titled singing from a mile across the skies
pairing China/America
rated pg-15
warnings politics, inebriation (no not really), awkwardly-established sex. and, just puttin' it out there; a lack of caps.
summary Believe in nothing.
notes originally written for a brilliant request on hetalia_kink, now brushed-up and de-anoned.
This is the last story that I am posting from this account on ffnet. It is the only fic I have written that uniquely deviates from any regular capitalization/grammar rules that I've subscribed to in the past, and it is a farewell gift to my readers and my friends, raburabu honeybunnies and freedom writers.
Love it or hate it, it's all yours. =D
singing from a mile across the skies
by ezyl
28.2.2010
1.12
one time out of twelve, most of them would say that the hellfire had flown in with the one-child policy.
the american journalists from New York were the ones who blew it out of proportion first. they filled their dials at the Golden Gate Bridge, cheap ink and polaroid film, proceeded to pump as much gasoline as they could onto the last burning building; the press came out like a burst of flowers and homosexual sobriety from a closet rubbed head-to-toe in toxic infant formula. so there was child abuse. so there was child abuse and pedophilia. so there was child abuse, pedophilia, fresh-faced yeltsin telling his associates to shut up and drive, missing cia agents missing from the american embassy and subsequent death penalties. nixon didn't even bother trying to cheer his nation up; disgrace only went so far before it blew your country off its ass.
and it wasn't like yao had specifically called for this to happen, either; alfred was the one to blame for it all. he could have held off his journalists. he could have censored the newspapers, shoved a few more executive privileges in everyone's face, told his associates to shut up and drive and keep their hands to themselves. he could have pulled out guns (and wouldn't he know it, he actually had the gunpowder). he could have shot a few more liberal democrats, and that would have been the end of that.
"i believe in freedom of the press," alfred tells yao, "i don't believe in the silence of my citizens."
"tell it to the 150,000 chinese immigrants in san francisco," arthur cuts in before yao does, "and your mexicans, too. tell it to your bloody mexicans."
2.12
"this is a pretty goddamn amazing place," nixon tells henry kissinger, among the flashbulbs and flecks of sweat in the fantastic chinese air. an entourage of vigilante God Bless Americas and paparazzi had gathered at tianan-men square. cigarette smoke, internal combustion engines, burgers and french fries several blocks down. a public toilet with a toothless woman sitting on a bench outside, selling toilet paper for two cents a fold.
mini-america. this was mini-america.
zhou en-lai is yao's boss at the time, and two times out of twelve he would never have agreed to meet richard nixon, had it not been for yao and yao's desire to cooperate after listening to the speech gorbachev had given upon his entrance into the soviet communist party. where inspiration was to be found, there was a way to keep it under thumbs and index fingers. perhaps they would learn how to tell him to stop, yao had thought, perhaps they would learn how to understand that we want nothing from them except their business.
"you need more than that to seduce me," alfred tells him a few minutes later, shuffles a hand through his hair and another curly fry down his mouth.
"i don't need anything more," yao replies, and he kisses america right there, a culmination of half-cooked beef burgers and the grease on america's fingers, the smell of fresh ink and camera film in the air, jodie foster's burn-out of a love song, bomber jackets and belt buckles kicked onto the floor.
3.12
three times out of twelve and 25% of the time, america likes to pretend that china and japan are the same nation. he tells kiku that he can go all night on the same day he's booked a flight to beijing, tells kiku that he likes the fried rice in his country and the slutty kimono-clad geisha in the streets of shanghai. and it never occurs to him, until the day the bombs drop, that tokyo isn't in manchuria.
and when he screams bloody murder and enters the war, alfred doesn't forget it. there are people in the world who don't care about america, just like there are people in the world who live off of making three dollars a day just like there are flower ladies who sit on the curb and smoke your cigarettes for you just like there are children starving on every single street off the subway, just like there are scars from plutonium and radioactive decay lining the insides of kiku's thighs.
(three times out of twelve, americans don't bother to study another foreign country until they plan to invade it.)
so yao promises himself this in the spring.
he won't tear down any of his factories, he won't break apart any families, he'll stand up to it like he's stood up to all of it, taken it inside himself for that last few millennia. he won't give up until every petroleum product in america has the words MADE IN CHINA stamped on its back.
4.12
four out of every twelve (roughly one third) of the bluefin tuna in the world has been depleted within a decade. more than 80% of the annual haul is consumed by japan, taken and carved and reloaded onto rotating sushi islands, flip-flopped around on brown paper bags at the supermarket, picked apart by grandmother's fingernails over the counter. america does not recognize this. america does not recall recognizing this. america only knows how to point fingers, how to complain and bitch in his environmentalist's journals, how to tell china that they are ruining the world bit by bit and without any warning.
and yet, even after all this, yao does nothing but thread his fingers through alfred's hair.
briefly, he wonders if this can be considered a weakness.
