My Contribution of Smoke
Short Story Review: “A Flock, a Siege, a Murmuration” by Su-Yee Lin
Su-Yee Lin’s short story “A Flock, a Siege, a Murmuration” is about the bird flu outbreak in China in 2013. The narrator has applied to medical school in America but lives in Shanghai as she waits to hear if she is accepted. Then the outbreak happens. Two hundred cases confirmed, then more and more. Though she has an excuse to stay home and hide from the virus, she decides to volunteer to cull birds from the wet markets. Why? “For science,” she claims. Perhaps she doesn’t really know why she has volunteered to wander the markets, picking up and carrying the feathered corpses to the waiting truck. She describes the birds in white bags: chickens, ducks, pigeons, and geese. So small in death. Seemingly so harmless.
The volunteers take the birds to incinerators, where they fire the bodies into ash. The smell makes their mouths water. She contemplates this reaction, her hunger amid fear and death. She decides that this is good practice for her future career as a doctor. She’s heard formaldehyde can create similar feelings of hunger, so this will be a way of preparing herself for that. It’s a way of preparing herself for the future.
To be hungry in the face of death. I saw this as practice. The same sensation one has with a human corpse, this odd feeling of hunger while dissecting, due to the formaldehyde. After all, I was interested in the processes of the body, of that tenuous boundary between being alive and not. The way certain chemicals, certain smells, can influence your thoughts and actions. All so rational and clear.
The virus continues to spread. To grow more deadly. The virus shuts down the organs, collapses the lungs, pulls the skin inward, sends an ache along the bones, and slowly stops the heart from beating. The narrator asks again and again to volunteer. She researches the birds she will encounter, birds in China, birds in the world. She writes out lists and prints photographs, etching them into her memory. Mandarin ducks, nightingales, chickadees, red-tailed hawks. She catches birds with nets and bags and waits until they flutter themselves to death. She takes them to the incinerators and releases them into the fire. Release is such an interesting word for Lin to use here. Release the birds from life. Release the birds back into the air via ash and smoke. Release them from capture. Is that the only release happening in China?
“I looked at the photographs of birds I couldn’t imagine but for their pictures upon my wall and thought, if not for me, would they exist? To name is to own.”
The virus mutates and spreads from person to person. The cities shut down. The subways are empty, the restaurants silent and still. Salesgirls lean against their counters, bored and looking at their smartphones. No one wants to speak for fear of catching the virus.
The narrator searches for birds to cull, aimlessly wandering the parks with the other bird catchers. The sky becomes grey with incinerator ash. The flowers fade with soot. One of her roommates grows sick and is taken away. The other abandons the apartment. The hospitals grow full. No one shops or travels. Few leave their homes. Insects take over the city, eating away at the trees and flowers, thriving in the birdless landscape. And what a landscape it is, as the people that live within it destroy the animals, disappear the infected, search out the virus between words.
“What would it have been like to feel the weight of these birds on my shoulders, on my arms? Or to have held them in my hands and feel the weak fluttering of their hearts.”
The story ends like the virus itself ended. Slowly, suddenly, all at once, things are fine. She describes it as a sense of fatigue, of paranoia, as if the city had been under siege “and the siege was mostly lifted, but the weight of it was not.” As life creeps to normalcy, the narrator finds herself unable to tear down her birds from the walls. She can’t imagine life without her pictures of the white-throated needletail or the Steller’s sea eagle. It’s months again before she sees her first bird in real life. A common sparrow. She coaxes him to her with some crumbs, takes him in her hands, and feels the rapid beating of his heart.
I loved this story. It seems a straight enough summary of what it must have been like during this event, but this perspective of a bird catcher feels almost magical. It reads like a fairy tale: lists of birds, the dead corpses and the billowing, delicious-smelling smoke drifting to taint the sky, the insects fidgeting their way through all the greenery, no humans or birds to stop them. Lin’s prose is simple and yet somehow dreamy. The details chosen are gorgeous and easily imagined. The story is heavy, soaked with something like nostalgia for things already gone. Nostalgia for things that should have been. That were.
Read the story at the link below, then come back here and let me know what you think. Obviously, we can draw parallels between this story and the reality we are living in now. What is similar? What is different? What does the story mean to you? Were there scenes or details that stuck out to you? What do you think the story is ultimately about? I can’t wait to hear what you think.
