on the gravel, arms swinging out. “Besides, don’t you have some Canadian guy back home?” Gracie turns to look at her, face partially illuminated by the moonlight. She’s grinning widely. “We both know he’s not real,” Emmy jokes. Gracie laughs, loud and bright, her eyes little crescents that rival the moon’s beauty. You’re prettier at night, she wants to say, but doesn’t.

Emmy dreams of the blackbird that used to perch by her window, back in Shanghai, a long yan pit bulging out of its cheek. She knows because it always deposited the seed on the cracked wood so it would roll onto her desk. She thinks they were friends; she’d never thought to tell it that she’d left for good.

Scarf notices the open window. Something white catches his eye. Nest, he thinks. Good. He wriggles his body through the narrow opening and snags the postcard. Good, he repeats, and flies to the top of the nearby oak, letter in his beak.

In seven days, Mister Hat and the cat had traversed most of Puxi. They spent the first afternoon lounging on an awning above Tianzifang, watching people explore the labyrinth of boutique shops below. The cat entertained him with stories of tourists in the late 19th century—about how they built this village on stereotypes of Chinese culture, and where exactly to look for remnants of the French Concession. “This area isn’t pure,” the cat said, bitter about something Mister Hat didn’t understand. “Pudong isn’t either, you know. It’s all glass panels and faux-brutalist trash.” Mister Hat frowned, thinking about the cherry tree in the front yard of his house, a skyscraper peaking through its rotten branches. “How old are you?” he asks. The cat pauses mid-tirade, sits back on its haunches, and whacks its tail on the tarp. Whap whap whap. “This is my eighth life,” it sighs. Mister Hat glances away, ashamed that he’d made their tentative companionship awkward. Still, for once in his life, he had found someone lonelier than him. He lets the silence linger in the space between them, stormy and humid. Mister Hat is old friends with this tension, so quintessentially Shanghai, and he knows the cat is, too. He can’t smile, but he suddenly wishes he could. Mister Hat takes off northbound in a flurry of black in the murky sky, waiting for the pit-pat-pit-pat of the cat on his tail.

Six days later, they’re bathing in the Yuyuan ponds when a flock of blackbirds bursts into view. There are thousands of them like ink in the open night, sleek black feathers gleaming deadly in the moonlight. “Ha, ha, ha,” they chorus, flying above them in concentric circles. Mister Hat can already feel his muscles contracting in an involuntary, pathetic display of unfiltered longing. The water around him ripples out in tiny waves. Help. The pressure in his chest expands, forcing his neck to shoot downward into the cold, cold water, a reprieve from the commotion above.

In the cool nothingness, the adventures of the past week come back to him. History lessons about the French that devolved into hide-and-seek in alleyways overgrown with poison ivy. Debating the merits of strawberry versus hawthorn tanghulu (Mister Hat, the only hawthorn you’ve eaten was rotting on the floor) and stealing sticks straight from the stand, riding on the cat’s back. Sunrise from the top of a crane. Weaving through drunkards on Nanjing Street, snagging colorful wrappers to show off to the other. Playing predator and prey in the dead of night. Sunset on the Bund, curled into each other. An unlikely friendship founded on the sweet desire to escape loneliness, if only for a few days. But Mister Hat was still a bird that longed for a family of his own; he could not reconcile his new friend with his need for a real community, one that swarmed the night sky in droves. And, he rationalized, if the cat had lived seven previous lives comforted by its own embrace, there was no need for him. Yes, there is no need. He’s—

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Mister Hat sputters, lightheaded from the sudden jerk upward, water pushing away. The canines lodged into his back retract. When he looks up, he’s staring into two yellow orbs, like lemons, sour and disorienting. Above them, the blackbirds are receding into the darkness. The cat blinks owlishly, once, twice. Its pupils are big in the dim glow of LEDs, and it looks so foreign, like an alien. The cat and his tirades about colonialism, his lazy nonchalance, the underlying distrust—he doesn’t understand that world, he thinks. Mister Hat has the sudden realization that the two of them are friends for the sake of having a friend. Selfishly, he hopes the cat hasn’t realized. His claws curl against the mossy pebbles beneath him as he violently shakes out his feathers. He wants to say something to soothe the tense silence, sticky like tar between his feathers, rooting him there where the cat stares. A beat passes; the chance is gone. He catches the edge of frustration in the cat’s eyes—its pupils narrow, ever so slowly—and suddenly he’s made his decision, he’s sure of it. Mister Hat tips his forehead in a courteous goodbye. He shoots out of the pond another nameless bird in the night.

