The Cardboard Fort

a field in paradise, california

It’s an oppressively hot day.

I’m in the middle of a dry yellow field littered with weeds and thorny jaded flowers, dead stumps of forgotten forests skirting the edges. Beside me is the spitting image of suburban America: cars lazily driving by, the town bakery closed for the day of worship, the local high school congratulating an up-and-coming star on his recent championship.

My eyes fix on something in the distance. It’s brown and rectangular, a respectably-sized structure that would make an excellent home for a five-year old. In fact, stepping closer now, it reminds me of a fort, one you would build as a kid out of cardboard and hot glue or other knick-knacks that you’d find from the garage. I can almost make out the blueprint of this specific fort: the eager little first-grader building a bed in the left corner, preparing high walls of cardboard as defense against the brutal outside world, selling precious tambark and rocks at the storefront. There is a makeshift roof, dilapidated yet strong enough to weather any storm, flimsy yet infallible against any potential onslaughts of attacks from the other clan. And then I suddenly see five year old me hiding out in that fort, breathing heavily with excitement as I listen for the enemy’s footsteps tiptoeing towards me.

“Aghhh!” I lurch out of my fort and unsheath my deadly weapon, a silk pillow. My friend jumps back in surprise, equipped with her own pillow, and we tackle each other to the ground, screaming and laughing.

We walk back home together covered in mud and mulch, chattering about identifying snails and catching tadpoles as the cicadas buzzed their familiar buzz. Hunan, the Chinese province I was born in, had tropical summers, packed with little critters that absolutely fascinated us, aunties and uncles that endearingly chastised us, and grandmothers that shook their heads at their rambunctious grandchildren that they didn’t know what to do with. It also had food. So much food. We came back drooling to rice noodles with chili, homemade soy milk, steamed vegetables, crispy pork belly, and seabass marinated in spices, and we lept to the bathroom to wash ourselves of our filth in preparation for dinner. The family friends who joined us laughed hearty laughs, joking about sons or daughters who still haven’t married yet or gossiping about mutual acquaintances.

I looked at my friend and winked at her. We always loved innocently listening into the gossip.

“I heard Zhangyuan moved to San Francisco, in America,” one auntie remarked.

An uncle followed, “What a change! I can’t understand why he would do it. He has his entire life here.”

San Francisco. In Chinese, we call San Francisco jiu-jin-shang, or translated literally, “Mountain of Gold.” Historically rooted in the Gold Rush days, the name now is synonymous with the Hunanese perception of Northern California as the land of opportunity and beauty, a foil to the simpler life I had. But little did I know, I would soon be shipped off into the golden mountain myself, leaving my entire life behind.

NorCal is different. But, true to its name, it truly is golden: redwood forests in sunlight, sunsets on hills, Joan Didion essays, salmon scales flashing in lively rivers. NorCal is listening to “Holocene” by Bon Iver, to Hunan’s rap songs by Jay Zhou. It's lighting a cranberry-scented candle at 10PM, to slurping noodles at the 7AM morning rush. It’s one half of me, to the other half of me. I loved, and love, both worlds and still hold them very close to me.

As I grew up, though, I realized that my worlds didn’t love each other. While they sometimes pretended to love, it was under a condescending guise, an “I love you and I know better than you and you should listen to me.” And that type of love showed itself through tiny cracks in the walls: friends staring blankly at me when I said I was born in China, classmates making jokes about communism to me, teachers reducing China’s history to just the past 50 years out of its multi-thousand-year history. And yet, every summer when I went back, there would be hordes of tourists, gawking and milling around in the country they know nothing about.

It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t know anything about my country. But sometimes, I think of the time a tourist approached me asking if I needed help, snapping pictures of me in my dirty outdoor clothes as I stared blankly at him. He was furiously scribbling notes into his pad as if my existence was the next tourist attraction on his “courageous” one-week exploration of the oriental, probably so that he could publish his article on his blog about helping out the less fortunate. And then I wince a little.

—

I snap back to reality with a strong gust of dry wind. It was an especially dry day in Paradise, California. The town was quiet.

We came to Paradise, California, after the recent heartbreak from the Maui fires, and it felt like the stitches that covered a fresh wound broke again. Grabbing our cameras, notepads, and laptops, we came with a hunger to capture the life of the citizens here, as if we could catch the feelings of this town like one could catch a butterfly in a net. The field was the first place that caught our eyes: it conveyed desolation and barrenness, a perfect muse for our article.

And now, looking at the fort, I was trying to mold another muse.

I step closer to the fort, careful not to get jabbed by thorns of delicate flowers or shards of glass on the ground. What was the life of the child who once played here? Did they also play with pillows? Or sell tambark at the store? I shut my eyes and picture their life. Where are they now? What are they defined by? And how has their life changed? Questions, questions, questions…answers that I wish I could receive so that I could write them down, romanticize them, novelize them, in a thirty minute interview after which I would probably never meet this person again, in a town that I would otherwise not have a reason to step into.

I take out my notepad. I step closer and closer, my strut quickening in pace, shoes brutally crushing the weeds, desperate to satiate my longing to illuminate the life of this town that has been through so much hardship, so close that I can almost hear the children laughing in their forts and the winds and the cicadas and the soymilk and the aunties gossiping and –

I stop. Everything becomes silent.

It’s a water tower.

The sun scorches my skin. I stand, breathing heavily, wincing at the thorns and the sun.

I stand looking at a water tower in the middle of a dry field in Paradise, California, and I suddenly flashback to the tourists staring at me back in Hunan, looking at our village and scribbling furiously into their notebooks as the usually lively cicadas die down.

Words: Adora Wen

Photos: James Nguyen

Design: Haniqa Rahardjo