by Christine H. Chen
My dead baby brother asked me why I hated Monsieur L’Oiseau so much. I said, he looked like a flaky crust next to Ah Ba’s robust physique even if Ba lost his eyesight and Monsieur L’Oiseau had gray-green eyes because he was a métis with Malagasy, Chinese, and French blood. He was Ah Ma’s business partner, and a husband too, even though he came around our home during dinner time so often you’d think he was a wife-less man. I called him “Uncle” because our parents made me.
He brought coconut scented macarons and plates-full of platitudes that made Ah Ma blush when he cackled with his mouth stuffed up with her homemade pork buns. Ah Ma told me never tell strangers about family things. My dead baby brother didn’t count as a stranger, so I told him everything. I didn’t like this man who left his dirty toothpicks on our porcelain bowls, didn’t like his wrinkled knees, his hairless head like a flattened egg, his meandering and disappearing in a room in our house, didn’t like that Ah Ba asked me, where’s your Ma, and I said she’s in the bathroom, and Ba asked what’s taking so long, and I lied, said I couldn’t help her zip up her dress, and Ba said, why is she zipping up her dress, and I had no words so I coughed so hard that when Ba said, go drink some water, and my dead brother told me to run to the bathroom and shake the doorknob like a flock of angry birds.
Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in The Forge, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time & Space Magazine, Pithead Chapel, and has been anthologized in Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2023, Best Microfiction 2024, 2025, 2026, Best Small Fictions 2025 among others. She is a recipient of the 2022 Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship and the co-translator from French of the novel My Lemon Tree (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). Find her stories at www.christinehchen.com or her sporadic presence on Bluesky @CSquareH.bsky.social
Emerge Literary Journal 