5.12
it was like asking for the mountains to move of their own accord, dip their slopes in the ocean, stir up a tropical hurricane along the freeway. it was like trying to find jesus in a southern baptist's seven-bedroom-six-bath limousine. the united nations wanted no hand in it, but al gore was confident. his brainchild had proposed no more than a 8% reduction of green-house gas emissions from the european union, 6% from japan, 7% from the united states of america.
it was only seven percent.
and after all, what could seven percent possibly mean?
(7% meant toyota shelling at least a million cars off the road, five out of twelve small oil companies going out of business, suntanning oil bought in large and liberal quantities across the state of Texas. 7% was george w. bush's ticket to the number one spot on the list of presidential candidates, square-dancing and dick cheney's plan to bully the middle east. 7% meant no ratification, refusals in participation, lack of communications; These Were Not Alarming Situations.)
there is no such thing as global warming, the self-proclaimed conservative libertarian radio host tells a gaggle of his devoted followers, there is no such thing as global warming, similar to how al gore is the devil's incarnate*.
and the senate, to alfred's twisted satisfaction and the world's demise, listens to glenn beck.
china was told be exempt from it, that was the way he had heard about it. china was told to continue to powerhouse his way to the top of the production food chain, continue to develop and suffocate in his own methane and nitrous oxide. china was told to keep climbing, keep assembling, keep driving because he was still a developing country, because he didn't need alfred, now that he had the markets bending without alfred's stock exchange, now that he could keep good money in his hands and inflation like a minimum wage.
well, china could just go ahead and fuck himself.
6.12
of the children who die in the world every year, six out of twelve attribute their death to malnutrition and lack of clean water. of the children who survive, the future greets them in the form of HIV, malaria and filthy bandages. and among the 1.2 billion empty stomachs walking around the world, 642 million of them belong to asia. alfred hears about it second to last (last had been the World Health Organization).
china? he finds himself asking his boss. who will feed china?
yao doesn't bat a single eyelash.
"i don't need your GDP or your sympathy, i just want your docks."
7.12
the chambermaid who works at fluffing out the pillows on the fifth floor checks for loose coins in the bedside drawers. she won't care if she finds a Holy Bible instead; she'll still want to discover it for herself, lose a silver wedding band to the dust and chip her nail varnish against the woodwork. she'll want to do it anyway, because seven times out of twelve, the hotels on the streets of Wang Fu Jing are just as clean and classy as the five-star Westin in Times Square. seven times out of twelve, what america doesn't hand over in money and business deals he makes up in ideology, faith in God and the cotton gin.
what america doesn't believe, china forgets.
what america recycles, china reinvents.
sometime after 1976, the maid finds a pair of glasses tucked under a pillow. they are worth their weight in visa cards. 270,000 square miles of solid american soil.
(so alfred fucks yao into the bedsheets, into the blue silk and the bedstand and the plaster statue of lu xun, existence of the People's Republic defiled and reaffirmed and struck across the cheek, again and again. he fucks the communism clean out of yao, keys of his ideology and his faith, continuum in a blank stare and the stock prices of electric vehicles and the greenhouse gases, america and china until there's nothing left but a cloud and perhaps a star. perhaps he can see a star.
for every five stars that yao sees on his flag, alfred sees fifty.)
8.12
except, Eight Times out of Ten, the younger generation will say "OH, MY GOD!" instead of something exclamatory in chinese. the pupils who sit in their desks would rather listen to Seth Meyers rave about abortion laws than recite poetry from the tang dynasty, eat out at a McDonald's instead of waiting in line for food tickets. was this what they called the Clash of Civilizations? was he what samuel p. huntington would have labeled as sinic, or had he become thoroughly washed in white, fifty stars branded across his chest, a crucifix plucked up against his heart?
"you don't have a heart," america breathes against his ear, "you don't have a heart because your gods are all buried underground."
his fingers curl against the hilt of the bedstead, grapple for a reality that sits there, mocks him in front of the world. american soil, it's american soil. i have a heart, yao thinks. i do, i do i do.