“Can you write your name in Chinese?” Gracie asks one morning. Emmy does, slowly, and stutters on the last stroke. Gracie doesn’t notice. “It’s gorgeous, Emmy,” she exhales, and picks up her own pencil.

It’s snowing today. Fat flakes gather on the windowsill, little ephemeral things that vanish when she presses her finger against them. Emmy wonders if Scarf is warm, if its delivered any of her letters to the post office. It’s a running joke between them, pigeon and human. She knows that it always comes after dark for the sunflower seeds Gracie sprinkles on the ledge. Gracie’s like that. Accommodating to everything, selfless to a fault, yet inexplicably messy. For example, she has an eclectic collection of crochet beanies that have since migrated to Emmy’s side from the bin they arrived in, along with tangled balls of rainbow yarn. She leaves open bags of kettle chips on the carpet. Her bed is permanently unmade; most of her throw pillows live on the floor. Emmy is okay with it. In the orange glow of their sunset lamp, it feels like home.

Dear Dad,

I’ve done something. Something really bad. I don’t know how it happened, or why, or what it means now that my entire life has shifted a little to the left. Remember Gracie? The roommate I said was so pretty in that letter I never sent to you. She’s got eyes like the artisan coffee you drink when you have a business meeting. Imagine that godly combination of cinnamon and smoke as a person. It’s devastating. I’ve gone and fallen in love with her.

Now I know for sure that I’ll never send this letter to you because I know you’ve already stopped reading. You won’t—you can’t—get past the “in love with her.” It’s okay, Dad, because you don’t have to know. I needed to say it to myself. If I can feel your disappointment from five thousand miles across the ocean, it means that I’ve fucked up beyond belief. Your only daughter, gay.

I’ll still love her, though, as long as she remains Gracie. I can already hear you: How do you know it's love and not some stupid phase? Well, I don’t know. But if this isn’t love, I don’t want to keep searching.

Love,

Emmy

Sometimes, at night, she tells Scarf things she doesn’t mean. Scarf never responds, but he always takes the paper.

The other blackbirds don’t talk to him. He often wonders if he made the right choice, looking down sporadically in hopes of glimpsing a lithe black cat on the prowl. When he falls behind in formation, no one glances back.

It’s thunderstorming tonight. The blackbirds scatter at the first strike of lightning, corralling him westward until his eyes burn from seasalt mist. A light, flickering oranges and yellows, draws him to the ground. White-capped waves pummel into the cliffside below him. He presses forward, ensnared by the pretty thing and desperate for warmth. He pushes off the dock onto gray metal and flutters unsteadily over coils of chains that snake across this strange land. Skittering side to side, he crashes unsteadily into towering posts, chipping his beak hard on a large bolt. He flies the last stretch and stretches his feet out, wings straining from the force of slowing down. I’m home, finally. Home home home. But his claws crack against glass. He ricochets sideways. In what sounds like the distance, a horn blows, and the ground rumbles. Click. A single circle, glowing red hot in the quiet dark, and the pungent smell of cigarette smoke.

He wakes up in a blanket of white. A bird eyes him curiously, head cocked in a playful greeting. It has a bulbous forehead and a rather magnificent ring of iridescent green around its neck. Its beak is dipped black at the tip. It’s the very picture of himself in a different outfit. “Come,” it beckons.

“I’m Mister Hat,” he croaks. The other bird continues to trot through the snow, thrusting its neck forward on every step. “Okay,” it says. Mister Hat scuttles after him, embarrassed.

***

“A new pigeon,” Emmy calls excitedly. Gracie rushes over, paint splattered high on her forearms. She’s still holding the wet palette, which drips steadily onto their carpet. “I’ve never seen a black pigeon before,” she mutters.

“It kinda looks like the one I told you about,” Emmy says. Gracie snorts out a sarcastic really and rushes to find her sunflower seeds. Emmy observes the duo, perched side by side like brothers in the frigid snow.

“You grew up,” the new one says, in perfect English.