A Chinaman’s Chance

Hezekiah Chang was 15, we are told;

an honor student at McClatchy School.

His family came to the United States

from China, where his parents had been

forced to perform hard labor during the days

of the Cultural Revolution. They were both

teachers, well educated intellectuals, yet

believers in the One True God of the Bible.

Mao’s secular cruelty could not suppress

their faith that Jesus would bless them

and watch over them, as they struggled

to remain alive, despite the many terrors

that they suffered, until that moment

two decades ago, when they became

Americans in the land called Gold Mountain.

Hezekiah was their first-born, a strong boy!

Intelligent, handsome, a natural student,

Hezekiah excelled in math, studied piano,

volunteered after school at the hospital,

attended to his parents wishes that he

become the proud son they had hoped for.

He would graduate, study medicine,

become a doctor, marry a Chinese girl,

in the custom of their family and ancestors.

Hezekiah was viewed by others at school

as a nerdy little yellow creep, all except

for one girl, a young Latina, also bright,

but the daughter of atheistic Chilean socialists

and former Sandinista migrants, now American.

Seeing in each other things denied their peers

Hezekaiah and the girl grew to value each other,

unknown to both sets of their parents.

Last week, Hezekiah and the girl left school

to study together at the end of the day,

walking in the parking lot when shots rang out,

reverberating off the brick walls of the school.

The bullets of an automatic weapon caught

them both. A car sped off. A random crime.

Hezekiah died there, as did she. No one knows

why, to this day, they were singled out.

A Chinaman’s chance. America the Beautiful!

The next day, Hezekaih’s mother was heard

to remark that it had been God’s will, that

He had had some greater plan for them that

somehow transcended our human understanding.

The girl’s parents were less forgiving, cursing

the implacable chaos of this Godless world

with all its barbarity and brutal, random cruelty.

Somewhere, faint hollow laughter echoes,

wafting through the mind like a ghostly breeze.

But is it Godlike, or is it human? We should be in

no hurry to find out the answer to that single

unanswered question, although we suspect

there is nothing to learn and no way of knowing;

no way of making any sense of what appears

to be…a Chinaman’s chance.