Last Time I Heard the Cicadas
“Untitled” by Roberto Carlos Lucarelli
Last Time I Heard the Cicadas by Frances Liu
The sound of screeching cicadas was woven into every single one of my life’s first thirteen summers, as I used to curl up on the sticky white leather sofa. The air conditioner whooshing directly in my face was my attempt to dispel the sweltering warmth of Beijing July, which my Chinese parents have always discouraged because “you’re gonna catch a cold!”
Cicada, such a beautiful name for what I thought was a horrendous creature. Their sounds were so normal until I didn’t hear them anymore.
The city-suburbs where I was raised had gentle winds that ruffled the tall trees with thin strands of branches. The breezes inspired the twirls of its pink, fluffy, dandelion-like seeds to linger in the escaping summer air, all while I pranced excitedly with a cheap yet delectable hawthorn berry ice pop in my hand. Clusters of bamboo were scattered across my neighborhood for aesthetic purposes. In the second grade, I assumed that I was clever when I hid between the crevices of those thick stalks during hide-and-seek—only to find soon after that I was mottled with red bumps at places where a mosquito decided to take a sip. Then, the raw smell of a rainstorm’s petrichor would wash all my itchiness away.
“Here. I’m paying with zhi qian today,” my fifth grade self said while tossing a packaged Old Beijing ice pop, a staple of any Beijingese summer, in my small sweaty hands.
The cashier of the little neighborhood store, barely dressed in a tattered white tank top and some old shorts, took the cigarette out of his mouth and cackled.
“You mean zhi bi!” My face turned into an unpleasant shade of red embarrassment upon seeing the white smoke he puffed out of his laugh, and he kept laughing. Later that day, I consulted my dad out of my curiosity about the reason he couldn’t stop laughing at me—only to find that zhi bi is the proper term that means “cash” while zhi qian is the word solely used to describe the fake paper money one burns for the ancestral deceased.
The cicadas were silent during the dry, piercing cold of Beijing winters, a time when I had no chance of successfully convincing my parents to buy me an ice pop. Instead, it was the caramel aroma of charred sweet potatoes roasting beneath the loving blistered hands of ayis beside the crowded supermarket that attracted all three of us. The middle-aged women competed among each other for the passerby’s recognition of their flamboyantly orange delicacy on the blazing metal stove. I’ve always marveled at the ayis’ inability to feel pain from their mobile oven’s harsh heat as they skillfully picked up steaming hot sweet potatoes for a customer with nothing more than a floral cotton glove.
I don’t remember myself as a child truly seeing the cicadas as they yelled at each other amongst themselves in the zeniths of roadside trees, so I assumed they were of a gloomy grayish-brown imitation of the tree bark’s color. When the periodical cicadas on the American East Coast emerged from the ground in mid-2021 with glaring maroon eyes searching hungrily for sweet tree sap and suitable mates, I dodged them with each prudent step on the sidewalks as a high school sophomore—hopping away from formerly blank spaces of where people used to be as it was now the land of the jealous-eyed. In the cicadaless nature of my apartment, the mesh film of my bedroom window glimmered faintly in the midday sun like an unnaturally expansive spider web spun across the glass. Just like innumerable others during the pandemic, I was trapped.
Because some things like eating Chinese hotpot are “people” things—when the pot, as round as the full moon, echoed the circle of joyous family chattering and gossiping the world away. For the past four years, though, there was a three-member family with only two of them around one pot. The summer cicadas voiced my burning desire to spend time with my dad and my grandparents, all of them distant in China. I, on the other hand, carried on in America with my mom and with the company of Chemistry and US Government and Computer Science and Music Theory and Algebra.
The cicadas this year were certainly better at math than I was in the torturous virtual school, or else why would they so precisely select the delicate visitation interval of 17 years? They conquered the blank spaces of the sidewalks and crawled ickily on the trees while creating an unearthly sound that was bound to distract any stroll. I found it a little sad that the US didn’t have Old Beijing or hawthorn berry ice pops, or even consider importing those remarkable treats. But I was flatly disheartened as I quietly listened to the cicadas lament to me their yearning for returning to the soil and the roots, their permanent residence and home that they briefly depart from and return to every 17 years.
Much unlike them, however, my home was 6,921 miles and an indefinite period of time away.
