Hana Elysia: WHAT THEY CALL ME • Cleaver Magazine

First Place, Duality Creative Nonfiction Contest, 2024

We are made to feel for the central character in this sad, moving work through the way place is evoked—both the place she is in and the one to which she aches to return. With a magical conciseness, this essay tells us in a few well-executed strokes where we are. The ending is perfect, its symbolism clear yet surprising, with its deft echo of what has come before. —Clifford Thompson, Contest Judge

Hana S. Elysia
WHAT THEY CALL ME

All Yuki knows are the tall fields of Miyazaki and the buzz of cicadas in the summer. Kansas City has both of these, and yet they seem unfamiliar to her. No one here chants Buddhist prayers, but everyone here chants at her to leave, to go back to where she came from.

She can’t.

She can only return to a cookie-cutter house that’s barely furnished, to a mother she once thought was her distant aunt, and to a new stepfather with blond hair and blue eyes, a stark contrast to her own.

English, meanwhile, remains a block of lead on her tongue. She hasn’t spoken Japanese freely in over six months, and the light, crackling feel of it fades from memory, like fireworks bursting at half-power, half-speed. When she’d first introduced herself at school, the kids snickered, and the teacher sighed. There are no heads of black hair among the cluttered rows of desks, and for lunch, no rice. She’s starting to forget the taste of that, too, along with its warm, whirling fragrance.

“Here,” her stepfather says as he sets lunch onto the kitchen table one Saturday. Yuki stares down at a plate piled with lumpy white grains. “It’s the Uncle Ben’s brand,” he smiles, hoping to please her, and she returns a smile in thanks, hoping to do the same.

The laughs of her family members left behind in Miyazaki echo with every bite, somehow mushy and hard at the same time, and the starchiness leaves her tongue coated in an oily combination of sugar and butter. More tastes to drown out those she already struggles to remember.

“Who is Charlie?” she then asks.

Her stepfather pauses mid-chew. “Who?”

Unable to find the right words, Yuki turns to her aunt—no, her mother—and asks her to translate.

“The boys on the bus call her Charlie,” her mother says, tone flat and accent heavy. A fly has landed on one end of her flipped bob, crawling its way up to the puffy black bouffant atop her head.

Yuki further explains that whenever the boys call her this, they all pretend to shoot her with a machine gun, like the soldiers on the news.

“Oh,” her stepfather mutters. His gaze falls to his plate. “It’s nothing. Ignore it.”

Yuki looks to her mother for an answer but receives a sharp shake of the head, and their food is promptly eaten in utensil-clinking silence. It’s not until years later that Yuki discovers who Charlie is. Or rather, what.

After lunch, Yuki’s mother tells her to get the laundry from the basement so they can hang the clothes to dry. Yuki had never even seen a washer back home, but it’s not a luxury she can appreciate due to the darkness this one sits in. She peers down the long staircase and flicks on the light—something slithers away at the bottom of the steps. Each board creaks as she slowly descends, splinters poking into her slippers, and then she runs past the mound of dirt in the corner where the basement remains unfinished.

On top of the washing machine are two horizontal rollers, those Yuki must crank by hand in order to wring out water from all the clothing. Her tan wrists move as quickly as she can while her gaze darts to the mound of dirt. She worries that whatever creature lurks down here will burst out of it and chase after her, but once the cranking is complete and her arms thoroughly ache, she hurries back up the staircase and shuts the basement door.

Safe.

Her mother slaps her in the backyard for not wringing out the laundry properly. “Stupid girl,” she spits. “Why did I bother bringing you with me?”

That’s something Yuki wonders as well.

She stays outside by herself to watch the clothes sway on the line. There’s so much space in this country. So much grass, so much sky. If she’s not careful, they might suck the breath out of her. A breeze prickles her cheek, pink and stinging. Her eyelids flutter in the sun.

That night, she realizes another luxury she fails to appreciate: having her own room. She used to sleep side by side on futons with her three siblings, their toes and hair comfortably tangled amid her father’s snores, but now she lies alone in her bedroom as the air pulls taut with quiet. Even the cicadas seem to whisper. She still hasn’t received a reply to the letter she sent to Japan: to the siblings who are really her cousins, the father who’s really her uncle, and the woman she considers her true mother, who’s really her uncle’s wife. No blood relation at all.

Come Sunday, Yuki’s stepfather takes her fishing. Based on the red signs and wild brush, she’s certain they’re trespassing at this lake, but she doesn’t ask why they don’t visit the one nearby that’s open to the public. A hooked worm wriggles on the end of her fishing pole while they sit on a rickety dock, and Yuki reels in a fish soon after, followed by two more.

“How are you doing that?” her stepfather says, joking about his Navy pride.

She can guess what he said by the pat on her back. He spears another worm onto the hook for her, the fishing pole wobbling in her grip, but instead of lowering the worm into the water, she takes a moment to observe it.

Its body writhes, tail curling upward. Mesmerizing, disgusting. A creature dug up from the dirt that can’t communicate, can’t return, and yet remnants of the soil still speckle its pink body.

“You going to name it or something?” her stepfather chuckles.

Yuki forgets to smile as she meets his blue eyes. “Name?” She glances back at the worm. It hovers above its own reflection as it continues to writhe, and the image burns into her mind before she finally gives an answer.

“Charlie,” she utters.

And she lets the hook drop.

Hana S. Elysia is a professional dancer turned writer whose work has appeared in publications including pacificREVIEW, Trembling with Fear, and Confluence, where she was named the winner of the 2023 Confluence Award for Excellence in Creative Writing. Her short nonfiction piece “What They Call Me” is directly based on her mother’s life after coming to the United States from Miyazaki, Japan.