Chapter Text
Yohoang was born to his mother, Wamung, when she was seventeen. As an inaka, she had no clear idea of who Yohoang’s father was. It could have been any numberl of festival-goers or neighbors. Mixed parentage wasn’t unusual, and with his ebony hair and tufted ears, Yohoang fit right in with everyone else appearance-wise.
Since Wamung was young and unwed, Yohoang was registered instead to Pepeng and Shishu, the couple living across the courtyard. They had been sweet on each other as teens, but their sexual and romantic interests had long since moved on to others. WHat mattered was that they worked well together, had gotten good marks in school. Added to the pressure Pepeng felt as an eldest daughter, they had marched over to the office and filed the application the moment they were legally able to.
Pepeng and Shishu already had two other children registered to their name, neither of them biologically theirs, and were their primary caregivers. Since Wamung was eager to look after her own child, they were more like distant godparents; Yohoang was raised as Wamung’s son in all but name.
Wamung had never done very well in school. She had a history of being inattentive or unintentionally disruptive, and when she put in a transfer notice, none of the teachers minded very much. She only had a year or two remaining anyway. She walked out and never went back.
She also quit being an inaka, arguably a bigger change in her lifestyle. She didn’t want to expose her child to the raucous festive scene, and at any rate needed to devote most of her time to his care, not to mountains of schoolwork or the exhaustive process of feast preparation. At her age, without completing basic schooling, Wamung was ineligible for most lines of work, so she made a living and a place in her community by cleaning out feast halls in exchange for table scraps and covering old Omoi’s packing shifts.
Yohoang was an alternatingly quiet and restless child. He was colicky, crying loudly at night, but also prone to bouts of expressionless silence. Wamung figured that some babies were just a bit difficult, and that he would eventually grow out of it.
Yohoang did poorly at school. Trying to make out the small letters made his head swim; they crawled and squirmed all over the page. He found it difficult to concentrate on what the teacher was saying, especially while the other kids were tap-tapping their claws on their desks, poking him incessantly with their pens, and trying to pull off his headband. When school ended and everyone walked home, they whispered loudly about him, the “angry-looking stupid kid,” the one who’d probably been dropped on his head as a baby. “Did you know they feed their kids piomong too?” he overheard one day. “It messes up their whole brain forever.”
“Tell them you keep a knife in your jacket,” his older sister Ita said after he told her about it. “They’ll believe you, and they’ll be too scared to bother you again.”
So Yohoang did. The other children did indeed believe him and were scared. So scared and believing were they that they told their parents, who were also scared and believing, and so Yohoang was put on probation and a youth investigator was summoned over to deal with it.
“Do you keep a knife?” they asked. Yohoang said no. They made him take off his jacket and checked inside the pockets, cut the seams and rummaged around while he shivered in his undershirt, feeling horribly exposed before all these hostile strangers. Then they told him to untie his veil so they could see his face. Then his headscarf and headband had to come off, in case he had a blade woven into a braid.
“You’d think it would be ridiculous, but I’ve seen it happen,” the investigator said, to the horror of the teachers. Yohoang intuited that it would be a bad time to mention Ita hid blades in that exact way. He tried to tell them that he wasn’t hiding anything in his headscarf, and he wasn’t supposed to take it off either, but they wouldn’t budge. So he did, and though his ears felt relief at being unwrapped, he had to clasp his hands tightly together to keep from covering them up in front of everyone, to keep from squirming when the investigator undid his braid and sifted through his hair. Occasionally their claw got caught, and there was a light sting as they disentangled themselves.
Satisfied that Yohoang was not in fact hiding any blades, the adults returned his headwear and loaned him a school jacket while they repaired the torn one. “Your other one was too big anyway,” the teacher said. “Hwatang are always giving their children baggy, ill-fitting clothes. This one is actually your size.”
“Why did you say you had a knife?” the investigator asked. “This is a serious threat.”
“I didn’t want my classmates to bother me anymore,” he said.
“That’s not a good enough reason to threaten their physical safety,” they said, sighing in disapproval. “Don’t do it again.”
At home, Wamung saw her son clinging onto his tail and shaking like sand in a pan and pulled him close. He told her what happened.
“Don’t listen to that Ita!” Wamung said, dismayed. “She’s always going off and causing trouble. I’ll need to speak to her older brother. You must never, never yell at or hit anyone at school, do you understand?” She had gotten into trouble so easily. A voice raised in excitement and a few occasions of clumsiness had been enough to get her implicated in every scuffle that happened on school grounds, and she had better hopes for her child. She comforted him with tea and crumblesticks, closing the door and window shutters so she could take off his headwear and properly put it back on. She combed out his hair with a brush, braiding it gently and neatly, having him hold the scarf in place so she could re-wrap the headband securely.
Yohoang did not cause any more trouble. The other students didn’t try and get close anymore, but their whispers grew. He could hear them all the time, hissing and humming like the pipes outside his walls at night. Even when no one was there, he felt like he could hear them chattering away. He could imagine the things they would be saying. The words swam before his eyes; he had to put away his schoolbooks after just a few minutes, otherwise his head would ache. His leg developed an uncontrollable jitter when he sat still for too long. The world did not seem to like him.