9.12
America shows up at his door some time between the last light in the street burns out and the birdsong in the morning, between faded colors on the lapels of his jacket and messy stumbling by the side-door of his car. it's quiet. it's quiet like the world has always been quiet, quiet like shanghai can never be quiet in the dregs of the night, quiet like you can hear heartbeats and shivers crawling across the air. there aren't a lot of birds close to where yao lives. most of them choose to fly high, closer to the sun and the stars. they sing from a mile across the skies, over the horizon and the tilt of the oceans. they sing about the polar ice caps and the flower petals on the Slopes of XiZang and the Time in Taipei, railroads and dreams and rice wine sipped from the tip of a bull's horn and three bottles of imported mineral water.
"the market's crashed," alfred says, rubs the back of his hands against sleepless eyes, "it's crashed, china. it's crashed."
"i'm sorry," yao says, and he's not sure what else he can say.
the afterglow is invisible until there's a crash. nine times out of twelve and 75% of the time, the corporation doesn't fall. it crumbles. it crumbles like a piece of stale cake, spoiled irrigation in the soil, slash and burn, skimmed away by your Executives and Acting-Executives and Marketing Managers. and by the time you realize it, you have already sunk waist-deep into credit card debt, the bank associates are calling your home phone twenty-four hours a day, and try as you might to keep juggling and struggling, lift a pinky finger and grasp the Ledge of Opportunity, you are jobless and helpless and it is absolutely, absolutely pointless
"Can I come in?" Alfred asks.
10.12
but here is what he really thinks.
he thinks that, regardless of the time or day or the evening or the songs in the sky, regardless of america's ideology, america's upbringing, america's republicans and democrats and presidential failures and successes, there is something else in here. there is something important that neither of them have truly missed. it hangs around sometimes, stares blankly at the Pursuit of Happiness, dangles by its feet near the hotel's balcony.
it's present, here and now.
it's here because, ten times out of twelve, china still believes in america.
"Can I come in?" America asks him again, rubs a hand against the front of his shirt.
"I don't know," Yao says quietly, "Can you really come in?"
"Yes," Alfred says without thinking, "Yes, I can."
(Yes, We Can, a presidential campaign boasts.)
when america leaves his jacket by the door, yao lays his heart down next to it.
11.12
and now, he's watching yao's hand from the corner of his eyes, feeling insignificant against the grandeur within the strokes, never going to admit that he's feeling insignificant against the strokes; he's taking deep breaths, finally whispering it, too fast and too low,
"you can have my docks."
the brush pauses against the lip of the page, and yao's gaze turns east towards the pacific ocean.
"i can have your docks?"
"yeah."
"what about your people? what about your infrastructure? can i have those, too?"
alfred doesn't meet his eyes.
eleven times out of twelve, the ink of his brush takes a spirit of its own, evades yao's grasp and turns onto the rice paper by itself. it smears lines with and against the grain, mellifluous splashes and suspension within systems, corner of the road underneath a filtered land. here is the tip of america's nose. here is the angle to his eyes. here are the lighter streaks in his hair, and here is what i've always wanted to show you, the curve of your knees when you bend over the bed, the pocket of soft skin between your hip and your thigh. here are the promises that you make and cannot keep, your Free Speech and your Right to Bear Arms, here are your globalization strategies that have become the downfall of the 21st century.
and here is where i will meet you, standing at the docks. here is your cargo ship, do you see it? it's setting sail for the world.
12.12
"i am a mile away from your driveway," alfred tells yao over the phone. "open the garage door. i have about fifteen minutes to spare."
yao moves his chin away from the receiver. checks the clock on the wall and the smog in the sky. keeps his fingers pressed against the pulse that races over the 2010 World Exposition. he doesn't have a garage door; he lives in a fifty square-foot apartment in shanghai, unit number forty-four on the forty-fourth floor next-door to a family of skeletons from the famine of '64.
"i don't have a garage door," he finally replies. or a driveway.
"but you have an American Dream."
"...what do you mean?"
"you have an American Dream," alfred repeats. (like he expects yao to understand. like he doesn't realize how ridiculous he sounds. like he doesn't hear the sirens swinging by.)
"i...you-"
"YOU. HAVE AN AMERICAN DREAM." and the phone line goes dead.
so maybe america speaks for the world. maybe he's spoken for the world for a long time, spoken for the world since the drawing of the fourteen points, since the league of nations, since the resolutions assembled and rejected and repassed and vetoed. he's spoken without raising his hand, he's spoken while chewing his way through animal oil and mayonnaise, spoken through hurricanes and recessions, he's spoken and proven, again and again, that he has no idea what he's talking about. he is america; he sits on a theory and sings from a mile across the sky.
You have an American Dream, America will put forth.
And twelve times out of twelve, China will agree.
