One morning, the man selling pork buns didn’t shout out. The breakfast crew felt incomplete without him, just like a song missing a beat. When Mom returned with only noodle soup, Dad didn’t reach for his chopsticks. He twisted the radio dial past the female singer that my sisters swirled to, stopping instead on a man’s voice that made his fingers tighten around the knob and his face turn rigid. Later, as darkness fell, distant thunder sounded, but the rain did not follow, only the sound of Dad’s footsteps as he traced and retraced his path beneath the guava tree, and Mom’s hushed voice seeping through the walls in words too soft to catch.

In late March, on a day like any other, the courtyard was warm beneath my bare feet. I ran and jumped, swinging a broken broomstick, the Monkey King leaping thousands of miles through the heavens on his magical Somersault Cloud. Nothing could touch me. Then came the moment when my world tilted forever. A loud bang made the birds fly off and rattled our windows. Then a low rumble shook the courtyard and vibrated up my legs before it reached my ears. I clapped my hands over my ears, but the noise was impossible to keep out.

Their twin cries—one high and demanding life, one low and mourning death—echo across decades whenever I remember that day. Did they survive? Did someone help them? I would never know.

Crouched in that dark, suffocating shelter, I understood the mountain had just fallen on us. I was no longer the powerful king swinging the staff. I was the monkey trapped beneath the rock, holding my breath in the dark, waiting to see if I would survive the crash.