-END-
Notes to last you an eternity:
1.12 Five separate references were made.
a) China's one-child policy, introduced/ratified in 1978 and acted-upon in 1979. It is cause for all sorts of problems within the families of rural areas; a single child simply does not cover for plowing fifteen acres of rice in a day. In upper-class families, it is considered a privilege to be able to have another child if you're wealthy enough to "buy a birth". D:
b) The Watergate Affair (1974), the absolute unadulterated greatest single presidential mistake Nixon has ever made (yeah, that was 5 adjectives). And now we know: don't mess with the American polls.
c) The whole zomg!centshorsheep argument between China and the rest of the world.
d) The Illegal Immigrants. Dun, dun, dun.
e) I was listening to Rihanna while writing this.
...And no, Yeltsin was not even close to being in office, then. He was still a kiddie back in '79.
2.12 References the visit that US President Richard Nixon made to the PRC in 1972. Talks with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai about foreign affairs-y things. Henry Kissinger was secretary to Nixon and secret correspondent to Beijing a year for the date of the actual trip.
4.12 It's true. A lot of Japanese people like to eat fish. /shock.
5.12 Alludes to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, signed by pretty-much every leader/representative of a nation-state in the world. It was the baby-steps to stopping global warming and a reduction of greenhouse-gases in the Earth's atmosphere. Al Gore headed the whole thing (it was one of the main pillars of his campaign, as a matter of fact), and it was really irony for him in the end when the Republicans in the Senate dismissed the idea (as such, the United States remains the only country in the world who has actively rejected the Kyoto Protocol). It is important to note that both China and India, under the pretense of being developing countries, were exempt from taking any action to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. This was one of George W. Bush's grounds for dismissal of the protocol, and Al Gore's downfall.
Political-commentary-maker/right-wing-Mr.-I-can-say-what-you-think-out-loud Glenn Beck was vehemently opposed to this whole thing. Needless to say, the ratings of his show went straight up to heaven.
*Al Gore is not the devil's incarnate, because shut up. /shot.
...And if you want some more irony, just go ahead and read about Obama and Copenhagen.
6.12 Everybody knows enough about world famine, even the World Health Organization. Moving along...
7.12 For Alfred's glasses. Texas is about 270,000 square miles, so there you go.
And Lu Xun is a...well. Just look him up. He's another one of my lovers, along with Proust and Hemingway and Nico di Angelo.
8.12 The McDonald's in many major cities of China all have a deliciously-unhealthy summer line of slurpee/smoothie/soft drink. It rots your teeth and burns your cheeks, but the shit's good. This must be love. *_*
Also, Samuel P. Huntington and The Clash of Civilizations. This was a theory in response to the a debate raised by Francis Fukuyama about world peace and conflict among nations. Post Cold War, it was suggested that there would be no more fighting and war because there was nothing to fight about after we cleared up the whole democracy-communism/fascism argument (I use these terms lightly). Huntington put forth that there will always be fighting among certain cultures in the world, and one of the cultures that he singled out was the China-Korea one, labeled as Sinic (Kiku was somehow different enough to receive his own category).
9.12 References the recession depression. You know the drill. Also takes pages from the China/Tibet (XiZang), China/Taiwan conflict. Including, but not limited to Railroad to Perdition. I've only read the dramatic excerpts, so no quiz time. Bad quiz time. n_n"
10.12 Yes, We Can! I'm sorry, could not resist poking at this one. D:
12.12 And to put the story in a positive light, you can have your American Dream. :)
On a last note. The views and opinions expressed in this story are what I imagine the characters would feel like, in each of their positions. These are not my personal political standpoints. There was a lot of confusion and several comments made about this; one in particular made me throw a bitchfit that I cannot apologize enough for. Again, I would just like to clarify and succumb to redundancy: what Yao or Alfred think or say does not necessarily apply to myself.
Personally, my opinions on issues are scattered over both the right and left wings. I come from a very traditional, Christian background, but I have a lot of liberal tendency when it comes to individual issues (for example, gay marriage). I think China is more of a capitalist than any other country in the world, and that America subscribes to socialism like it's free beer on a Saturday night. Glenn Beck is hilarious, fosho, but lucid and vaguely reasonable at times, too (Coulter is another story entirely). I am a huge fan of Richard Nixon's. He remains one of my greatest heroes in foreign diplomacy and I treat the Watergate Affair as an overtly-popularized blip in an excellent presidential career.
tl;dr Hetalia is too cool for me. ;_;
O_O My notes are seriously longer than the story. /dies.
But yes, this is my last story. I hope you've found it entertaining, or even mildly amusing. Thank you for your time. I'd hope to receive some feedback, but I'm probably asking for too much.
One last time, I thank you for reading. :D
-ezyl, formerly ezylrybbit, once known as ezyl's girl
-poofs-